News You Need to Know – Page 20

Cliven Bundy Walks Free

A few days ago the case against Cliven Bundy, the man who had the guts to defend his property against federal agents, was dismissed. While a lot of people have talked about the dismissal of the case, usually with statists screaming in outrage, I think the reason the case was dismisses is the most noteworthy element:

An hour earlier, Bundy sat stoically in prison garb and shackles as a judge dismissed the case against him, two of his sons and a militia supporter, saying federal prosecutors violated the men’s rights to a fair trial by withholding evidence.

[…]

U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro said federal prosecutors acted recklessly and engaged in a “deliberate attempt to mislead and distort the truth” by failing to turn over evidence that could have helped exonerate the four defendants.

People often make the mistake of believing that the government seeks justice. However, it’s usually not justice that the government wants but a prosecution. Oftentimes a government prosecutor will go to great lengths to prove an innocent individual’s guilt. Government prosecutors have done everything from withhold evidence to use scientifically unsound forensics to put people behind bars.

Bundy was lucky that his case was being run by a judge who felt that the withholding of evidence was grounds enough to dismiss the case. Many innocent people aren’t so lucky.

People Are Going Batshit for Crypto

People are going batshit for crypto. When the Long Island Iced Tea Company changed its name to Long Blockchain its stock jumped by 50 percent. Similarly Hooters’s stock jumped by 50 percent when it announced its blockchain rewards program and Kodak, which I didn’t realize was even still around, enjoyed a stock increase of 60 percent when it announced its blockchain-based currency. It seems like the mere whisper of the word blockchain is enough to get investors excited.

Let us return to Long Blockchain though. When the company announced its name change it justified it by claiming that it was going to buy cryptocurrency mining hardware. After baiting investors Long Blockchain announced that while it was still planning to invest in cryptocurrency mining hardware it didn’t have a definite timeline:

But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it’s still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it “can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment.”

Every time Bitcoin’s price increases detractors claim that it’s a bubble that will soon burst and leave everybody who invested penniless. Little did they know that Bitcoin itself wasn’t the real bubble but the technology it’s based on, blockchains, was. And yes, when the mere whisper of adopting a technology causes your stock to significantly jump in value, you’re operating in a bubble.

Policing Even Less Dangerous than Last Year

A lot of people, especially those involved in or somehow connected to law enforcement, believe that policing is a dangerous job. However, policing doesn’t even make the top 10 list of dangerous jobs. Not only is policing fairly safe but it has been becoming safer for decades:

The number of police officers killed on duty dropped to near a 50-year low in 2017. As of December 28, 2017, 128 officers died in the line of duty. That’s down 10% from 2016, when 143 officers died, according to new data from National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Perhaps it’s time to do away with the practice of letting police justify their violent actions by claiming that they have a dangerous job and just want to go home at night. Their job isn’t all that dangerous and those who are working jobs that are actually dangerous seem to manage just fine without gunning down everybody who looks at them wrong.

The United States of Rome

I’ve been on a huge Roman history kick for the last several months. Currently I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland. I’m a bit over 200 pages in and it has been an excellent read. The history itself is fascinating but the various parallels between the twilight of the Roman Republic and the United States are also worth noting. For example, the Romans had a similar strategy when it came to justifying war. From page 152:

The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

Like the Roman Republic, the United States never performs a preemptive strike without first convincing itself that its target is an eminent threat even if there is no plausible threat. Furthermore, the Romans had a similar attitude towards the “rights” of its citizens. From pages 202 and 203:

At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.

Like in the Roman Republic, the rights of Americans end where the politicians’ perception of safety begins.

The Founding Fathers put a lot of effort into emulating the Roman Republic and that effort wasn’t wasted. As the United States marches into its twilight it continues to emulate the Roman Republic as it marched into its twilight. Perhaps the next stage of the United States will be a monarchy as well.

Sending a Message

Admittedly I’m speculating here but Roy Moore’s accuser’s house burning down shortly after he lost an election due, at least in part, to those accusations is a pretty big coincidence:

Roy Moore accuser Tina Johnson lost her home Wednesday in a fire that is now under investigation by the Etowah County Arson Task Force.

