zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — also lots from Friday March 22nd, more, and the Barr comment on Mueller Report breaks, March 24th ]
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Let’s start with the weirdest tweet ever:

That’s a crowd-sized tweet, y’see, and in the crowd-sized small print it says:

He didn’t tweet it, he actually said it.

Take a look at the same image full-sized — full photo-sized, here.

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Unpredictable weather:

Okay, that’s my excuse for a NASA DoubleQuote:

Here’s what Joshua Stevens of NASA Earth Observatory says in the caption:

Several communities west of Omaha (between the Elkhorn and Platte Rivers) either flooded or temporarily became islands as floodwaters encroached from both sides. One third of Offutt Air Force Base was inundated and 30 buildings were damaged, according to news reports. Rising flood waters forced people in dozens of communities to evacuate.

Wha??

Bob Dylan to the point:

A change in the weather is known to be extreme

You’re A Big Girl Now.

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Okay, down to mores serious business..

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, made a fascinating and provocative suggestion to Nicolle Wallace yesterday, and I’ll offer here my transcription and some comments:

To go back to this notion, and the clip of him {The President] saying the American people won’t accept this {Mueller results &c] because these are people who were not elected.. Let’s focus on that. Do you know what that sounds a lot like to most law enforcement officers, this notion that you can’t abide by anything by anyone who has not been elected? The Sovereign Citizen‘s movement.

These are people who, when they get pulled over by the police, shoot the police officer. Why? The police officers were not elected. They recognize only the sheriff. They don’t pay taxes, right? We are essentially seeing the President as a Sovereign Citizen, not recognizing the authority of anyone who wan’t elected. It’s a dangerous philosophy.

He’s going to go with that theme that only elected officials can decide his fate, and there’s going to be a substantial part of the American public that’s going to buy into that..

The Sovereign Citizen Movement was featured in this now-archived FBI page:

Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or “sovereign” from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.

This causes all kinds of problems—and crimes. For example, many sovereign citizens don’t pay their taxes. They hold illegal courts that issue warrants for judges and police officers. They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them. And they use fake money orders, personal checks, and the like at government agencies, banks, and businesses.

That’s just the beginning. Not every action taken in the name of the sovereign citizen ideology is a crime, but the list of illegal actions committed by these groups, cells, and individuals is extensive (and puts them squarely on our radar). In addition to the above, sovereign citizens:

Commit murder and physical assault;

Threaten judges, law enforcement professionals, and government personnel;

Impersonate police officers and diplomats;

Use fake currency, passports, license plates, and driver’s licenses; and

Engineer various white-collar scams, including mortgage fraud and so-called “redemption” schemes.

Sovereign Citizenship, is very like a religion –n but the sort of religion where the dogma is loose, and each member pretty much defines their own version. Catholics might recognize this as cafeteria Catholicism, but Pentecostals with each one informed by individual inspiritation strikes me as a more apt comparative.

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Just caught this from late 2018:

Natasha Bertrand, The Eerie Parallels Between Trump and the Watergate ‘Road Map’
Lawmakers thought Nixon’s gathering of inside information about the Watergate probe from DOJ was an impeachable offense:

Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.

A half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker—a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey—is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016.

Parallels, subtly drawn: from a geometrical perspective, parallels are’t subtle, they’r exact — but parallels as a metaphor for similarities in patterning are all the better for subtlety.

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running (in an election), off the hook (wrt prosecution), — these are among the sports metaphors for politics that are so obvious, so basic that it’s barely worth noting them — and yet they’re bassic to more detailed metaphors we’re very interested in.

and then there are the images I catch,but not the sentences they’re embedded in, let alone the paragraphs.. %strike)Brennan saying “firestorm” at a moment when the TIVO or whatever captured the feed had a hiccup), deliberate or otherwise.. Joy of SM Joy’s “spiked the ball at the fifty yard line”*****, for instance, was a fleeting capture of an often repeated basic phrase, “spiked the ball” which would be better caught in a more detailed context..

