Just Hero Things

What do you do when you’re a law enforcer who killed a child when driving over twice the posted speed limit? You sue the mother, of course!

ALBUQUERQUE, NM (KRQE) – – A police officer officer being sued for speeding through an intersection and killing a young boy is now suing the boy’s mother, saying the crash was all her fault.

[…]

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s investigation of the incident determined APD Officer Jonathan McDonnell was going double the speed limit while responding to a call in May 2017.

However, he says the mother was the one driving carelessly when she turned in front of him.

Laws are for thee, not for me.

Antoinette Suina, the mother, didn’t break the law when she turned on a green light. Officer McDonnell, on the other hand, was breaking the law by driving 80 miles per hour. And less we forget, his driving record before the accident wasn’t exactly stellar:

The Albuquerque Police Department officer whose cruiser collided with a woman’s car last month, killing her 6-year-old son and critically injuring her 9-year-old daughter, has been disciplined in at least six driving-related incidents during his nine years on the force, according to records obtained by the Journal.

So the officer not only broke the law but has a history of doing so. If he didn’t have a badge, things would not be looking good for him and his chances of winning this lawsuit would be roughly zero (and he’s probably already be in a cage). However, he does have a badge so the rules are different. He actually has a chance of winning this lawsuit because he can claim that the accident happened while he was performing his duties and that usually acts as a get out of consequences free card.

Chipping Away at the Drug War

The public sale of cannabis has been legal in Colorado since January 1, 2014. Three years later and none of the doom and gloom predictions of the prohibitionists have come to pass. Now Colorado is planning to step up its game of chipping away at the drug war by considering lowering the severity of psilocybin possession:

The group calls itself Colorado for Psilocybin after the fungi’s scientific name. Their proposed measure would do away with felony charges for people caught with mushrooms, and make them the lowest enforcement priority for Denver police.

Anyone caught with more than two ounces of dried mushrooms, or two pounds of uncured “wet” mushrooms, would be subject to a citation: less than $99 for the first offense, increased by increments of $100 for subsequent offenses, and never more than $999 per citation.

If this is passed, the prohibitionists will once again predict doom and gloom and their predictions will once again fail to manifest. Despite what prohibitions believe, consuming psilocybin doesn’t turn an individual into a killing machine. What is can do though is help those suffering from depression and, of course, offer those looking for a good psychedelic trip what they want.

I really hope that this is the beginning of the next chapter of an individual state telling the feds where to stick their drug war.

When You Virtue Signal So Hard You Commit a Felony

A few proponents of gun control have chosen to demonstrate their piety to the cause by destroying AR-15s. However, because they are ignorant of current gun control laws, they have been starting by cutting the barrel off, which legally makes their AR-15s into short barreled rifles and those are regulated by the National Firearms Act.

One woman who is running for office in Virginia decided to show her piety to the cause by filming herself doing exactly and somebody noticed:

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WVEC) — The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is investigating congressional candidate Karen Mallard after she posted a video on Facebook that shows her cutting apart an AR-15 rifle.

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Several others said Mallard broke federal law by taking a legal firearm and altering it, making it into an illegal one. Many of them referred to details contained within the Sawed-Off Shotgun and Sawed-Off Rifle Act which, in part, prohibits people (except for those permitted by the act) from having a rifle that has been “modified to an overall length of less than 26 inches.”

I doubt she’ll be charged since she’s on the side of gun control and therefore on the side of the ATF. However, I do hope that the announcement of this investigation raises awareness of this law to gun control advocates. I’d rather see these idiots destroy their property in a way that won’t potentially land them in a cage for 10 years (even though I strongly disagree with them, I’d rather not see people who haven’t hurt anybody put in a cage).

Shut Up, Slave

Many Americans continue to believe that courts are where justice is done. It’s easy to make that mistake since the courts are usually part of an organization with the word justice in its title. However, courts aren’t where justice is served, courts are where slaves go to beg their masters for leniency or to beg them to inflict harm on another. Sometimes these masters are kind to the slaves, other times they are not:

In Tarrant County, Tex., defendants are sometimes strapped with a stun belt around their legs. The devices are used to deliver a shock in the event the person gets violent or attempts to escape.

But in the case of Terry Lee Morris, the device was used as punishment for refusing to answer a judge’s questions properly during his 2014 trial on charges of soliciting sexual performance from a 15-year-old girl, according to an appeals court. In fact, the judge shocked Morris three times, sending thousands of volts coursing through his body. It scared him so much that Morris never returned for the remainder of his trial and almost all of his sentencing hearing.

The action stunned the Texas Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso, too. It has now thrown out Morris’s conviction on the grounds that the shocks, and Morris’s subsequent removal from the courtroom, violated his constitutional rights. Since he was too scared to come back to the courtroom, the court held that the shocks effectively barred him from attending his own trial, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant’s right to be present and confront witnesses during a trial.

