News You Need to Know – Page 23

Turning Minneapolis into a Prison to Appease Our NFL Masters

Back in 2008 the Republican National Convention was hosted in St. Paul. In response the city was basically turned into a prison. Surveillance equipment was setup everywhere, heavily armed and armored officers were out on patrol, streets were shutdown, etc.

If you missed out on that experience or want to relive the experience, I have some news for you. The city of Minneapolis, in order to appease our National Football League masters, is going to be turned into a prison:

The final plans, including which streets are closed and when, are expected to be announced in the next couple of days.

If the most recent Super Bowls in San Francisco and Houston are an indication, the security operation is like none other the Twin Cities has ever seen. Snipers will be on rooftops and in buildings in strategic places. Officers in head-to-toe commando gear will be on the streets gripping assault rifles against their chests.

Minneapolis Police Cmdr. Scott Gerlicher said the influx of federal agents to Minnesota will be the largest in the 52 years of Super Bowl history. “We are prepared for anything that might come our way,” he said last week.

The full extent of the security won’t be visible, but it will be everywhere: in the skies and on the ground. Whatever equipment is available will be used — from tactical vehicles to helicopters and boats.

[…]

In addition to uniformed officers, there will be other obvious visible protections, including 2.5 miles of concrete barriers topped with wire fencing. Some busy spaces will follow NFL bag restrictions (including no purses) and have metal detectors. The airspace will be restricted above the stadium during the game.

All of this for one fucking game.

In addition to turning the city into a prison, the security arrangements will likely impact local businesses. A yet undisclosed number of streets in Minneapolis will be shutdown, which will impact any businesses that rely on them. And I highly doubt the NFL will compensate those businesses for such losses. Likewise, I highly doubt the City of Minneapolis will give those businesses a tax credit as compensation for not being able to use the roads they pay taxes to use. After all, they’re nobodies compared to the might that is the NFL.

I hope that the worse winter storm in the history of the state hits on Super Bowl weekend. It would be fun to see how well these assholes handle security in several feet of snow.

The War Is Not Meant to Be Won

One of the defining characteristics of an empire is that it is almost constantly at war. War is the great excuse for the State to expand its power. Need to increase taxes? Start a war to justify the increase. It might seem like a bad idea due to the expense of waging war but if you plunder enough from the other nation you can walk away with a tidy profit. Are you a politician who needs to line you pockets with some cash? Start a war and watch the campaign contributions and other perks roll in from the defense contractors. Do you want to expand your surveillance powers? If you start a war, you need to search for enemy spies!

As Randolph Bourne said, “For war is essentially the health of the State.” So it should come as no surprise that the United States, which is already engaged in a series of wars, is positioning itself to enter another:

Mr Dumont said calculating “even the roughest” potential casualty figures would be extremely difficult.
He also gave some detail on what the first hours of a war would involve.

“The only way to ‘locate and destroy – with complete certainty – all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs’ is through a ground invasion,” he wrote in response to Congressman Lieu’s questions about a potential conflict.

The risks involved included a potential nuclear counter-attack by North Korea while US forces attempted to disable its “deeply buried, underground facilities”, he said.

A potential nuclear counter-attack might sound horrific but you have to remember that nobody involved in developing this assessment and nobody involved in issuing the war order would actually be sent to fight the war. Casualties are easy to justify when other people are the ones dying.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Not all heroes wear capes. Some heroes wear business suits and work as accountants and lawyers who specialized in defending their client’s assets from thieving governments:

The world’s most profitable firm has a secretive new structure that would enable it to continue avoiding billions in taxes, the Paradise Papers show.

They reveal how Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its controversial Irish tax practices by actively shopping around for a tax haven.

It then moved the firm holding most of its untaxed offshore cash, now $252bn, to the Channel Island of Jersey.

Apple said the new structure had not lowered its taxes.

It said it remained the world’s largest taxpayer, paying about $35bn (£26bn) in corporation tax over the past three years, that it had followed the law and its changes “did not reduce our tax payments in any country”.

The article appears to be implying that Apple is lying about its tax payments not changing. However, I’m betting that Apple is being truthful and the move prevented its tax payments from increasing after the crackdown in Ireland (Ireland had a sweet deal until its neighbors, upset that Ireland was getting a lot of business, put pressure on it to bring its corporate tax structure up to their standards).

The accountants and lawyers that Apple hired to pull this off deserve the same applause as anybody else who stops a thief from mugging another person. Unfortunately, the world is populated with statists so those heroes will be treated like villains.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

Proponents of gun control aren’t the only ones clamoring for a ban of some sort after the recent Texas shooting. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is setting the ground work to once again push for a ban on effective cryptography:

A Federal Bureau of Investigation official said today that the agency has been unable to access an encrypted phone used by the gunman who killed 26 people at a rural Texas church on Sunday.

