Corruption Corner – Page 25

Let the Purges Begin

Ukraine is looking to be the start of Cold War II. Not surprisingly, just as was common during the Cold War, the United States is looking to back some really nice guys. On the anti-Russia side, which means our side, we have Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk who looks like a pissant tyrant in the making.

Mr. Yatseniuk has announced that his regime is going to begin ~~purges~~ loyalty screenings in a McCarthyistic attempt to remove all wrongthinkers:

Ukraine will screen about one million civil servants to root out corrupt practices from the past, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk has said.

The parliament passed a law on Tuesday, allowing the removal of government officials from their posts.

All those who worked under ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and also former senior Communist and KGB members will be affected.

Like all tyrants Mr. Yatseniuk is selling his loyalty screenings as a narrowly focused effort to remove potentially destabilizing Russian sympathizers. But history has shown that loyalty screenings have a way of going from narrowly focused to so broadly focused that only personal friends of the ruling party members keep from being sent to the camps. Even if these screenings go to that extent we will sweep it under the rug because his regime isn’t supported by Russia and as we learned with America’s support of Pol Pot anybody who is against Russia, no matter how heinous, will receive America’s backing.

For Being an Anit-Gun Paradise California Sure is a Militarized State

California is a hostile place to live if you’re a gun owner. The state is placed number one on the Brady Campaign’s State Score Card list [PDF], which is based on how many stupid gun control laws each state has on the books. You would think that a state so hostile to gun ownership would be a devoid of militarism. But that’s not the case. In fact California lays claim to the only be the only state that I’m aware of where school districts own armored personnel carriers:

News that San Diego Unified School District has acquired an MRAP, or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, is adding a new facet to discussions about the practice of giving surplus military equipment to civilian agencies.

The six-wheel Caiman MRAP has an official value of around $733,000. But the San Diego school district paid only about $5,000 to transport it, according to inewsource.org, a website that partners with NPR member station KPBS.

$5,000 could buy a lot of text books and that price doesn’t cover the yearly upkeep fees and cost to fuel the machine. Why did the district feel it was a good use of its money to buy an armored personnel carrier instead of equipment to better enable education? Probably because schools are more closely reflecting prisons every day and to complete the image districts need a way of rounding up truant students in the same way prisons round up escaped convicts. But San Diego doesn’t have the title of most militarized school district. That title belongs to the Los Angeles Unified School District:

os Angeles Unified school police officials said Tuesday that the department will relinquish some of the military weaponry it acquired through a federal program that furnishes local law enforcement with surplus equipment. The move comes as education and civil rights groups have called on the U.S. Department of Defense to halt the practice for schools.

The Los Angeles School Police Department, which serves the nation’s second-largest school system, will return three grenade launchers but intends to keep 61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicle it received through the program.

An armored personnel carrier and surplus military rifles (later in the story it notes that the rifles were converted to semi-automatic)? Talk about rounding up students in style! But the district did return the grenade launchers, I guess it realized that most parties sent to round up convicts don’t usually bring heavy ordinance.

The San Diego district justified its purchase of the armored personnel carrier by saying it is for search and rescue and that the behemoth will be loaded with medical supplies. I guess the district has some policy against calling an ambulance, which is loaded with medical supplies and comes equipped with trained medical personnel. The Los Angeles district didn’t beat around the bush, it went straight for the school shooting scare excuse. Of course the Los Angeles Police Department was the first department in the country to have a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team and is well known for being extremely militarized already. Why the school district believes it needs its own team when it can call in the LAPD is beyond me, especially when you look at the statistics and see how rare school shootings actually are (which isn’t to say they don’t happen but the risk doesn’t warrant the establishment of a separate SWAT team for the district).

Truthfully these school districts are just following in the footsteps of police departments throughout the country. The federal government is giving away free or near free shit to local government agencies and those agencies are snapping it up like a shopper snapping up shit they weren’t going to buy until it they say that it was marked down for the store’s going out of business sale. In other words the government, by subsidizing the purchase of military equipment, has further distorted the market by making the military equipment look more appealing than shit local agencies could actually use (like, say, deescalation training for police officers).

I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Add this story to the reasons you can’t trust anybody these days. A man who was charged with being a terrorist, although he committed no crimes related to terrorism, was first tortured in a South Carolina military prison. After that he was sent to the court system where he was threatened with a life sentence. In 2007 he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. But the justice system is a funny thing and the rules can change on a whim, which is what happened:

MIAMI (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge in Miami re-sentenced Jose Padilla on Tuesday to 21 years for a 2007 terrorism conviction after an appeals court deemed the original 17-year sentence too lenient.

Now instead of the original 17 years he going to be locked in a cage for 21 years. His crimes? Conspiracy to commit crimes, which means he didn’t actually commit a crime but the state merely said he was planning to do so:

Padilla, an al Qaeda recruit and the first U.S. citizen labeled an enemy combatant, was convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people abroad, as well as providing material support for terrorism.

He was accused of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States. In all likelihood the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested him when he turned out to be too smart to actually press the button on the fake detonator for the fake bomb supplied to him by the agency in another one of its fake terrorist bomb plots.

