Month: August 2016

If You’re Going to the State Fair Prepare to Be Treated Like a Criminal

Here’s a heads up, everybody. If you’re planning on attending the Minnesota State Fair, and I don’t know why anybody would, be prepared for longer than usual lines to get in because every attendee is going to be treated like a criminal:

Going to the Minnesota State Fair this year? Make sure you have your ticket in hand and your bag open.

The State Fair says bags, purses, coolers and packages will now be subject to search at each of the fair’s 11 entrances. Prohibited items include weapons and fireworks but also alcoholic beverages, drones, bikes, skateboards, skates and hoverboards. Other items may also be refused at the discretion of fair management or police.

Of course this is being done under the guise of security. Realistically it’s nothing but security theater though. Searching bags won’t, for example, find any weapons being concealed on a person’s body (although that’s something they cannot legally prohibit if a person has a carry permit but the law has never stopped the State from violating people’s rights). Also notice that alcoholic beverages are prohibited, which will greatly boost the profits of the State Fair alcohol vendors. Drones, bicycles, skateboards, and hoverboards aren’t a security risk to anybody so giving officers discretion to ban them in the name of security is nonsense.

There’s something else worth noting here. The Minnesota Agriculture Society, which runs the Minnesota State Fair, is a public corporation [PDF], which is a fancy way of saying a government created and owned corporation. The Stair Fair grounds are owned by the State of Minnesota. In other words the Minnesota State Fair is a government event run by a government corporation that happens on government property. If the Bill of Rights actually meant anything these bag searches would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment since warrants aren’t being issued against each fair attendee. But the Bill of Rights, like all government laws, doesn’t actually apply to the State so it can violate your rights with impunity and if you complain it might investigate itself and determine it did nothing wrong.

Putting You in Danger to Protect You

When a suspect attempts to flee from the police should the officers pursue? Most people will instinctively say they should. But one has to ask whether it’s more dangerous for the police to enter into a high-speed chase with a suspect or allow the suspect to flee. Oftentimes in the zealous pursuit of suspects the police end up putting a lot of lives in danger:

More than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979, and tens of thousands more were injured as officers repeatedly pursued drivers at high speeds and in hazardous conditions, often for minor infractions, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The bystanders and the passengers in chased cars account for nearly half of all people killed in police pursuits from 1979 through 2013, USA TODAY found. Most bystanders were killed in their own cars by a fleeing driver.

Police across the USA chase tens of thousands of people each year — usually for traffic violations or misdemeanors — often causing drivers to speed away recklessly. Recent cases show the danger of the longstanding police practice of chasing minor offenders.

5,000 people killed primarily in the pursuit of revenue from traffic violations and misdemeanors. This is especially ridiculous when you consider that ever car has a government mandated unique identifiable number bolted to the vehicle. An officer could just call in the make, model, and license plate number and wait for a safer time to deliver the citations.

Whenever somebody argues that the police do something to keep us safe we must ask whether the tactics being used by the police are more dangerous than whatever they’re supposedly combatting. Is heroine really more dangerous than no-knock raids leading to dead pets or family members? Are people who exceed the arbitrarily posted speed limit really more dangerous than having a police car with bright flashing lights on the side of the road causing chaos on the highway? If the tactics are more dangerous than the activity being policed then the police aren’t keeping anybody safe, they’re needlessly putting them in danger.

Sometimes You Just Need an Exorcism

It’s nice to know there are still forces out there willing and able to challenge the State’s revenue generators. Police officers in Scotland apparently learned that demons don’t care about their truncheons or guns:

A mother and her teenage son were said to be “extremely distressed” after experiencing what the Daily Record describes as “violent and unexplained circumstances”.

The family, who live in South Lanarkshire, called police on Monday and Tuesday.

“The officers attended expecting it to be a mental health issue but they witnessed the lights going off, clothes flying across the room and the dog [the family’s pet Chihuahua] sitting on top of a hedge,” a police source said.

“The officers called their superiors, who also attended, thinking the cops were perhaps being a bit silly. But it’s being taken very seriously.”

A priest is understood to have blessed the house in Rutherglen after officers got in touch with the Catholic Church.

Perhaps I’ve been playing Doom wrong all along. Instead of slaughtering demons it may be beneficially to encourage their presence on this planet to challenge the power of the State. Granted, the demons would probably want to establish their own government but once they’ve taken care of the current governments we could exorcise them back to Hell. At this point I’m willing to entertain any ideas for eradicating statism.

Have a Plan

Several people have asked me about my thoughts regarding the rioting in Milwaukee. Truth be told, I’m only superficially aware of what happened. I know the police shot somebody, which was the spark that lit this fire but I haven’t had time to learn the details surrounding the shooting.

I will say this though. You should have a plan of action in case civil unrest developers in your area. Be it hunkering down and defending your home or evacuating to someplace safe, you should have a plan of what you will do if worst comes to worst. Then you should have a backup plan in case your primary plan fails.

Cash, Baby

Some people think that the war on drugs is about protecting the American people from the effects of drugs. Regardless of what your D.A.R.E. program officers told you in school that isn’t the case. The war on drugs is about the money and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is done pretending otherwise:

WASHINGTON — Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.

Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.