At a press conference, Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, said the phone had been transported back to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia for examination. Investigators have identified Devin Patrick Kelley as the gunman in the shooting, which unfolded in the town of Sutherland Springs.

“Unfortunately, at this point in time, we are unable to get into that phone,” Combs said.

The shooter is dead and from what I’ve seen his motivations are understood. There is no evidence that he was part of a network that is planning other similar attacks so who fucking cares if the FBI can’t get into his phone? Statists. Why? Because the FBI’s inadequacy, in their minds, makes everybody unsafe. It’s the same mindset that causes people to demand a ban on firearms. If a technology allows an individual to defend themselves, especially against government agents, then it is dangerous and must be prohibited.

Statists want nothing more than to turn the entire country into Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A Different Set of Rules

If you roughed somebody up and then detained them, what do you think would happen to you? I suspect that you’d be tossed in a cage for assault and unlawful detainment. However, if you wore a shiny badge and a magic suit, you might get fired from your job but somebody else would certainly get stuck paying the bill for your transgression:

A Utah nurse who was roughed up and arrested on July 26 by a Salt Lake City cop because she told the officer that he needed a warrant to draw blood from an unconscious patient has settled for a $500,000 payout.

Body cam footage from the scene shows University Hospital nurse Alex Wubbels calmly telling the officer, who was trained for the task of blood withdrawal, that he cannot take a blood sample because the patient, who was involved in a vehicle crash, had neither been arrested nor gave consent. Then the cop lunges and grabs the nurse as she was fearfully backing away. He rushes her outside the hospital, and handcuffs her. All the while, she’s screaming that there’s no reason for her detainment.

[…]

The $500,000 settlement is to be paid jointly by Salt Lake City and University Hospital. A hospital officer on the scene told the nurse that she would be obstructing justice if she interfered with Payne’s investigation.

Emphasis mine.

While the officer in question was fired, he didn’t have to pay out the $500,000 settlement. Instead his employer, Salt Lake City, and the nurse’s employer got stuck with the bill. Having that kind of shield from liability is one hell of a job perk. Unfortunately, possessing such a shield doesn’t incentivize good behavior.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

I figured that it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to marry a drone to an improved explosive. While I’d like to claim to have the power of prescience for this, truth be told it was something common sense would have lead anybody to predict:

Mexican authorities have released photographs of commercial drones armed with improvised explosives caught among cartel members in the central Mexican town of Guanajunto. The improvised explosive was attached to the drone via a string that allows it to be carried to an objective and then remotely detonated, blowing up the drone itself (instead of releasing the device like we are seeing in Syria with some cases).

This is why any belief that weapons can be controlled is foolish. What most people think of as weapons are really just tools. The real weapon is the human mind, which has boundless creativity. One person may look at a truck and see a tool he can use to haul heavy equipment from once site to another. Another person may look at the very same truck and see a tool he can use to kill a bunch of people.

Everything is a Russian Plot

Привет товарищ! I bring great news of the glorious victory of Mother Russia, err, I mean I bring frightening news. Yeah. Terrible news indeed! It turns out that everything you love and cherish is a Russian plot, including Pokemon Go!

One Russian-linked campaign posing as part of the Black Lives Matter movement used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Pokémon Go and even contacted some reporters in an effort to exploit racial tensions and sow discord among Americans, CNN has learned.

The campaign, titled “Don’t Shoot Us,” offers new insights into how Russian agents created a broad online ecosystem where divisive political messages were reinforced across multiple platforms, amplifying a campaign that appears to have been run from one source — the shadowy, Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

[…]

The donotshoot.us website in turn links to a Tumblr account. In July 2016, this Tumblr account announced a contest encouraging readers to play Pokémon Go, the augmented reality game in which users go out into the real world and use their phones to find and “train” Pokémon characters.

Nothing is beyond suspect. Your friends could be part of a Russian plot! Your spouse could be part of a Russian plot! Your dog could be part of a Russian plot! Even this blog could be part of a Russian plot! Trust nobody!

The only way to stop the Russians is for all of us Americans to come together and stand behind our government no matter what! Our freedom can only be preserved through blind obedience!

For $19.95 You Too Can Rent a Weapon of Terror for 90 Minutes

I’m predicting that it’s going to become a lot more difficult to rent a vehicle in the near future because of the attack perpetrated in Manhattan yesterday:

TRIBECA, Manhattan — A man described as a “lone wolf” deliberately drove a rented truck into a West Side bike path in lower Manhattan, killing at least eight people and injuring 11 others in the first terror attack in New York City since 9/11.