ALS Association Moves to Block Other Charities from Enjoying Similar Success

The ice bucket challenge has been very lucrative for the ALS Association. So far the marketing ploy has raised $94 million for the charity. I’ve often noticed that the more successful a charity becomes the more corrupt it also becomes. Now that the ALS Association has its money it’s working to prove my theory:

No one could’ve predicted what a sensation the Ice Bucket Challenge would become. It’s everywhere. It’s unavoidable. And now that it’s earned the ALS Association over $94 million in charity, the organization has filed for a trademark seeking ownership of the phrase “ice bucket challenge.” The August 22nd filings also request a trademark covering “ALS ice bucket challenge,” a slightly-more-specific description that’s proven equally popular across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media. The ALS Association wants complete control over “ice bucket challenge” whenever the three words are being used for charitable fundraising purposes.

So far I haven’t been nominated for the ice bucket challenge and with this latest move I will refuse to take part in the challenge if nominated. In fact I will never give the ALS Association so much as a dime. If the trademark is granted it would prevent any other charity from using an ice bucket challenge to raise money. That leads me to believe that the ALS Association views other charities as competitors, which goes against the whole idea of charity. And in its desire to destroy its perceived competitors it has chosen to use the state’s fiction of intellectual property.

Must Have Been a Contortionist

There has been a small trend of instances where detainees have been cuffed, placed into the back of cop cars, and ended up shooting themselves. We can now add another occurrence of this strange phenomenon to the list but this time more than just speculation stands against the cop’s story:

A coroner’s report obtained exclusively by NBC News directly contradicts the police version of how a 22-year-old black man died in the back seat of a Louisiana police cruiser earlier this year — but still says the man, whose hands were cuffed behind his back, shot himself.

In a press release issued March 3, the day he died, the Louisiana State Police said Victor White III apparently shot himself in an Iberia Parish police car. According to the police statement, White had his hands cuffed behind his back when he shot himself in the back.

But according to the full final report of the Iberia Parish coroner, which was released nearly six months later and obtained exclusively by NBC News, White was shot in the front, not the back. The bullet entered his right chest and exited under his left armpit. White was left-handed, according to family members. According to the report, the forensic pathologist found gunshot residue in the wound, but not the sort of stippling that a close-range shot can sometimes produce. He also found abrasions on White’s face.

I’m shocked that the officer’s version of the story didn’t hold up. After all it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that a person was handcuffed, almost certainly searched, and placed into a cop car only to have smuggled in a firearm in his ass so he could pull it out if captured and execute himself. What part of that story isn’t completely plausible?

Now we wait to see what comes of this information. My guess is jack shit. The officers that arrested the man and potentially shot him will probably remain on duty and the media will fail to report further on this fiasco. Then if riots erupt in the area the cops will claim they have no idea why it did and call in the storm troopers to violently suppress the rioters.

Down the Memory Hole

There’s no doubt that the Internet has been one of the greatest tools for information sharing every invented. Instead of having to go to the library, request a book, wait two weeks for that book to arrive, and squeeze every bit of knowledge you need out of that book in one or two weeks we not open a browser and type a search into Google. But it’s not limited solely to books. The state, failing to comprehend a future where the plebs could access and read its documents, put a bunch of stuff online for us to access. This saves a lot of people a lot of headaches having to go to a court to obtain a physical copy of records related to cases. Slowly the state is realizing its mistake and disappearing things down the memory hold:

The Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) has removed access to nearly a decade’s worth of electronic documents from four US appeals courts and one bankruptcy court.

The removal is part of an upgrade to a new computer system for the database known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER.

Court dockets and documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, were maintained with “locally developed legacy case management systems,” said AO spokesperson Karen Redmond in an e-mailed statement. Those five courts aren’t compatible with the new PACER system.

If your tax funded upgrade of a public system removes public records then the upgrade was not done correctly. As somebody who relies on being able to download the state’s dirty laundry and court records (but I repeat myself) to entertain my readers this kind of shit pisses me off. And I’m probably going to be pissed off more and more because I guarantee the state is going to “upgrade” more of its systems and toss a ton of online records down the memory hole. It’s a classic maneuver, if you can’t get away with destroying public records then you just make them very difficult to access.

Betsy Hodges Puts Forward a Stupid Proposition

Betsy Hodges is the current mayor of Minneapolis. Those familiar with her probably read the title and said “No duh.” She’s a statist, which means she frequently makes stupid propositions. But her budget proposal really takes the cake. Specifically:

The most significant new spending is in the area of public safety. Hodges wants to spend nearly $2 million to hire 20 community service officers and an 18-person police cadet class, two of the most reliable feeders for the city’s police force. To drive down crime, she wants to boost the number of officers to 860, which is above last year’s budget but equal to the figure Chief Janeé Harteau has said she hopes to reach by the end of the year.

