Category: Wall of Fame Assholes

Straight to Deadly Force

Would you execute somebody if you suspected that they had stolen $1.19 worth of merchandise. Most people probably wouldn’t but I can state for a fact that there is at least one person who would and, surprise, he’s a law enforcer:

One minute, Jose Arreola was buying a pack of Mentos at an Orange County service station.

The next minute, he was at the business end of a gun drawn by an off-duty Buena Park police officer who thought Arreola had stolen the $1.19 roll of mints.

This didn’t have the appearance of an armed robbery so there was no threat of violence on the table until the officer pulled his gun. Instead of jumping straight to deadly force, he could have asked the clerk whether the mints were paid for or not. That simple question would have cleared the entire matter up without anybody having to be threatened with a summary execution.

I also think that it’s fucked up that an officer would consider jumping straight to deadly force over a roll of mints. If I owned a convenience store and somebody slipped a $1.19 roll of mints into their pocket without me realizing it, I’d write it off because the cost of doing anything about it would greatly exceed the value of the merchandise. I certainly wouldn’t call the police because I don’t believe having $1.19 stolen from me warrants the use of deadly force.

Keep the Jazz Cabbage Illegal or Fido Gets It

It’s amazing how far agents of the State will go to keep the War on (Some) Drugs going. The latest, and probably most petty, attempt to keep people on the side of continuing the drug war is to threaten dogs:

The training director of a police K-9 academy in Illinois claims that if the state legalizes recreational marijuana, it will have to euthanize all its pot-sniffing dogs, The Pantagraph reports.

Keep the jazz cabbage illegal or the dogs get it!

If cannabis was legalized tomorrow, all of the dogs that have been trained to sniff out the plant would cease to be useful to law enforcers. However, they wouldn’t cease to be useful entirely. This is something so obvious that even the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) understands it. The TSA puts dogs who have failed training up for adoption. While they may not be useful for sniffing out bombs, they can still provide an individual or family with companionship. There is no reason that drug dogs that are no longer useful to law enforcers can’t be put up for adoption as well. But I can see why an organization that makes its money off of training drug dogs to sniff out cannabis would pull out all of the stops to try to keep cannabis illegal.

Who Knew Punishing the Law Abiding Could Have Consequences

Everybody will die from opioid addictions if something isn’t done! We must roll over and let legislators and law enforcers do whatever is necessary to stop this threat!

That’s how I’ve been reading the news as of late. Opioids are the current boogeyman for the War on (Some) Drugs. Whenever a chemical becomes the boogeyman in the War on (Some) Drugs new legal restrictions are placed on it. Unlike many previous boogeymen, opioids are legally prescribed and many overdoses have been caused by legally prescribed drugs. In response to this, government busybodies have been putting pressure doctors to prescribe fewer opioids. The result of this pressure was predictable:

A report published yesterday by the health care consulting firm IQVIA shows that the total volume of opioids prescribed in the United States, indicated by the green area below, fell by 29 percent between 2011 and 2017, from 240 billion to 171 billion morphine milligram equivalents. Last year’s 12 percent drop was the largest ever recorded. The number of opioid prescriptions and the number of patients receiving opioids for the first time are also declining. The report notes that “decreases in prescription opioid volume have been driven by changes in clinical usage, which have been influenced by regulatory and reimbursement policies and legislation that have been increasingly restricting prescription opioid use since 2012.”

But as you can see in the graph, the total number of opioid-related deaths counted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicated by the blue line, is not falling along with opioid prescriptions. To the contrary, it has risen sharply in recent years, driven by dramatic increases in deaths involving heroin (orange) and illicit fentanyl (the main component of “other synthetic opioids,” the category represented by the gray line). The CDC has not released final data for 2017 yet, but more increases are expected.

People addicted to opioids aren’t going to suddenly stop being addicted when their doctor refuses to renew their prescription. Instead they’ll seek out other ways to acquire opioids. Enter the black market. However, black market opioids are dangerous. Since opioids are the current boogeyman, people who deal in opioids face greater risks than those who deal in, say, cannabis. These risks necessitate concealment. The best way to conceal a chemical substance is to make it smaller and the best way to make a chemical substance smaller is to make it more potent.