A high ranking police source tells PIX11 News the suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov from Tampa, Florida. Saipov was brandishing two fake guns when he exited the truck after the multi-block rampage, yelling “Allah Akbar,” which is Arabic for God is great.

Since the attacker supposedly yelled, “Allah Akbar,” this attack was labeled terrorism, which brings us to a rather important point. For the low price of $19.95 (for 90 minutes) the attacker was able to acquire a weapon of terror from Home Depot. Asymmetrical warfare tactics are difficult to counter specifically because the weaponry is cheap and readily available.

Unfortunately, this attack will likely make renting a vehicle a huge pain in the ass in the near future. Because its logo is on the side of the truck, Home Depot will feel the need to demonstrate its piety to the State. It will likely do this by establishing new policies for vehicle rentals that include a bunch of new hoops for renters to jump through. Such policies will be futile but that doesn’t matter since they’ll be implemented for show, not for actual security reasons.

Make no mistake, terrorism is winning the War on Terror. Almost every attack that gets labeled terrorism results in the lives of everyday people being inconvenienced by more bureaucracy that does nothing to improve actual security. This attack will likely be no different in that regard.

But It Works One Percent of the Time

Both parties become extremely interested in voter fraud when their candidate fails to win. After Obama’s election the Republican Party was up in arms about voter fraud. After Donald Trump won against Hillary Clinton the Democrat Party was suddenly up in arms about voter fraud. While both parties try to approach the problem slightly differently (the Republicans tend to blame illegal immigrants while the Democrats have been blaming Russia), they both tend to favor terrible solutions. Take this system that will be used in Indiana:

A database system that will now be used by Indiana to automatically purge voter registrations that have duplicates in other states is 99 percent more likely to purge legitimate voters, according to a paper published last week by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft Research. Using the probability of matching birth dates for people with common first, middle, and last names and an audit of poll books from the 2012 US presidential election, the researchers concluded that the system would de-register “about 300 registrations used to cast a seemingly legitimate vote for every one registration used to cast a double vote.”

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is a system administered by the office of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach—the vice-chair of President Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Crosscheck uses voter roll data from 27 states—pulled every January by election officials and uploaded to an FTP site—to check for duplicate records across states, based on full name and date of birth, as well as the last four digits of social security numbers where that data is collected by voter registration (which is not consistent from state to state).

Somebody finally did it. They managed to have a higher failure rate than the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is yet another failure on a long list of government failures. Like most entries on that list, the magnitude of the failure was only realized after the “solution” was implemented, which raises the question, who is performing the preliminary studies on these “solutions?” I honestly doubt any preliminary studies are even being performed, which is why the list of failures is so long. A system of this size should have involved a significant amount of testing, including a study like the one mentioned in the article, before it was released.

Statists often wonder why libertarians are so skeptical of government solutions. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the government often fails to perform due diligence. When government tries to find a solution to a problem it tasks handful of bureaucrats, who usually have no expertise in fields applicable to the problem, with developing a solution. They then outsource the solution to whatever crony offered up the best campaign contributions and then blindly accept whatever product it handed to them. If the solution fails to work, the bureaucrats hold some hearings that might result in some poor schmuck at the crony company being forced to step down (oftentimes to go to work for some lobbyist organization). In the end the crony company suffers little in the way of consequences but enjoys a significant profit from doing the initial work. Needless to say, this environment of no accountability breeds poor solutions.

TSA Agents Want to Talk to You

It must get lonely being a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer. They stand in line for hours making the lives of passengers who are just trying to get from one place to another miserable. Needless to say, there isn’t a lot of love for TSA officers. To help alleviate their loneliness, higher ups have implemented new security measures that will require people entering the country to make small talk with the agency’s flunkies:

New security measures including stricter passenger screening take effect on Thursday on all U.S.-bound flights to comply with government requirements designed to avoid an in-cabin ban on laptops, airlines said.

Airlines contacted by Reuters said the new measures could include short security interviews with passengers at check-in or the boarding gate, sparking concerns over flight delays and extended processing time.

They will affect 325,000 airline passengers on about 2,000 commercial flights arriving daily in the United States, on 180 airlines from 280 airports in 105 countries.

Now we know what the laptop ban was all about, making the intended security policy look better by comparison. This change in policy will also do nothing to improve airline security. I know that the agency is going for the Israeli system but that requires having people who know what they’re doing asking passengers questions. The TSA isn’t renowned for hiring competent individuals and any encounter with one of their officers will give anybody who has watched Idiocracy flashbacks.