Category: Wall of Fame Assholes

Los Angeles Considering a Prohibition Against Feeding the Homeless

The state’s war against the homeless wages on. Last month a Hawaiian politician decided to step up the war by walking around town and smashing shopping carts being used by homeless individuals. Lost Agneles, not wanting to be outdone, is now considering a complete prohibition against feeding the homeless:

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council recently proposed an ordinance that would ban private charities and individuals from feeding homeless people in public. The politicians behind the legislation, Tom LaBonge and Mitch O’Farrell (both Democrats), have said they are responding to concerns from residents who are uncomfortable with the homeless spending lots of time around their homes.

Again my theory that the state will never be useful for helping the homeless is proven true. The state’s idea of helping the homeless is to make their lives so miserable that they flee to another city.

One Hawaiian Politician is Taking the State’s War Against the Homeless to a New Level

The state has been waging war against the homeless for some time now. But one Hawaiian politician is taking matters into his own hands to make the lives of those with nothing even more miserable:

WAIKIKI (HawaiiNewsNow) – State Rep. Tom Brower has taken a sledgehammer and a novel approach to Hawaii’s homeless problem.

“I got tired of telling people I’m trying to pass laws. I want to do something practical that will really clean up the streets,” he said.

In his spare time he scours streets and parks in his district, looking for shopping carts homeless use to store and move their belongings. He returns good ones to stores and destroys others with his sledgehammer.

“I find abandoned junk, specifically shopping carts, and I remove them. I also create a situation where those carts can’t be pushed around the city. I think it’s a good thing,” he said.

Once again I feel the need to stress the fact that the state isn’t going to solve the problem of homelessness. Politicians don’t see the homeless as individuals in need of help; they see the homeless as vermin whose lives must be made miserable so they move on to a different city, county, state, or country. If we want to help the homeless we will need to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves. In fact we’ll have to fight the state in order to help the homeless as it is determined to make helping the homeless illegal.

True Patriotism Must be Forced

Do you love your country? Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio does. In fact he loves his country so much that he’s punishing all nonbelievers in his prisons:

Arpaio said he has implemented an American flag campaign in his jails.

Each cell is getting a sticker of an American flag. Any inmate who vandalizes the flag will be punished with the restricted diet.

In keeping with the patriotic theme, Arpaio has ordered that the playing of God Bless America and the National Anthem be done daily in every jail facility over the public address system and for all the inmates, regardless of national origin, to hear and sing-a-long.

Nothing says America like being kidnapped and caged for possessing a plant, being given a flag that represents the country that caged you for possessing a plant, and being punished for not treating the flag that represents the country that caged you for possessing a plant with love and affection.

In fact, Joe Arpaio is being an unpatriotic pussy communist. God Bless America? The National Anthem? Those songs don’t represent America. This song represents America:

Seriously though, Joe Arpaio is an asshole.

Words Cannot Describe My View of This Cop

I would call this cop a pig but that would denigrate an animal that wallows in its own filth:

Police officers in the city of Louisiana, Missouri used the stun gun to stop Ryan Miller after he kicked in a front door and tried to enter his house to rescue his 3-year-old stepson, Riley.

Officers on the scene felt it was too dangerous to let anybody go in. Witnesses say Miller was tased three times, then handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police car.

The boy’s body was eventually found 12 to 15 feet from the front door.

Disgusting doesn’t even begin to cover it. Imagine yourself in the position of the father. Your child is trapped in a burning house and a cop hits you with a Taser to prevent you from going in and rescuing. The end result is your child burning to death a mere 15 feet from the front door.

I really have no words to describe the actions of that cop. Preventing a father from attempting to save his child, entirely at his own risk, is despicable. Police officers shouldn’t feel as though they have the right to determine whether or not a situation is safe enough for a parent to attempt to rescue their child. That’s a decision only a parent can make.

Planning to Call the Police? Stop. Think. Reconsider.