While it’s nice that the case was thrown out, merely throwing the case out won’t solve the long term problem. The judge in question was found to have violated an individual’s constitutional rights by physically assaulting him to such a degree that the individual was afraid to return to the courtroom. Unless the judge faces consequences for his actions, there is nothing dissuading him or other judges from doing the same thing or worse in the future.

A major problem with today’s “justice” system is the professional immunity culture. So long as a government agent in the “justice” system is acting in their official capacity, they are basically immune from suffering consequences for bad actions. Officers routinely get away with perjury. Prosecutors routinely get away with withholding evidence that might help the defense. Judges routinely get away with violating the constitutional rights of individuals in their courtrooms. The lack of consequences creates an environment where others feel safe performing misdeeds themselves. There is no hope of reforming the system unless this culture of professional immunity is dealt with but it won’t be dealt with because the people charged with holding members of the “justice” system accountable are also members of the “justice” system. Not surprisingly, whenever the “justice” system investigates itself it finds that it did nothing wrong.

Learning Unfortunate Lessons the Hard Way

I feel bad for the students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. When they really needed protection, they were abandoned by those who were tasked with protecting them. Unfortunately, a couple of the surviving students are probably going to suffer all over again because they are filing a lawsuit against the school, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and the Broward County Sheriff’s Department for their roles in failing to protect them:

Two survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., have announced they will sue the school, the FBI and the local sheriff’s office for failing to prevent the deadly February attack.

Anthony Borges, 15, and his family said on Monday that he intends to sues the Broward County Public School District and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, according to the Miami Herald.

The lawsuit, when it is filed, will allege that there should have been more done to protect students and teachers inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14 when a former student walked into the school and killed 17 people.

These kids already had to learn that when things get bad nobody is going to save them. Now they’re probably going to learn that law enforcers have no duty to protect them.

The students may receive something from the school district but I doubt they will see anything from the FBI or the sheriff’s department. While both of those agencies dropped the ball, they are allowed to do that because the Supreme Court said so. Moreover, since nobody in the United States is allowed to cease paying taxes to a federal or local law enforcement agency that fails to provide protection, the agencies have no motivation to provide protection.

It Gets Worse

The aftermath of the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has become like the history of Russia, every chapter can be summarized by saying, “And then it got worse.”

As word spread that an armed attacker was shooting up a Parkland high school, two members of the Miramar Police Department’s SWAT team responded to the scene.

They had been training in nearby Coral Springs earlier that day and wanted to help end a deadly mass shooting that claimed 17 lives.

But their own commander said he didn’t know they were going. And the Broward Sheriff’s Office — worried about over-crowding a chaotic scene with law enforcement officers — didn’t ask for them to show up. BSO already had its own SWAT team in motion.

Eight days after the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the two Miramar officers, Det. Jeffery Gilbert and Det. Carl Schlosser, were temporarily suspended from duty with the SWAT team. They remain on active duty with the department, according to a Miramar police spokeswoman.

While four officers were sitting on the sidelines, whether due to cowardice or being ordered to do so, two officers from the Miramar Police Department SWAT team attempted to respond to the scene. Now they’re the ones being punished.

They’re being punished for disobeying orders. While I can see why one wouldn’t want unexpected people running to a scene to which others are already responding, we know that nobody was responding to the school shooting. That being the case, it seems foolish to punish these two now. But it seems like many departments have developed a culture where following orders is the most important criteria for an officer, not helping those who the department is supposedly tasked with helping.

Spook Squad

I’ve often wondered how Geek Squad stays in business. The prices it charges for even the most trivial repairs are absurd. More and more I’m becoming convinced that Geek Squad stays in business because it is being propped up by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI):

After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants.

EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit last year to learn more about how the FBI uses Geek Squad employees to flag illegal material when people pay Best Buy to repair their computers. The relationship potentially circumvents computer owners’ Fourth Amendment rights.

While Geek Squad has been caught red handed working with the FBI, any employee at any computer repair company could be operating under the same deal. The FBI has a vested interest in access the information on as many computers as possible and people who repair computers often have unrestricted access to a lot of information on a lot of computers.

If you’re going to send your computer to somebody else for repairs, here are my recommendations to guard your privacy. If the device you’re sending in has a removable hard drive, remove the drive that is in it and replace it with a blank drive (one that has never been used to store personal information). On the blank drive install the operating system that came on the device and a user account with generic credentials (this is one of the few times where the password “password” is a good idea) so the repair person can log in. By doing this you ensure that the repair person doesn’t have access to any of your personal data. When the device comes back, format the drive that you provided the repair person, remove it, and install the hard drive with your data again.