Tina Johnson, who first came to public notice for accusing Senate candidate Roy Moore of grabbing her in his office in the early 1990s, said her home on Lake Mary Louise Road in Gadsden caught fire Tuesday morning.

After neighbors and some utility workers called 911 shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday, the Lookout Mountain Fire Department responded to the scene. By the time the flames were extinguished, Johnson and her family had lost everything they owned.

I’m not necessarily implying that Moore had a hand in this. He strikes me as a spiteful enough man to pull something like this though. However, it could have also been one of his supporters who was particularly upset about the election results. It could have also been somebody who hated Moore and wanted to make his supporters look vengeful. Then again it could have also been an accident or a random act of arson. But it strikes me a suspicious nonetheless.

As She Should

The mother of the victim of the recent swatting incident is calling for the officer who killed her son to be brought up on charges:

An attorney representing Lisa Finch, the mother of a man who was killed by Wichita police last week after a “swatting” prank call, is calling for criminal charges to be filed against the officer who fired the fatal shot.

“Justice for the Finch family constitutes criminal charges against the shooting officer,” attorney Andrew Stroth told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

As she bloody well should.

As I said in my original post, swatting is a byproduct of trigger happy law enforcers avoiding consequences for their actions. If law enforcers were held responsible for their actions, it would likely instill a sense of responsibility into law enforcers. If law enforcers had a sense of responsibility, swatting wouldn’t be a thing because few departments would respond to an anonymous tip by deploying a SWAT team to a provided address to perform a little shock and awe. Instead they would investigate the matter to determine if the reported incident is even legitimate and then act accordingly.

I really hope that the officer who shot Andrew Finch ends up facing criminal charges. Storming a home and gunning down an unarmed man in response to an anonymous call is criminal.

If You’re Afraid of Risk, Don’t Take the Job of Absorbing Risk

If you ask the average America what the job of a police officer is, you will likely receive some variation of, “To protect and serve the public.” This shouldn’t surprise anybody. We’re told from a young age that police officers are heroes who protect us and that we pay taxes so police officers can protect us from nefarious individuals.

So, at least ideally, the purpose of a police officer, like that of a firefighter or a private security guard, is to absorb risk. When your job is to absorb risk, the job you take is necessarily risky, which is why many individuals, including myself, are puzzled by officers’ obsession with going home safe at night:

If my concern was “you going home safe,” then I’d just fucking hunker down and die. Because I wouldn’t want that poor responder to endanger himself.

Except…that’s what I pay taxes for, and that’s what you signed up for. Just like I signed up to walk into a potential nuke war in Germany and hold off the Soviets, and did walk into the Middle East and prepare to take fire while keeping expensive equipment functioning so our shooters could keep shooting.

There’s not a single set of orders I got that said my primary job was to “Come home safe.” They said it was to “support the mission” or “complete the objective.” Coming home safe was the ideal outcome, but entirely secondary to “supporting” or “completing.” Nor, once that started, did I get a choice to quit. Once in, all in.

When that 80 year old lady smells smoke or hears a noise outside her first floor bedroom in the ghetto, she doesn’t care if you go home safe, either. She’s afraid she or the kids next door won’t wake up in the morning.

People have varying degrees of risk tolerance. The more risk tolerant a person is, the less they’re concerned about mitigating risks. An investor who is highly risk tolerant is more willing to invest in an unknown startup than an investor who isn’t very risk tolerant. An individual who is motivated to save lives and is highly risk tolerant is more willing to take on the job of fighting fires than an individual who may have the same motivations but isn’t risk tolerant (they might instead opt to become a doctor).

The problem with the “I want to go home safe at night,” mentality that many officers cite whenever they put bullets into somebody is that going home safe at night isn’t part of their job description. Their job description is to absorb risk, which means possibly not going home at night.