Heroin and especially fentanyl are highly concentrated forms of opioids, which means they generally need to be diluted before use. Failing to dilute fentanyl properly can lead to a deadly overdoes. So the government has created the perfect storm by declaring opioids a prescription only medication and then taking away many of those prescriptions. And like typical government busybodies, instead of admitting that their policies may have been in error, they have doubled down, which is only exacerbating the situation.

Reliving the Good Old Days of Colonialism

Colonialism is dead, or is it? France seems to be trying to relive the good old days where it would plant a flag in a foreign land and claim it as its own:

A French-born American has now sued his home country because, he claims, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has illegally seized a domain that he’s owned since 1994: France.com.

[…]

However, sometime around 2015, that very same ministry initiated a lawsuit in France in an attempt to wrest control of the France.com domain away from Frydman. Web.com locked the domain, and Frydman even roped in the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School to intervene on his behalf.

By September 2017, the Paris Court of Appeals ruled that France.com was violating French trademark law. Armed with this ruling, lawyers representing the French state wrote to Web.com demanding that the domain be handed over.

I guess we can all take some solace in knowing that if this form of colonization turns out like the original, France will end up losing everything in the end.

This story is absurd on multiple levels. First, Jean-Noël Frydman has owned the domain for 23 years. I think it’s fair to say that if an entity doesn’t defend its trademark for 23 years, it should loses it. Second, it’s ridiculous for a nation that calls itself democratic to claim a trademark. The philosophy of democracy states that a government is ultimately owned by its people. That being the case, the people of France should be able to use the name, image, etc. of their country however they desire. Third, having a court French court rule on the matter is inappropriate because it can hardly be considered impartial in this case.

Ultimately, I think the biggest thing to be said about this story is that the court’s decision was really enabled by the centralized Domain Name System (DNS) on which the Internet currently depends. Courts are able to enforce their decision on matters such as this because there are centralized organizations that can be identified and coerced. If DNS records were managed by an anonymous decentralized mechanism, it would be far more difficult for decisions like this to be enforced.

You Child Is the Property of the State

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four took place in London, which was part of the great police state of Oceania. It is only fitting then that the real Britain has turned into an Orwellian state.

The latest horror story to come from that island is the one of Alfie Evans. Alfie is suffering from a condition that has put him on life support. The doctors treating him have said that his situation cannot be cured and have therefore decided to pull the plug on his life support. When it was announced that Alfie’s life support would be pulled, the Vatican stepped in and offered to care for the boy. In order to make the process of transferring the child smoother, the Italian government granted him citizenship. This situation seems pretty straight forward. Britain doesn’t have to front any additional costs for treating the boy and doctors willing to try to treat the boy can do so. Win-win, right? Wrong. The doctors in Britain are not only unwilling to treat Alfie but they have decreed that Alfie must die and the courts have backed their call:

Pope Francis has been praying for the British toddler Alfie Evans — and the Italian government has granted the child Italian citizenship and lined up a transportation plan that could swiftly bring the sick little boy to a Vatican hospital.

But Alfie’s doctors say he cannot be healed and shouldn’t make the trip at all.

On Tuesday, a British judge sided with the doctors, saying that the family cannot accept the offer to take Alfie to the Vatican for treatment. An appeals court swiftly re-heard the case and upheld the previous day’s ruling, saying on Wednesday that Alfie cannot leave the country.

This is the point where Alfie’s parents would be entirely justified in taking up arms, storming the hospital, and liberating their child. I’m not the only person to express a belief that the use of force is justified in this situation, which has resulted in the local police department issuing an Orwellian statement:

We’ve issued the following statement following reports of social media posts being made in relation to Alder Hey Hospital and the ongoing situation with Alfie Evans:

Chief Inspector Chris Gibson said: “Merseyside Police has been made aware of a number of social media posts which have been made with reference to Alder Hey Hospital and the ongoing situation involving Alfie Evans.

“I would like to make people aware that these posts are being monitored and remind social media users that any offences including malicious communications and threatening behaviour will be investigated and where necessary will be acted upon.”

In other words, shut up, slaves.

The doctors have decreed that Alfie must die, the courts have backed the doctors, and now the law enforcers are backing the doctors and the courts. What this means is that the government, in no uncertain terms, has claimed ownership over the child. The “rights” of the parents have been declared irrelevant. This precedent should scare the shit out of every parent in Britain.