If your device doesn’t have a removable drive, ensure that the first thing you do when you initially start the device after getting it out of the box is enable full disk encryption. When you need to send the device in for repairs, format the drive, reinstall the default operating system, setup a user account with generic credentials, and send the device in. When the drive comes back, wipe the drive again and restore your data from a backup. For those who are wondering why full disk encryption should be enabled it’s because formatting a drive doesn’t necessarily erase the data. By default formatting a drive wipes the file allocation table but leaves the data preserved. Enabling full disk encryption ensures that the data on the drive is unreadable without the proper decryption key. While formatting won’t erase the data, the data will be unreadable to the repair man if they attempt to restore the old file allocation table to pilfer your data for law enforcers.

Sincerity

President Trump is taking the issue of violence so seriously that he’s meeting with executives in the video game industry instead of winding down the country’s overseas wars:

A variety of potential actions have been discussed to limit school violence in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL last month, from the uninspired option of raising the minimum age of potential gun-buyers to President Trump’s controversial suggestion of arming teachers. But a familiar target for blame appears to be on the mind of the president, as well. In today’s White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump would soon meet with “members of the video game industry” to see what could be discussed around “protect[ing] schools around the country.”

A lot of people are rightly poking fun at Trump for his announcement. Of course many of the same people are also angry because Trump is blaming one inanimate object, video games, instead of another inanimate object, guns. It always amazes me how people can learn only the part of a lesson that jives with their worldview.

Most Hated Person in America

There are several contestants for the coveted Most Hated Person in America award. Trump has been the likely winner for 2018 but now he faces some stiff competition:

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office has identified to Fox News the captain who, according to sources, directed responding deputies and units to “stage” or form a “perimeter” outside Stoneman Douglas High School, instead of rushing immediately into the building, as the mass shooting unfolded there.

Multiple law enforcement and official sources said the commands in the initial moments after Nikolas Cruz allegedly opened fire would go against all training which instructs first responders to “go, go, go” until the shooter is neutralized. As law enforcement arrived, the shooter’s identity and exact location were still unknown.

Multiple sources told Fox News that Captain Jan Jordan was the commanding officer on scene. In an email responding to Fox News’ request for information, a BSO spokesperson wrote, “Capt. Jordan’s radio call sign is 17S1.”

Before giving Jan all of the blame, it should be noted that this remains an allegation. I’m sure the department is desperate to throw somebody under the bus and several officers could be trying to do that with Captain Jan. Unless more information comes to light, it’s difficult to say. But this is America so individuals are guilty until proven innocent so I’m pretty sure Jan will win that coveted award regardless.

No matter how one looks at it, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office really fucked up the handling of this shooting. While it’s easy to pin the blame on a single individual, the problems in the department likely run far deeper than just one incompetent individual.

Persona Non Grata

Gun control advocates haven’t enjoyed a great deal of success in recent times. I believe part of the reason for this is that the Internet has provided us gun owners with a mechanism to voice our side of the story. It was more difficult to be heard by the masses before the Internet, especially if what you were saying didn’t agree with the views of the major media outlets. It appears that gun control advocates are finally recognizing this and are trying to return gun owners to their “proper place” where they may be seen once in a while but never truly heard:

Gun-control advocates are now pressuring Amazon, Google, AT&T, Roku, and other streaming platforms to ban NRA TV — the organization’s private channel of gun-rights advocacy and other weapons-related programming. This takes the fight against the group to a different and dangerous level. It is one thing to condemn the NRA and even to ask businesses not to work with a group that offends some people. It is quite another to silence the point of view of an organization that represents millions of Americans. If successful, the ban on NRA TV will mark a turning point not so much in the battle over gun control as in the debate over political speech and what is permissible within the public square.

It should be noted that attempts to silence NRA TV are just one effort on this front. Gun control advocates have already enjoyed some success by pushing Facebook, Google, and other major websites to curtail the voice of gun owners in many ways.

Private entities have no obligation to provide goods or services to anybody. If Facebook or Google want to ban any mention of firearms, they have a right to do so. But us gun owners are also free to create our own services, which is how we managed to get our voices heard on the Internet in the first place. Before major social media sites became a thing, gun forums, blogs, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels were how us gun owners linked up with one another and put our side of the story out to the public. The nice thing about these forums and blogs is that they were owned and operated by gun owners. I’m not familiar with an IRC server expressly owned and operated by gun owners but it would have been a simple enough matter to setup such a server if needed. Today more and more gun talk is taking place on major social medias sites, which are often owned and operated by individuals who are gun control advocates. Us gun owners have migrated from our own platforms to platforms controlled by our ideological opponents and we have thus made ourselves vulnerable.

This situation can be reversed and if things continue going as they have been in recent times, will need to be reversed if us gun owners want to continue voicing our beliefs. Relying on a hostile entity is always foolish and we may want to consider reversing the trend of doing so.