A quick Melber chyron before I lose it, at 22:

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Hardball:

Chris Matthews: all these dots we are now to believe don’t connect ..
Chris Matthews: I could see the President announcing in two or three weeks, I split the double header. I got off collusion, all they’ve got me on is this argument about obstruction, by the way I’m allowed to obstruct if I’m innocent ..
should they feel they just skipped justice?
43 stars / constellation .. [ a nice para — transcript? ]
Chris Matthews: it’s the politburo ..
Chris Matthews:

The Democrats have been riding this camel for a lot of miles through the desert, waiting for an explosive report that would decide whether the President did something impeachable or not ..

All In, Chris Hayes:

Julia Ainsley:

And then this is the part I think is the most magical. At five o’clock, the congressional liaison at the Justice Department knew his job would be to go brief the committees, but they didn’t want to have any jealousy about who might get this first and how this might go down, so they dispersed a team to the Democrat and Republican side of both the House and the Senate Judiciary, to make sure that the letter .. was put down in front of those committees, all four, Republican and Democrat, Senate and House, Judiciary at the exact same time, five o’clock..

Neil Katyal:

And now Mueller is really like a relay racer, handing off the baton to other folks..

Anna Galliard:

Well, boy, it’s one of those moments where you have to walk & chew gum & juggle. & fight for the soul of democracy all at the same time ..

Carol Lam: a Japanese Tea ceremony .. [transcript?]

Rachel 3-22

51-2: chuck rosenberg: I think this is far too early for Mr Corsi to be dancing in the end-zone ..*****
@58 or 50?, katyal: lanes & batons ..
the mueller probe is officially over, and the torch has been handed to .. cf baton

MTP (3-22?)

brennan: I think Bob Mueller understands the firestorm that this report was, you know, going to be out into ..
nicolle w: andy mccabe .. [distorted] .. a tree house ..
ari m: he’s a wild-card here, who could ..
graphic of mueller investigation ..
nicolle: the earth could change under our feet ..
he had access to five-eyes intel ..
ari: i got the football and i might be passing lots of it by this weekend ..
katyal: we generally don’t have secret books in this country ..
meacham: will there be a MAGA pitchfork rebellion?

AM Joy 3-23:

sat am: malcolm nance: koresh-style . [transcript?]

AM Joy 3-24

and not dropped, like a nuclear bomb, on the white house, on friday ..

59 or 00: over on Earth II or Fox News ..

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Listen up:
Here’s the breaking news of Barr’s comments on & quotes from Mueller’s report, Sunday 3/24/2019, pm:

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Two comments summing up this remarkable day:

MSNBC, commentator unknown:

This is a very good day for the President, and they’ll be spiking the football from here to the election, likely..

Barr’s letter to Congress:

The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’

[ by Charles Cameron — plus further readings on sovereign citizens & the Moorish Science Temple ]
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JJ MacNab, author of The Seditionists: Inside the Explosive World of Anti-Government Extremism in America — note date of publication — has the basics on the quasi-religious sovereign citizen and Baton Rouge cop shooter, Gavin Long:

Tweet storm: The Baton Rouge cop shootings #BatonRougeShooting #socitpa #sovcit #sovereigncitizen #moors #Extremism

— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) July 18, 2016

Here’s the text of MacNab’s Tweet-storm, collapsed for easier reading:

Yesterday, Louisiana law enforcement revealed that the Baton Rouge shooter, Gavin Long, had a Washitaw Nation card on him when he was killed. Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star looked beyond the social media clues to find a Washitaw-related legal filing: Kansas City man identified as suspect in killings of three Baton Rouge police officers

A sovereign citizen is someone who mixes fabricated history, out of context laws, and miscellaneous quotes to prove he’s above all laws. Those who have been watching the #BundyRanch standoff and the #oregonstandoff have seen this “magical thinking” in action.

25+ years ago, this movement fell into the white supremacist / right-wing extremist categories. 20 years ago, the white supremacist side of the movement splintered off, leaving behind a right-wing extremist group. 15 years ago, a handful of left-wing extremist / black supremacist groups adopted many of the legal theories as their own.

Today, the sovereign movement falls into 3 general categories: the right wing patriots, the left wing Moors, and the left wing anarchists. Since the left-wing anarchist sovereigns aren’t a significant threat at this point, I’ll leave them out of the rest of this thread.

