Mark of the Beast

Via Drudge, Student in Texas loses lawsuit seeking injunction allowing her to remain in her school without wearing tracking device as required by school.  Her objection: "the badge was the "mark of the beast", as described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation in the Bible."  Did her lawsuit assert religious freedom grounds I wonder?

My take: the device is not the "mark of the beast," but it's not acceptable that the government forces people to go to public school in the first place.  It's too bad the objection to the practice in this instance was enunciated in cukoo language, that can only provide fodder for shameless and unprincipled slayers of straw men.

The big news today is the pending dismantling of the 2nd Amendment.  Those who hold that the exercise of a constitutional right requires pleading and justification and the license of those who have come to political power are apt to set their sights on two particular scarecrows: the 2nd Amendment either contemplates hunting ("No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer!") or -- yes, really -- the potential overthrow of the government!  This last one just kills me.  Look, the point about sovereignty is simply this: in a society in which the government gets its legitimacy from consent of the governed, individual citizens have a basic inalienable right to sovereignty over their persons.  That means, e.g., the state cannot grab people off the street and tie them up and draw their blood without a search warrant or other emergency; it also means that people have the right to defend themselves from evildoers.  To assert that individuals do not have the right to self defense when attacked, and must wait for police to arrive or else just lay down and be a good little victim is to dismantle the fundamental building block of popular sovereignty.  Soverignty lies with the individual.  It's too bad the founders did not state this more explicitly, although to be fair it's impossible to anticipate all the penumbras and emanations scoundrels will discover in their attempt to undo this noble experiment in self-government.  Should Madison have put a footnote to the fourth amendment, for example, saying "Notably, the protection from "unreasonable search and seizure" shall not be construed as providing the right to abort a fetus".  No, there's no reason he should have anticipated that.  So, they did about as well as can be expected with "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".  It's certainly not that the petty tyrants don't understand the words, and it may not even be that they actually believe in the straw men they set up to attack or that they don't grasp the notion of individual sovereignty, but the problem is simply that these enemies of freedom disagree with individual soverignty as a first principle, and they know they can get away with their dishonest and cynical reworkings of our society thanks to a compliant lap dog media that agrees with their statist vision, and thanks to a people that has been both thumped into submission by 1000 little indignities and intrusions, and dismantled as a people through the deliberate political project of replacing legacy Americans with foreigners who do not share historic American values, and who are not assimilated into those values, now that the ideal of the "melting pot" has been tossed out in favor of "multiculturalism".

Fuck you, Obama, come get them.