News You Need to Know – Page 80

Assault Tattoo

Disproportionate responses are standard operating procedure for most law enforcement agencies these days. If an individual calls the police claiming that they saw a man with a gun the appropriate response would be to ask if that individual was acting in a threatening manner. That question never seems to get asked. Instead police will often toss logic to the wind, grab their toys, and head out to harass the subject of the call. That’s what happened to a man in Maine who wasn’t even carrying a gun:

NORRIDGEWOCK — Michael Smith went outside shirtless after being awakened Tuesday morning, yelling at a tree removal company to get off his property.

The workers thought they saw a gun in his waistband and called police.

Smith, who’d gone back to bed, was awakened again minutes later — this time by Maine State Police at his front door, backed up by a group of troopers with assault rifles in his driveway. They were asking him via a megaphone to come out of his house.

Smith did have a gun. It was tattooed on his stomach.

Because Smith was yelling at the tree removal service I can see where a claim of threatening behavior could be made. But even then an appropriate response would have been to send a couple of police officers to knock on Smith’s door and ask some questions. Loading up an entire group of troopers is overkill whether or not Smith had a real gun.

Officer safety has become the go to excuse for police agencies to act like paramilitary forces. Why did so many police officers have to be sent to respond to a call about a man who was merely through to be in possession of a gun? Because officer safety. Either that or I must assume that police officers think so poorly of their ability that they feel the only way they could win a potential gunfight is with overwhelming firepower.

Mother of the Year Award

I know a lot of older people who complain about today’s youth. But behind many problem children there are problem parents. Take this story for example. Roman Rodriguez left class to find eight teenagers beating up a smaller child. Rodriguez approached the group, determined who the ringleader was, and addressed him with a request to leave the child alone. His request was met with an attempted punch, which missed. Reacting to the initiated aggression Rodriguez, a teenager with martial arts experience, put the aggressor on the ground and held him. What happened after that makes one ask what the fuck is wrong with some parents:

Rodriguez’s strategy worked. The teen, who Rodriguez could only identify as “Angel” ran home, with his group of friends following. What he wasn’t prepared for was the threat he yelled.

“The kid threatened to stab or shoot Roman,” Colón said.

Rodriguez ran back inside the building to tell his father, who was still packing up after class, what happened.

“My son is a pretty mellow kid and I could tell something was wrong as he was pretty hyped up,” Ricardo said.

As they walked outside together, Ricardo said, the teen had returned brandishing a large kitchen knife with his mother by his side.

“I witnessed this kid’s mother encourage her son to stab mine. She was instigating a fight,” Ricardo said. “My first reaction was to protect my son, but also to avoid any kind of tragedy.”

Emphasis mine. The aggressor returning with a knife is bad in of itself but it’s pretty easy, based on this stroy, to figure out where he learned such behavior. What mother on Earth would give a knife to their child, accompany their child to the scene of a previous fight, and encourage him to stab the kid that had previously won the fight (that, I might add, was started by the kid who lost)? That has to be one messed up household.

Kudos to Roman Rodriguez for doing the right thing. I don’t think the situation could have been handled any better than it was. But the mother of the aggressor… holy shit. The fact that parents like that exist in this world saddens me greatly. Can a child with such a mother have any chance of a decent life?

If You’re Reading This Then You’re On the NSA’s Watch List

Good news readers, you’re officially on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) watch list! I know what you’re thinking, how can I be on the agency’s watch list when I haven’t done anything. It turns out that the NSA assumes anybody using encryption is a suspect and this very website employes encryption. Some time ago I switched this site over to using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and forced any attempt to access the insecure version of this site to the secure version. It’s bad news for government spies trying to snoop on your web traffic but good news for the NSA when it comes time to point out how many suspected terrorists it’s tracking:

AUSTIN, Texas — Glenn Greenwald, editor of the newly launched digital publication The Intercept, told attendees at SXSWi that the National Security Agency is wary of anyone who takes steps to protect their online activity from being hacked, such as using encryption tools.

“In [the NSA’s] mind, if you want to hide what you’re saying from them, it must mean that what you’re saying is a bad thing,” Greenwald said via a Skype video call. “They view the use of encryption… as evidence that you’re suspicious and can actually target you if you use it.”

Why stop at using encryption for just websites? Since you’re already on the watch list you might as well start encrypting your e-mail and other forms of communication. Those agents at the NSA get paid good money so we might as well make them work hard for it.

People Find a Way

China is reeling from a recent knife attack that claimed the lives of 33 persons:

Authorities on Sunday blamed a slashing rampage that killed 29 people and wounded 143 at a train station in southern China on separatists from the country’s far west, while local residents said government crackdowns had taken their toll on the alleged culprits.

Police fatally shot four of the assailants — putting the overall death toll at 33 — and captured another after the attack late Saturday in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. But authorities were searching for at least five more of the black-clad attackers.