[…]

It is a lucrative endeavor, and one that remains largely unknown outside the drug agency. DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade after concluding the money was linked to drug trafficking, according to Justice Department records. Most of the money was passed on to local police departments that lend officers to assist the drug agency.

The best scams are the ones that cut everybody in on the action. Local law enforcement agencies get a cut, the DEA gets a cut, and the State gets a cut so none of them are motivated to fight against this kind of theft.

With all of the news of corruption surround the drug war it amazes me that so many Americans are still being suckered by the claim that it’s about protecting people. Using drugs certainly caries the chance of developing negative side-effects or dying. But having men with guns who are too lazy to verify an address kick in your door at oh dark thirty and shoot you is a guarantee of negative side-effects or death. And if that wasn’t enough the drug war also opens the door for rampant corruption. Police officers can blackmail drug dealers and users, steal large quantities of cash without any justification other than the quantity of cash being large, ignore laws against unreasonable searches by claiming a dog “signaled” that there were drugs in the car or house, etc.

The supposed prescription is far worse than the disease in this case. But it was never about curing the disease, it was always about milking the patient for every dime they have.

They Call Her Killary for a Reason

Everybody who believes in the political process necessarily believes in the death penalty. Death is the inevitable outcome of breaking one of the State’s decrees and not cooperating when armed men with guns come to kidnap you (and cooperating won’t guarantee you avoid the death penalty). However, many politicos, especially on the Democratic Party side, will say they oppose the death penalty. Hillary Clinton is not one of them:

Asked her position on capital punishment, Mrs. Clinton said she did not support abolishing the death penalty, but she did encourage the federal government to rethink it.

“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way,” she said. “So I think we have to take a hard look at it.”

Mrs. Clinton added, “I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states.”

They call her Killary for a reason.

The problem with the death penalty isn’t that it’s used too often, it’s that it exists at all. Executions performed by the State are collectivist nonsense. When the State executes somebody it does it under the auspices of justice. But the State’s justice doesn’t involve best efforts to right a wrong. Instead it involves whatever words were written on a piece of paper and voted on by a committee. Justice would require asking if killing a convicted individual would be an appropriate way to right whatever wrong he committed, not whether some suit-clad mother fuckers in a marble building said it was okay to execute somebody for violating one of their decrees.

Transporting prohibited drugs, for example, isn’t even a crime since there is no victim and even if one considers it a crime killing the transporter wouldn’t right any wrongs. But the State is willing to issue death sentences for transporting prohibited drugs. Issuing death sentences for such arbitrary reasons must be opposed entirely. Since everything the State does is arbitrary by nature allowing it to issue death sentences must be opposed entirely.

It Was Never About Safety

Advocates for gun control always pretend that their goal is to increase safety. However, their actions betray their intentions. Gun control advocates focus on disarming innocent people, which makes them less able to defend themselves and thus makes them less safe. For example, whenever a state moves to liberalize their carry laws the gun control advocates move in to block it. But they never want to disarm the police, which is strange because they cause far more gun crimes than permit holders:

Concealed-carry permit holders are nearly the most law-abiding demographic of Americans, a new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center says—comparing the permit holders foremost with police.

“Indeed, it is impossible to think of any other group in the U.S. that is anywhere near as law-abiding,” says the report, titled “Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States 2016.”

[…]

“We find that permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at less than a sixth the rate for police officers,” the report says. “Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000.10. That is just one-seventh of the rate for police officers.”

If safety was their primary goal the gun control advocates should be working to disarm the police before permit holders. But most gun control advocates aren’t complete fools. They realize heavily armed police are needed to disarm the plebs.

So if safety isn’t the goal what is the goal of gun control advocates? I cannot read minds but from what many of them have written and said their goal appears to be guaranteeing the supremacy of the State. All gun control advocates are necessarily statists. Most of them seem to believe the individual should be subservient to the State. If an individual can own weapons then they can defend themselves, which challenges the State’s supremacy.

Not the Exercise They Were Expecting

Yet another person has been killed by a police officer. This time the victim was a 73-year-old retired librarian. There was no crime, real of fictions, involved in this shooting though. Instead negligence during a citizen academy lead to live ammunition being used during a shoot, no shoot scenario:

PUNTA GORDA, Fla. (AP) — A police “shoot/don’t shoot” demonstration in Florida went shockingly awry when an officer shot and killed a 73-year-old former librarian with what police said was real ammunition used by mistake at an event designed to bring police and the public together.

Authorities didn’t immediately say how a gun with a live round came to be used at Tuesday evening’s demonstration, noting blank rounds are typically used in such classes. The officer has been placed on administrative leave, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating.

“We were unaware that any live ammunition was available to the officer,” Punta Gorda Police Chief Tom Lewis said at a news conference Wednesday. “The officer involved is grief stricken. We’ve got officers assigned to him to make sure he’s psychologically stable.”

Training scenarios like this are why non-lethal ammunition such as Simunitions exist. Most training ammunition requires the use of a conversion kit that is also unable to chamber live ammunition. Why was live ammunition available to the officer? Why was he using a firearm capable of chambering live ammunition? There had to be multiple layers of people not giving a shit for this kind of death to occur.

But, perhaps, this exercise wasn’t really a shoot, no shoot scenario. Perhaps it was an exercise in investigating yourself and finding that you did nothing wrong. Either way, I doubt the officer will face the same punishment that you or I would if we negligently killed somebody.