News You Need to Know – Page 26

Let Them Eat Rabbit

Socialism has brought equality to Venezuelans! Everybody is equally hungry (except for members of the Party but they’re more important than the lowly proles) and it’s not sitting well. Probably hoping to keep his head firmly attached to his neck, President Maduro has offered a plan to deal with the country’s hunger. His plan? Let them eat rabbit:

That was basically the message from President Nicolas Maduro to Venezuelans starving and struggling through severe food shortages brought on by a spiraling economic crisis.

Maduro unveiled “Plan Rabbit” on Wednesday with his agriculture minister, Freddy Bernal, at a meeting that was broadcast on Periscope. (In the video, the announcement comes after the two-hour mark).

Unfortunately for the people of Venezuela, rabbit meat alone doesn’t fend off starvation:

Protein poisoning was first noted as a consequence of eating rabbit meat exclusively, hence the term, “rabbit starvation”. Rabbit meat is very lean; commercial rabbit meat has 50–100 g dissectable fat per 2 kg (live weight). Based on a carcass yield of 60%, rabbit meat is around 8.3% fat while beef and pork are 32% fat and lamb 28%.

Unless Venezuelans can find a source of fat to go with their rabbit meat, they’ll be in the same position they currently are.

New Levels of Incompetence

Equifax, one of the largest consumer credit report agencies, recently suffered a major database breech. Of course, you wouldn’t know it if the media wasn’t giving it heavy coverage because Equifax seems to want to keep things hush hush and I understand why. After reading this it would appear that Equifax implemented worse security than most college students in an introductory web development class:

It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”

[…]

Each employee record included a company username in plain text, and a corresponding password that was obfuscated by a series of dots.

However, all one needed to do in order to view said password was to right-click on the employee’s profile page and select “view source,” a function that displays the raw HTML code which makes up the Web site. Buried in that HTML code was the employee’s password in plain text.

This is an impressive level of incompetence and I mean that sincerely. Most amateur websites have better security than this. The fact that a company as large as Equifax could implement worse security practices than even the most amateur of amateur web developers is no small feat. Unfortunately, its piss poor security practices has put a lot of people’s sensitive information in the hands of unknown parties.

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

On Tuesday night a security officer at St. Cathrine University was shot. The initial report said that an individual had shot the officer but it turns out that the officer shot himself and lied about it. Why did he do that? Because he played a stupid game:

Investigators continued working the case all day Wednesday. While interviewing Ahlers about 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, he told officers that he was in a wooded area of the campus about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday. He had brought his personal handgun from home and was handling it when it accidentally discharged, hitting him in the shoulder.

He told police he’d lied and said he made up the story because he was afraid of losing his job because he’d brought a gun to work with him.

One of the rules of carrying a firearm is that you should leave it in the holster unless you absolutely need to use it. A holstered gun won’t hurt anybody but the second a gun leaves its holster the possibility of it being fired increases from zero.

As an additional note, if the officer wanted to carry a gun he should have sought out an armed job. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about losing his job for being armed. Now he’ll probably lose his job and find a tough time getting a new job as a security officer since he’s proven himself to be untrustworthy.

Plan Ahead

Planning ahead can save you a great deal of grief, frustration, and money:

Two things are true of all festivals: the security is super tight and the booze is very expensive.

[…]

One guy from New York named Alex found an ingenious way to get past these two road blocks. Three weeks before the Electric Zoo festival in New York City, Alex travelled to the Randall’s Island where the event is located with a bottle of Vodka in arm.

He filled a reusable bottle with the Vodka and using a small shovel that he brought with him, Alex and his friends buried the bottle of booze in the ground a long time before the festival crew arrived to construct the stages for the event.

Alex is a real American hero (I know this story could be fake but I want it to be true so I’m going to believe it is).

On a more serious note, this tactic could also work for smuggling weapons into outdoor festivals. I wonder how many security providers have considered such a threat model. It’s also a difficult threat model to defend against since a security team would have to run metal detectors across the entire grounds and that would only offer protection against metallic weapons.

Gun, Camera, What’s the Difference?

Another day, another isolated incident. This isolated incident involves a law enforcer who apparently mistook a camera tripod for a gun:

A newspaper photographer from Ohio was shot Monday night by a sheriff’s deputy who apparently mistook his camera and tripod for a gun, and fired without a warning, the newspaper reported.

Andy Grimm, a photographer for the New Carlisle News, left the office at about 10 p.m. to take pictures of lightning when he came across a traffic stop and decided to take photos, according to the paper’s publisher, Dale Grimm.

“He said he got out, parked under a light in plain view of the deputy, with a press pass around his neck,” Grimm told The Washington Post. “He was setting up his camera, and he heard pops.”

Clark County Sheriff’s Deputy Jake Shaw did not give any warnings before he fired, striking Andy Grimm on the side, according to the paper.

Did the officer mistake a tripod for a gun or was he simply not in the mood to be photographed and knew that the likelihood of him being punished for shooting an innocent person was practically zero? There’s no way to know for sure since law enforcers almost always get away with shooting innocent people with little or no punishment.

Utah Hospital Tries to Prohibition Cops from Further Abusing Its Nurses

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the incident with Alex Wubbels. Some armed thugs came into her hospital and demanded to draw blood from an unconscious patient. She refused to allow the thugs to do so because the hospital’s policy is that blood can only be drawn from an unconscious individual if they are under arrest or if there is a court order. While the officers in question didn’t have enough evidence to arrest the unconscious person of interest, they apparently had enough evidence to arrest Wubbels… roughly. She paid a price for standing in the way of an officer’s power trip and that has resulted in the hospital prohibiting officers from interacting with its nurses:

The University of Utah Hospital, where a nurse was manhandled and arrested by police as she protected the legal rights of a patient, has imposed new restrictions on law enforcement, including barring officers from patient-care areas and from direct contact with nurses.