Tragedies such as this point out something that we must all come to accept. Humans are creative creatures. Our creativity can be used for both good and evil. Gun control advocates focus their attention on wanting to prohibit firearms. Prohibitions against weapons, like any prohibitions, don’t work because human creativity will render it meaningless in a short period of time. History has shown us this with alcohol prohibition in the United States and we see it today with the war on unpatentable drugs.

An absence of guns simply means other weapons will be used and in our creative hands everything is a weapon. The chemicals under my bathroom sink can be mixed into a rather unpleasant gas. My kitchen contains numerous sharp objects that, as the linked story demonstrates, can cause a great deal of harm in a fairly short period of time.

Prohibitions are pointless. They throw a lot of innocent people in cages and fail to hinder the evil in any ways. This is why I feel we need to stop implementing prohibitions and start focusing on identifying the causes of society’s ills. Calls for prohibitions are a waster of time and effort and this is proven time and again whenever evil men are able to accomplish their goals when prohibitions that were supposed to hinder them are in place.

NSA and GCHQ Have You Webcam Pics. Yes, Even That One.

The well of National Security Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) scandals has yet to run dry. Now it has come to light that the GCHQ, with assistance from the NSA, has been collecting webcam footage from Yahoo! users:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

I’m sure the agency’s database is chock-full of penis and boob pics. In fact I’m guessing that that was the primary purpose of Optic Nerve. Agents from both agencies are probably searching the database right now hoping to find some pictures to wank off to.

So Long Piers Morgan

If you’re a douche long enough people will tire of you, which is something Piers Morgan just learned:

CNN has given up on trying to make Piers Morgan the new Larry King after a three-year run and will pull the plug on the Briton’s 9 p.m. talk show, which has been finishing far behind rivals Meghan Kelly on Fox News Channel and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

According to Nielsen ratings from last week, “Piers Morgan Live” was seen nightly by just 270,000 viewers nationwide and only 50,000 people in the key advertising demographic of Americans ages 25 to 54. Ms. Kelly and Ms. Maddow had, respectively, audiences of more than 2 million and 900,000 overall and more than 350,000 and 220,000 in that key 25 to 54 age group.

Not surprisingly one of the hypothesized reasons for Morgan’s low ratings is his constant banging on the gun control drum:

Conservatives especially took offense at his British-tabloid persona and his overt support for gun control, and they started a petition at the White House’s “We the People” site demanding that the administration “Deport British Citizen Piers Morgan for Attacking 2nd Amendment.”

Personally I just find Morgan to be a disagreeable person in general. He has always come off as a smug asshole to me and that alone was enough for me not to like the guy. I don’t watch CNN (or much television in general) so it doesn’t matter much to me that his show was cancelled but I certainly am not going to lose any sleep over it.

When the Legal System Turns On Itself

As we know the state has been having a hard time finding enough of the chemicals used in lethal injection to execute all of the prisoners currently on death row. Part of the reason for this is because European drug manufacturers are doing everything within their power to withhold these drugs from being used in state executions. This has lead the state to look for domestic suppliers of the drugs. While such suppliers do exist they are being subjected to the same legal system that put convicts on death row. A domestic seller of the drugs used in lethal injection faced a lawsuit if it supplied said drugs to the Missouri prison system. Instead of dealing with the lawsuit the seller not to sell the drugs:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court this month against the Apothecary Shoppe, Taylor’s lawyers said US drug regulations barred the pharmacy from supplying the drug for use in the execution, and asked the judge to block the sale.

Among other arguments, they said the pharmacy’s custom-made pentobarbital would cause him “severe, unnecessary, lingering, and ultimately inhumane pain” during the execution.

They argued the unregulated nature of compounding pharmacies in the US yielded “no evidence [the pharmacy] will or even has the capacity to test the pentobarbital… to ensure it will not cause unnecessary pain and suffering.”

In recent days, the Apothecary Shoppe notified Taylor’s lawyers it would not sell pentobarbital to Missouri for the execution – and had not already.

In return, Taylor’s lawyers filed a motion late on Monday to drop their suit.

It’s rather ironic that the same legal system that sentences people to death has been successfully used to make the execution of a convicted man more difficult (although it’s likely that Missouri either has a stockpile of the drugs on hand or will find an alternative way to kill the convict). Sometimes a bloated bureaucracy can be used to muddle itself up. I only hope this trend continues because if there’s one thing I would like to see made more difficult for the state it’s executing people.

Knock knock. Who’s there? Your Creditor.

A time marches on it seems American companies are becoming more bold about the clauses they insert into their contracts. Capital One has recently updates the contracts of its customers to include a clause that allows the company to send representatives to make house calls to its debtors:

Credit card issuer Capital One isn’t shy about getting into customers’ faces. The company recently sent a contract update to cardholders that makes clear it can drop by any time it pleases.

The update specifies that “we may contact you in any manner we choose” and that such contacts can include calls, emails, texts, faxes or a “personal visit.”