It’s safe to say that this country no longer has peacekeeping forces. Modern police departments in this country are are paramilitary forces. Instead of trying to find nonviolent solutions to community problems the paramilitary forces that call themselves police jump to violence in a frighteningly short amount of time. A man in Iowa called the police on his son, who had taken his truck. What happened next was, sadly, predictable:

James Comstock refused to buy a pack of cigarettes for his 19-year-old son, Tyler, and now he’s planning his son’s funeral.

“He took off with my truck. I call the police, and they kill him,” James Comstock told The Des Moines Register on Tuesday. “It was over a damn pack of cigarettes. I wouldn’t buy him none.

[…]

Police began pursuing Tyler Comstock of Boone after his father reported the truck stolen. The truck belonged to a lawn care company.

Ames Police Officer Adam McPherson pursued Comstock into the heart of ISU’s campus. During the chase, Comstock rammed McPherson’s car. The truck eventually stopped, but Comstock revved the engine and refused orders to turn it off.

McPherson fired six shots into the truck. Comstock died from two gunshot wounds, according to the Iowa state medical examiner’s office.

This kind of shit pisses me off. I’m sure somebody will claim that Comstock’s act of ramming the police cruiser authorized the cops to use deadly force. That doesn’t sit well with me. With the vast toy box police officers have at their disposal, barring violent action on behalf of a suspect, there is little need for officers to enter a high-speech case. Deploying spike strips along the speeding vehicle’s path can immobilize it, which puts the ton and a half threat out of commission.

But the real lesson is simple. If you’re thinking about calling the police stop, think, and reconsider. Do you really want costume-clad thugs with a history of brutality and puppycide intervening? Is there are better, more peaceful way to solve your problem? These are questions you should give serious consideration to before picking up the phone and dialing 911.

More Cavity Searches in New Mexico

Via Twitter zerg539 let me know that our friend Agent Flemming is still operating in New Mexico:

A man in New Mexico was pulled over by police for a minor traffic violation. When officers said a K-9 unit sniffed drugs on the driver’s seat, the officers forced the man to undergo invasive medical procedures, including an anal exam.

It may sound nearly identical to David Eckert’s nightmarish story as reported by TheBlaze Tuesday, but this is an entirely different incident.

What’s interesting is that these two incidents involve the same drug dog, which apparently isn’t certified:

Leo’s certification to be a drug dog reportedly expired in April 2011. K-9s need yearly re-certification sources, and Leo is more than two years behind. But as Reason.com notes, that may not matter:

According to the Supreme Court, none of this necessarily disqualifies Leo as an informant reliable enough to obtain a warrant authorizing the sort of humiliating searches that Eckert and Young underwent. Last February the justices unanimously ruled that “a court can presume” an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides probable cause for a search “if a bona fide organization has certified a dog after testing his reliability in a controlled setting” or “if the dog has recently and successfully completed a training program that evaluated his proficiency in locating drugs.

I’ve always thought of drug dogs as a scam. While I don’t doubt the ability of the dogs I doubt the way they’re handled. A drug dog signalling is used as evidence to perform a search. The problem is that an alert action is subjectively decided by the human handler. A drug dog’s handler could take his dog’s pacing back and forth as and alert and use it as evidence to perform a search. This really relegates drug dogs to the status of exploitable tool to get around pesky warrant requirements. But seeing that the drug dog hasn’t even been reevaluated in over two years really adds icing to this already rich cake.

When Law Enforcement Turns Parody Into Reality

Do you know what I find frightening? When law enforcement turn parody into reality. Take this story:

The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming. According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement.

Obviously the officers wrote him a ticket and sent him on his way, right? Wrong:

What Happened

While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures. A review of Eckert’s medical records, which he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

This reminds me of a certain fictional law enforcement agent:

Frightening, isn’t it?

Getting Them Used to the Surveillance State

Colleges are great places where students can be subjected to years of rabid neo-liberalism in their pursuit of getting a piece of paper. On top of being beat over the head with statist propaganda, college students also have something else to look forward to: widespread surveillance:

It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called “the most authoritarian institution in America“.

The National Security Agency? Nope. It’s your average college or university.