If you’re not willing to be shot at, signing up for the military isn’t for you. If you’re not willing to run into a blazing building, being a firefighter isn’t for you. If you’re not willing to put yourself in a situation where you have to let another person initiate violence before you can respond in kind, being a police officer isn’t for you.

I Need to Begin Capitalizing on My Jokes

When raw food started making headlines I made jokes about selling raw water. Apparently I should start treating my jokes as serious business proposals:

Silicon Valley is developing a “raw water” obsession.

In San Francisco, “unfiltered, untreated, un-sterilized spring water” from Live Water is selling for $60.99 for a 2.5 gallon jug — and it’s flying off the shelves, the New York Times reported. Startups dedicated to untreated water are gaining steam. Zero Mass Water, which allows people to collect water from the atmosphere near their homes, has already raised $24 million in venture capital.

I take solace in knowing that this will likely be a self-correcting problem. If enough Silicon Valley hipsters die of dysentery, the bottom of the market for a lot of these stupid ideas will fall out.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

There is a belief among statists that laws can prevent undesirable behavior. But statists have been passing laws for thousands of year, which is the same amount of time that other people have been ignoring them. Any law that is found to be inconvenient is ignored or bypassed:

But in an effort to cut down on the drunken mayhem, the town imposed a public drinking ban over the holiday—a law that apparently didn’t stop a few crafty, determined drinkers from setting up their own boozy sanctuary off the coast.

According to the BBC, the group spent Sunday building a makeshift private island off the Coromandel Peninsula, constructed out of sand, seashells, and a few wooden planks. The revelers set it up at low tide, and dragged out a picnic table and a cooler so they could get blasted out on “international waters,” see some fireworks, and stay away from the cops.

Sometimes I think nobody learned from Prohibition. The government of the United States went so far as to amend its constitution to prohibit alcohol throughout the country and yet people continued to manufacturer, trade, and consume alcohol. The United States’ War on (Some) Drugs is yet another example of undesirable laws being ignored. In fact the desire to ignore drug prohibitions is so strong that many individual states have announced that they’re no longer bothering to enforce them for cannabis. And why should they? While cannabis may be illegal people are still using it.

Prohibiting an activity doesn’t make that activity go away. At most it pushes that activity underground. But oftentimes a prohibition is blatantly ignored as is the case with these heroes who went so far as to construct a small sandbar in international waters.

Government Subsidized Murder

What happens when you combine trigger happy law enforcers and pranksters who are either oblivious to the consequences of involving law enforcers or simply don’t care? The phenomenon known as swatting:

Here’s what seems to have gone down. Two individuals were playing Call of Duty and got into an argument online over a game with a $1.50 wager. One of them, a person with the Twitter handle @SWauTistic, threatened to swat user @7aLeNT. The latter then provided an address that wasn’t actually their own in response to the threat. Shortly thereafter, @SWauTistic allegedly called in the false report, which led to a police response at the provided address. Andrew Finch, who lived at the address, reportedly went to the front door in response to the commotion and was shot. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon,” said Livingston. The police haven’t said whether Finch had a weapon at the time, but his family has said there were no guns in the house. The officer who fired the shot is a seven-year department veteran who will be put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

The individual who called in the false report was arrested but I’m betting that the trigger happy officer will be found innocent of any wrongdoing because he has a magic badge.

Swatting isn’t new but this story received more attention than most because somebody ended up dead. Sadly this was a question of when, not if. Law enforcers in this country kill a lot of people, oftentimes under very questionable circumstances. With a few very rare exceptions, officers who kill people are found innocent of wrongdoing. The lack of consequences certainly isn’t helping make law enforcers less dangerous. In addition to being trigger happy law enforcers in this country also like to respond with shock and awe. If you call in a hostage situation, there’s a good chance that a SWAT team will be kicking in a door instead of trying to make contact with the reported hostage taker in order to open negotiations. Of course, if they tried to make contact with the hostage taker instead, they would discover that the report was false and not have to go in guns blazing.

What this story ultimately illustrates is that if you want somebody dead, the government will happily do it for you.