In 2015 Gavin Eugene Long aka Cosmo Setepenra filed a curious document with the Jackson County, Missouri recorder.

In this document, he corrected his “common law name” from Long to Setepenra.

Note that his given name GAVIN EUGENE LONG is in all capital letters while his “corrected” name Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, is mixed case. In sovereign-speak, he is attempting to separate his flesh-and-blood self (Cosmo) from his corporate fiction self (GAVIN.) In the document, Long claims to be a member of a fictional Native American tribe: the Washitaw Nation.

This group has a theory that, when the North American continent separated from the African Continent, humans were split between them. They consider the slave ship stories of the early colonies to be a myth. Therefore, he is descended from an indigenous people who were in the U.S. before it became a country and is not subject to any our laws.

When gov agencies (police, IRS, courts) fail to recognize their faux indigenous status, they believe their inherent rights are violated. They simply lifted legal theories from the right-wing sovereigns – UCC codes, “reclamation,” admiralty law theories, “truth language.” The personalized those theories w/ a complex layer: Egyptian mythology and symbols, numerology, new age imagery, holistic healing, etc.

To see some of these beliefs, poke around this website a bit: http://www.stewartsynopsis.com/washitaw.htm 

Long left clues beyond filing his sovereign “reclamation” legal document and carrying a Washitaw Nation card (probably his ID card.) The number 7, for example, is sacred.

Gavin Long’s email address was TheCosmoWay7@gmail.com. The family name he chose for himself was Setepenra or Setep-en-ra (Chosen by Ra.) The shooter said that he used to be part of Nation of Islam. That is not inconsistent as there is some overlapping between movements.

When you start looking into this movement, you will find hundreds of website, hundreds of Youtube videos, and thousands of online comments. It’s a complex sub-culture so no tidy category boxes. Moorish sovereign beliefs can be found in everything fr popular music 2 self-help vids. As w/ their “patriot” sover’n cousins, there’s a lot of grifting, property theft & domestic violence (females relatives & kids are property) And like the “patriots,” they resent authority figs who don’t respect their belief that they are above the law. This can be deadly to cops.

The following is violence/plots list. As you scroll down (it’s 8 pages,) look for the “Moorish Sovereign” subset. http://www.seditionists.com/antigovviolence.pdf

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I first became aware of the Moorish Temple via the brilliant and eccentric Peter Lamborn Wilson‘s Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam. Herbert Berg‘s Mythmaking in the African American Muslim Context: The Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the American Society of Muslims looks to be a serious paper on the topic, and you can find more at the Moorish page at the Hermetic Library — note that Hakim Bey is the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wilson. See also the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America.

[ by Charles Cameron — and what about straw men & sovereign citizens? ]
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I have long appreciated Mr Justice Douglas‘ dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), and Christopher Stone‘s comment on the same, Should Trees Have Standing? — presented along with other essays in Stone’s book of the same name [upper panel, above].

That takes care of the trees in my title. Parks and rivers are covered by the New York Times piece today, In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can Be People (Legally Speaking).

Whales and apes get added to our list, as you can see, in Brighter Green‘s Nature’s Rights: Rivers, Trees, Whales, and Apes — which mentions that under Ecuador’s constitution enshrining the legal rights of nature as a whole::

Ecuador stepped to the forefront of the nature’s rights movement when it became the first country to include the rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama) in its constitution, which was ratified in 2008. The document states, “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution.” Nature is a “rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.” Citizens are given the power to sue on behalf of nature, now a legal entity

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And corporations?

The irony here, of course, is that those who would like to see Nature get a word in edgewise in the courts as a legal Person, tend to be unhappy with corporations having the same rights as chimpanzees. Eric Posner in Slate, Stop Fussing Over Personhood, catches the irony nicely:

From a legal standpoint, there is nothing remarkable about a chimpanzee claiming to be a person. Indeed, there are a number of cases that have been brought by animals—including a palila, a marbled murrelet, and a spotted owl. All of these animals sought to enforce their rights under the Endangered Species Act, under a provision that gives “persons” the right to bring suit.