This makes sense. In fact, I would be shocked if colleges weren’t surveilling students. Colleges have been little more than an arm of the Ministry of Truth for decades now. Students are fed bullshit ranging form social contract theory to Keynesian economics. Anything that may justify the actions of the state are shoved down the throats of students who just want to get a piece of paper that says they’re qualified to do a job so they can join the ranks of the unemployed with everybody else.

But colleges are supposed to prepare students for the real world. Spying on them will ready them for being spied on for the rest of their lives.

Watching the GOP Crash and Burn

When people ask me to describe the Republican Party I generally compare it to the villains of Saturday morning cartoons. Its plots tend to be rather harmless but are perceived as being extremely evil to the children watching Politics: The Reality Television Show for Suckers. Like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, nobody is actually afraid of the Republican Party because it’s always defeated at the end of the episode.

Besides impotency, the Republican Party has another problem: an alarming number of their members are very loud assholes. By loud assholes I mean they can’t keep their mouths shut when it comes to their moral indignation. I try to withhold moral judgements unless somebody is hurting other people. Your religious beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identify, drug of preference, etc. don’t harm anybody in any way. More and more the population of the United States is turning in this direction. Previous generations held a lot of hatred for members of minority religions, homosexuals, transgenders, and drug users. That attitude is dying. Publicly hating against any of those groups is a surefire way to achieve political suicide. When people see shit like this, they get angry:

Many people will correctly point out that Mr. Kincannon has the right to express his beliefs. I agree but I also have to point out that actions have consequences. When members of the Republican Party go around saying they want transgenders put into camps it turns people away from it. Let’s be honest, putting people into a camp is pretty severe. You don’t toss around such things in an official manner unless you’re trying to drum up bad publicity. So long as members of the Republican Party keep saying shit like this their party is going to burn like Rome.

Also, on a purely personal level as a person who respects almost everybody, Mr. Kincannon is a fucking asshole. I wouldn’t even wish my enemies to be rounded up and placed in camps.

Without Government Who Will Trick the Mentally Disabled into Buying Drugs

Most police departments seem willing to do anything and everything to make drug busts. Granted, if I knew I was going to get a huge cut of the action via civil forfeiture laws, and I was a complete psychopath, I would do the same thing. But even if I was a complete psychopath I doubt I would stoop to this level:

Their son, who wished to remain unnamed, is noticeably handicapped and has been diagnosed with autism as well as bipolar disorder, Tourettes, and several anxiety disorders.

[…]

The ordeal began on the first day of school last fall. The family had just moved to a new neighborhood and their son began his senior year at a new school, Chaparral High, in the Temecula Valley Unified School District. Their son rarely socialized, so his mom was thrilled when he announced that he had made a new friend in art class on the first day of school.

“We were so excited. I told him he should ask his friend to come over for pizza and play video games,” says Catherine Snodgrass, “but his new friend always had an excuse.”

His new friend, who went under the name of Daniel Briggs, was known as “Deputy Dan” to many students because it was so apparent to them that he was an undercover officer. However, to their son, whose disabilities make it hard for him to gauge social cues, Dan was his only real friend.

Dan reportedly sent 60 text messages to their son begging for drugs. According to his parents, the pressure to buy drugs was too much for the autistic teen who began physically harming himself.

The Snodgrass’ son finally agreed to buy Dan the pot. Dan give him twenty dollars and it took him three weeks to buy a half joint of pot off a homeless man downtown. This happened twice. When Dan asked a third time, their son refused and Dan cut off all communication.

[…]

On December 11, 2012 armed police officers walked into their son’s classroom and arrested him in front of his peers. He was taken to the juvenile detention center, along with the 21 other arrestees, where he was kept for 48 hours. First hand reports claim that the juvenile center was caught off guard by the large number of arrests and that some youths had to sleep on the floor, using toilet paper as pillows.

Listen, if you’re working for a police department and trying to rake in cash through drug busts there are plenty of actual drug dealers and consumers out there. You don’t have to prey on children who have mental disabilities. I know they’re easy targets and practically a guaranteed bust, but there are far more honorable ways of expropriating wealth from the people. Set up speed traps, issue parking citations, or anything else that doesn’t require you to prey on children who lack, and will never have, full mental faculties.