As if that weren’t creepy enough, Cap One says these visits can be “at your home and at your place of employment.”

The police need a court order to pull off something like that. But Cap One says it has the right to get up close and personal anytime, anywhere.

[…]

Incredibly, Cap One’s aggressiveness doesn’t stop with personal visits. The company’s contract update also includes this little road apple:

“We may modify or suppress caller ID and similar services and identify ourselves on these services in any manner we choose.”

While Capital One, according to the article, claims it doesn’t visit card holders or send debt collectors to visit customers I think the clause has more to do with the future. As the economy continues to crumble creditors are likely going to become more aggressive in collecting on outstanding debt. We will likely see creditors inserting more clauses in their contracts that enable them to take more aggressive actions against their debtors.

I’m sure many legal challenges will be made against these increasingly aggressive contractual clauses. In all likelihood courts will end up ruling in favor of the creditors in a vast majority of cases since the major creditors in this country are so closely tied to the state that the two are almost indistinguishable. That will make life ever harder for debtors.

This is why I’m glad that I don’t currently have any outstanding debt. I inherited my parents’ distaste for debt and will only incur it if no other options are available. In my fight for liberty this has helped me live freer and I firmly believe that one of the biggest steps an individual can make to increase their liberty is to pay off any incurred debt.

Questions Arise Regarding Shooting on Highway 212

The situation on Highway 212 in Eden Prairie where police shot two individuals has raised some questions. Family members of the woman who was shot have hired a lawyer to investigation the officers’ claims:

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (KMSP) – The family of one of the people shot and killed by police on Highway 212 last week has hired a lawyer to learn more about why officers pulled the trigger, but law enforcement is pointing to the 21-foot rule.

The investigation is still ongoing, but depending on which experts you talk to, some already say they see the shooting that followed a high-speed chase as justified because of a guideline that police officers are trained to use when assessing a threat.

Joe Dutton, a retired Golden Valley police officer and use of force expert, told Fox 9 News studies have proven that when faced with a suspect who is making threats with a knife, an officer won’t have the time to get their gun from a hip-holster and shoot if that suspect is within 21 feet.

The 21-foot rule, also know as the Tueller Drill, cites that an attacker armed with a knife can close an unobstructed gap between himself and an individual armed with a holstered firearm before that individual can draw his firearm. Does that rule apply in this case? I think that’s a valid question that deserves to be investigated.

Setting aside the possibility of the officers lying about the reason they shoot the two we will have to ask whether or not a lesser amount of force could have safely resolved the situation. Several factors could play a part in this. First we know that police officers carry Tasers for situations where force that can be deployed at a distance is necessary. Second we know that the police already had their firearms drawn as they had just shot the first victim. Third judging by the helicopter footage it seems like the police had positioned their squad cars between themselves and the victims.

Does the 21-foot rule apply here? I don’t believe it is so cut and dry. The police already had their firearm drawn and the path between themselves and the victims was not unobstructed. It’s possible that the situation could have been resolved with less force than was deployed, which would likely open the door for a civil case. I think this investigation is warranted and do want to read any report that comes of it.

Introducing This Week’s Fear Propaganda

You have to hand it to the United States propaganda machine, it never takes a day off. Every week it seems like we’re treated to a new story that is supposed to strike fear, doubt, and uncertainty in our minds. For the last two weeks we’ve been treated to horror stories involving the conditions as the Sochi Olympic games. This week we’re being told that Iran is sending war ships close to the United State’s maritime border:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian warships dispatched to the Atlantic Ocean will travel close to U.S. maritime borders for the first time, a senior Iranian naval commander said Saturday.

The commander of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet, Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad, said the vessels have already entered the Atlantic Ocean via waters near South Africa, the official IRNA news agency reported.

In of itself a handful of Iranian warships isn’t scary. What you’re supposed to be scared of is the reason that Iran is sending warships our way:

The voyage comes amid an ongoing push by Iran to demonstrate its ability to project power across the Middle East and beyond.

Look at those evil Iranians trying to project their power. As we all know projecting power is only a few steps away from an actual attack (unless, of course, the United States is projecting power because then it’s just bringing freedom and democracy). What’s funny are some of the comments I’ve read online. Most people are laughing this story because it is rather absurd. But a few people, the gullible suckers who believe anything the state crams down their throats, have been drumming up the Iran hatred again.

Iran seems to the Ministry of Propaganda’s fallback. Whenever it runs out of world events that could actually be deemed scary for American citizens it resorts to drumming up fear of Iran. It’s sad really. The Soviet Union was an enemy that Americans could legitimately fear. Between it’s large landmass, gigantic military, and arsenal of nuclear weapons the Soviet Union actually had a chance of giving the United States a run for its money in a real war. Now that that threat is gone the Ministry of Propaganda seems lost. It can try and try as it might to turn Iran into an enemy worth fearing but the capability to hurt the United States is entirely missing making the adventure all for naught.