In the name of public safety she wants to add more people to the ranks of Minneapolis’s most violent gang. Talk about failing to understand the problem. The Minneapolis Police Department has a colorful history but even if you put that aside it still performs a lot of crime. For example, it guns down family pets. When it’s not performing raids on suspected drug users so it can confiscate their property (thankfully that’s slightly harder in Minnesota now). Minneapolis’s finest also find time to write a massive number of parking and traffic citations. And the department has a lot of connections with local business, which it helps drum up business for (my friend recently had his motorcycle stolen and Minneapolis Police Department made him pay to get it out of the impound yard after finding it).

What’s especially ironic about her proposal is that she knows that the city’s police officers are trouble:

Hodges wants to spend $1.1 million for police to wear body cameras, a program she trumpeted during her campaign that she hopes will reduce use-of-force complaints.

I’m all for making police departments wear cameras so long as the footage is always available to the public and cannot be tossed down the memory hole by government officials. But her proposal to make Minneapolis’s most violent gang members wear cameras is also an admittance to the fact that the department has a lot of use-of-force complaints against it. She knows the department has a history of unnecessary violence yet she still wants to provide it more funding to hire more thugs.

If Hodges really wanted to reduce crime she would either reduce the number of criminals in city’s officially sanctioned gang or, preferable, disband the department entirely and allow the market to fill the demand for protective services (something the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t seem to focus on at all).

Who Rules America

Are you sitting down? If you’re not you should be before reading further because I’ve got some news that will shatter your reality:

A shattering new study by two political science professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country. The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.

The new study, with the jaw-clenching title of “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” is forthcoming in the fall 2014 edition of Perspectives on Politics. Its authors, Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, examined survey data on 1,779 national policy issues for which they could gauge the preferences of average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups and business-dominated interest groups. They used statistical methods to determine the influence of each of these four groups on policy outcomes, including both policies that are adopted and rejected.

The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a “non-significant, near-zero level.“

Ho. Ly. Shit. You mean to tell me that economic elites and organized interest groups basically own the government? Mind. Blown.

I can’t believe it! Somebody actually had to do a study to figure this out? It wasn’t at all obvious that the people of the United States have had effectively no say in their government for the last several decades (I would argue since the government’s inception but I’ll be conservative for the sake of this post). Like all men are created equal, the fact that we have no say in our government is self-evident. Without much effort you can usually figure out what special interest group bought a law even when most Americans opposed it.

It’s still nice to see more people pointing this fact out since there are a lot of people who don’t seem to realize it.

A Rather Brilliant Scam

There’s a lot of scams out there but it’s rare that you come across an especially clever one. Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr. supposedly managed to pull off a scam that actually merits a little congratulations for creativity:

Here’s how it works: Parrish allegedly visited Apple Stores and tried to buy products with four different debit cards, which were all closed by his respective financial institutions. When his debit card was inevitably declined by the Apple Store, he would protest and offer to call his bank — except, he wasn’t really calling his bank.

So, the complaint says, he would offer the Apple Store employees a fake authorization code with a certain number of digits, which is normally provided by credit card issuers to create a record of the credit or debit override. (Business Insider, like the Tampa Bay Times, refuses to publish the number of digits “so as not to inspire anyone.”)

But that’s the problem with this system: as long as the number of digits is correct, the override code itself doesn’t matter.

I could find the number of digits from the quick Google search I performed otherwise I would let you know what it is (because security through obscurity is dumb and people who rely on it should feel bad for doing so). But using this scheme Mr. Parrish scammed various Apple stores out of $309,768 in merchandise. My guess is the high amount is what ultimately got him caught. Let this be a lesson to would-be thieves. If you’ve found a good scam don’t use it too much because that is what will most likely get you caught.

What’s especially bad about this scam is that the retailer generally has to eat the costs because they overrode the declination. Because of this many retailers will probably stop accepting override codes under any circumstance. That’s the only way to protect against this scam since the only thing that determines whether or not an authorization code is valid or not is the number of digits.

Privileges of Position

Several episodes of Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast covered the fall of the Roman Empire. In it one of the facts that I found interesting was that Roman politicians were immune from lawsuits for acts they performed until they left office. Because of this politicians often sought to remain in office simply to avoid the slew of lawsuits that they knew awaited them upon exiting. Our country isn’t that dissimilar except members of the government are usually immune from lawsuits for acts performed in office for the entirety of their lives. Which leads to some rather interesting situations:

Judge Wade McCree first made headlines when he sexted a shirtless selfie to a female bailiff back in 2012. Then, McCree had a sexual relationship with Geniene La’Shay Mott while overseeing her child support case.

McCree sexted Mott from the bench and had sex with her in his chambers. During this time, he ordered Robert King, the father of Mott’s child, to pay child support and to wear an electronic tether.

King sued McCree, but a court ruled that he could not be sued because of the immunity doctrine, which says that in order for judges to remain impartial, they must be immune from lawsuits.

A judge must be immune from lawsuits to remain impartial but he’s totally remaining impartial in a divorce hearing when he’s banging one of the divorcees. It really is good to be in the service of the king. Perhaps it’s time I sold out, gave up this whole anarchism thing, and got a sweet job with the state that allowed me to abuse my power without consequence. That pay and benefits are usually pretty stellar as well (especially when you consider you don’t actually have to do anything useful).