This may be a nice gesture but it will likely be unenforceable. The lack of accountability for law enforcers in this country means any restriction placed upon them by a private entity can be ignored. After all, who is going to enforce this policy? The good cops? Seeing as they stood by while their fellow officer kidnapped a nurse because she was doing her job I don’t have much faith that they do anything. Maybe the hospital itself will enforce the policy. Of course, any staff member who attempts to enforce the policy will receive the same treatment that Wubbels did.

The biggest problem with government monopolies is that individuals don’t get a choice of whether or not they want to participate. Participation is mandatory. If you refuse to participate, you are usually arrested and charged with a crime. I hope this changes someday but I don’t have a lot of hope that it will.

Being the Designated Fall Person is Lucrative

After Officer Noors gunned down Justine Ruszczyk the mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, sought out a sacrificial lamb that she could toss to the public to appease their anger. The sacrificial lamb she found was Janeé Harteau, the now former police chief for the City of Minneapolis. Initially it looked like a pretty raw deal but it turns out that being the sacrificial lamb can be quite profitable:

Former Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau would receive $182,876 in separation pay plus 12 months of health benefits under a severance deal with the city released Friday.

The deal must earn City Council approval. It includes a sweeping mutual non-disparagement clause: Harteau must say nothing negative about Mayor Betsy Hodges, the City Council or other high-ranking city officials, and they must say nothing negative about her.

Shielding the mayor and City Council for criticism doesn’t come cheap.

These deals always amuse me. On the one hand, a person in a management position is terminated because they supposedly did a bad job. On the other hand, their severance package is so good that they’re actually rewarded for doing a bad job. It’s like the people above the sacrificial lamb want to have their cake and eat it.

More Hero Things

Let’s say that you’re a law enforcement officer and you’ve just pulled over a white individual because you suspect that they’re driving under the influence. Due to the reputation the people in your profession now have, the suspect is hysterical because they’re afraid that you’re going to murder them on the spot. How do you handle the situation? If you answered, by informing the suspect that law enforcers only murder black people, a promising career in law enforcement may be in your future:

On a Sunday night in the summer of 2016, a Georgia police officer pulled over a white woman he suspected was under the influence. Lieutenant Greg Abbott walked up to her car on the shoulder of an Atlanta highway and stopped at the passenger side window. Asked to take her hands off the steering wheel and pick up her cellphone, the woman refused, telling the officer she’d “seen way too many videos of cops—.” He cut her off.

“But you’re not black,” he told her. “Remember, we only shoot black people. Yeah, we only kill black people, right? All of the videos you’ve seen, have you seen the black people get killed? You have.”

And now you know why Officer Noor and his partner didn’t bother to turn on their dashcam or body cameras when they gunned down Justine Ruszczyk. If it weren’t for the dashcam recording, Officer Abbott wouldn’t have been caught in this embarrassing position.

A Return to Normal

I wasn’t surprised when I read this:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is preparing to restore the flow of surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies under a program that had been sharply curtailed amid an outcry over police use of armored vehicles and other war-fighting gear to confront protesters.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press indicate President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order undoing an Obama administration directive that restricted police agencies’ access to the gear that includes grenade launchers, bullet-proof vests, riot shields, firearms and ammunition.

Both political parties are in favor of expanding the power of government but the Democratic Party is at least honest about its intentions. The Republican Party likes to market itself as the party of smaller government but every time it gets into power its people find ways to expand government power further.

Reopening the floodgates of surplus military equipment to domestic law enforcement is only going to further expand the already expanding rift between them and the people living here. When you have forces that are widely seen as abusing the large amount of power they already possess, giving them even more power to abuse isn’t going to sit terribly well. Unfortunately, the State requires a strong force to subjugate the people it claims as citizens so any action taken to curtail that force will be temporary at best.

Prosecutorial Jackpot

Christopher Cantwell, after talking a tough game, ended up crying like a bitch after Charlottesville because he was afraid of what was going to happen to him after macing a couple of people in the face. Not surprisingly, a warrant was issued for his arrest and now he’s sitting in a cage:

Police report a white nationalist who says he pepper-sprayed a demonstrator in self-defense on the campus of the University of Virginia has turned himself in.

Campus police issued a statement late Wednesday saying Christopher Cantwell of Keene, New Hampshire, was taken into custody at the police department in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Cantwell was wanted on three felony charges: two counts of the illegal use of tear gas or other gases and one count of malicious bodily injury with a “caustic substance,” explosive or fire.

Cantwell claimed that his act of macing two individuals was self-defense. I’m not intimately familiar with the self-defense laws in Virginia but if they’re anything like Minnesota’s, he’s probably going to have a difficult time selling the self-defense angle. If he doesn’t take a plea bargain, his entire social media presence, his appearance in Vice’s documentary on white nationalists, and his podcast are all going to come back to bite him in the ass. He stated numerous times that he was expecting violence and, to add icing to the cake, after the fiasco in Charlottesville was over he bragged about the amount of violence him and his fellow white nationalists used against the anti-fascists.

The prosecution team probably feels like it hit the jackpot with this guy. This case will probably serve as a warning to others that what they say, whether it be in the past or present, can be used against them.