In none of these cases was a judge fooled into thinking that an animal possesses all the rights of human beings. The lawyers bringing them were simply ensuring that a judicial remedy was available to address the harm that Congress sought to fix. If the spotted owl had also asked for the right to vote, the request would have been denied. A judge wouldn’t give a hoot that an earlier court had deemed the owl a “person” under the Endangered Species Act. A person for one legal purpose is not necessarily a person for another.

The law also treats various nonhuman, nonsentient entities as “persons” for certain legal purposes. Corporations, estates, trusts, partnerships, and government entities are often defined this way. Walmart, Illinois, and the California Pension Fund can sue, for example, without anyone asking if they have a right to abortion.

The classic case here is the famous and infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here also the curious notions of personhood invoked by members of the Sovereign Citizens movement. From JM Berger‘s recent report, Without Prejudice: What Sovereign Citizens Believe:

Fictitious Person

Because the UCC provides an interstate standard for things such as driver’s licenses, property ownership, and bank accounts, many sovereigns believe that these documents (and associated laws and financial obligations) do not apply to them, but instead to a fictitious person created by the illegitimate law, sometimes referred to as a “straw man.” Some believe a fictitious person is denoted in legal documents by listing his or her name in all capital letters. The fictitious person is a legal entity akin to a company with the same name as the citizen, sovereigns believe.

Some sovereigns create their own driver’s licenses and license plates because they believe the state-issued documents are inauthentic, as they refer to the fictitious person, and that using or signing these documents exposes them to vulnerabilities under the illegitimate and tyrannical commercial laws, including debt collection, arrest, and prosecution.

The correct use of certain phrases or legal citations can reduce or eliminate these vulnerabilities, however. For instance, some believe that documents used by the illegitimate system, such as contracts or court documents, can be signed safely if the citizen appends the phrase “Without Prejudice UCC 1-308” to the signature, which they believe preserves the sovereign citizen’s common law rights and privileges.

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Let’s return to sanity.

The final word in Sierra Club vs Morton is given to Mr Justice Douglas: in a footnote, he cites John Donne, poet — and thus according to Shelley, one of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”:

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Devotions XVII.

And by way of comparison, here’s a Maori expression of the same sense of extended personhood, in context from the NYT article I cited above:

A former national park has been granted personhood, and a river system is expected to receive the same soon.

The unusual designations, something like the legal status that corporations possess, came out of agreements between New Zealand’s government and Maori groups. The two sides have argued for years over guardianship of the country’s natural features.

Chris Finlayson, New Zealand’s attorney general, said the issue was resolved by taking the Maori mind-set into account. “In their worldview, ‘I am the river and the river is me,’” he said. “Their geographic region is part and parcel of who they are.”

[ by Charles Cameron — a side-note on web practice — American Lands Council vs BLM ]
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JJ McNabb is a Fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, and author of the book The Seditionists, Inside the Explosive World of Anti-Government Extremism in America. Today she posted two linked tweets.

This first one shows what you can find on the American Lands Council site:

The picture attached to this story has cringe-worthy spelling but is relatively innocuous. https://t.co/OmlsyEVzuw pic.twitter.com/qdVYdOO7cM

— (((JJ MacNab))) (@jjmacnab) June 9, 2016

while the second shows what you will be sending if you hit the “share” button at the bottom of the same page.

When you go to share the same story on social medial, however, the picture attached turns inflammatory. pic.twitter.com/Lzw4q8TmZW

— (((JJ MacNab))) (@jjmacnab) June 9, 2016

As McNabb points out, you are “sharing” something quite different from what you might have expected to share — although you do get to see it ahead of time, and can thus decide not to share it after all.

McNabb makes a neat use of the rhetorical device I call the DoubleTweet — revealing the squirrely nature of the ALC’s “share” button.

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FWIW, the text under the new and menacing image is the vision statement of the American Lands Council:

To advance prosperity and self-reliance, improve the health of public lands, and provide increased funding for public education by securing and defending local control of land access, land use and land ownership of public and private lands.

and can be found on the group’s About page.