Winning Hearts and Minds

I swear that the airliners are competing to provide the worst customer experience possible. United is still ahead in the competition since it likes to beat passengers and kill pets but Sun Country is working to catch up:

We understand that winter weather can wreak havoc on an airline, especially a small airline like Sun Country. On Saturday, Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) received a foot of snow, which closed the airport for most of the day. This, of course, resulted in a slew of cancelled flights, including some of Sun Country’s last flights of the year on a couple seasonal routes, including flights from Mazatlan (MZT) & San Jose del Cabo (SJD). Rather than trying to work out a solution for passengers, Sun Country simply refunded passengers and told them on Facebook to find an alternative way home.

Passengers will be have to book expensive last minute flights home on another airline, and they will be required to pay for any additional lodging expenses on their own. Based on our calculations, Sun Country has abandoned two flights or around 250 of their Minneapolis-bound passengers in Mexico.

Most airliners will work with passengers when weather causes their flights to be delayed or cancelled. The impacted passengers may be put up in a hotel at the airliner’s expense, shuffled onto flights with open seats, or even transferred to a plane operated by another airliner if no other alternative is available. Sun Country takes the tough love approach by telling its passengers that life isn’t fair so you have to suck it up and deal with it.

I flew Sun Country once. While the airliner didn’t strand me in Mexico, my experience was dreadful enough that I swore to never use it again. I’m guessing these customers aren’t going to be repeat customers either.

You Can’t Take the Sky from Me

The United States government suffers from delusions of grandeur. The latest of these delusions is the belief that it owns space:

The story behind the missing live feed is a muddy bureaucratic affair. It appears that NOAA has recently decided to start interpreting or enforcing a decades-old law in a new way. The agency says SpaceX and other commercial space companies must apply for a license to broadcast video from orbit.

“The National and Commercial Space Program Act requires a commercial remote sensing license for companies having the capacity to take an image of Earth while on orbit,” NOAA said in a statement last week. “Now that launch companies are putting video cameras on stage 2 rockets that reach an on-orbit status, all such launches will be held to the requirements of the law and its conditions.”

If you launch something into orbit with the ability to broadcast a signal, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, perhaps the agency with the title containing the most hubris considering it states that the agency can administer nature) believes that you have to pay it for a license. Apparently it’s position as an agency of the United States government gives it command over all of space.

This decree would be irrelevant except the individuals who are launching payload into orbit are stuck on the ground where government goons can get them. Fortunately, there are tracts of land run by goons who are less deluded. Were I interested in launching rockets into space, I’d do so from one of those tracts of land. While NOAA might be able to enforce it’s delusion in the United States, it would have a harder time enforcing it in, say, India.

Fahrenheit 451 without the Fire

The government of China, like most communist regimes, isn’t big on free expression. Expressing ideas that go against the state’s teachings can result in anything from spending some time in a reeducation camp to being outright executed. Although the Chinese government’s image has softened quite a bit since the days when Mao was killing millions, it still isn’t a teddy bear by any regard. For example, the regime is now cracking down on booksellers who traffic banned titles:

Lam Wing-kee knew he was in trouble. In his two decades as owner and manager of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Books, Lam had honed a carefully nonchalant routine when caught smuggling books into mainland China: apologize, claim ignorance, offer a cigarette to the officers, crack a joke. For most of his career, the routine was foolproof.

[…]

On Oct. 24, 2015, his routine veered off script. He had just entered the customs inspection area between Hong Kong and the mainland when he was ushered into a corner of the border checkpoint. The gate in front of him opened, and a phalanx of 30 officers rushed in, surrounding him; they refused to answer his panicked questions. A van pulled up, and they pushed him inside. Lam soon found himself in a police station, staring at an officer. “Boss Lam,” the officer cooed with a grin. Lam asked what was happening. “Don’t worry,” Lam recalls the officer saying. “If the case were serious, we would’ve beaten you on the way here.”

[…]

Over the next eight months, Lam would find himself the unwitting central character in a saga that would hardly feel out of place in one of his thrillers. His ordeal marked the beginning of a Chinese effort to reach beyond the mainland to silence the country’s critics or their enablers no matter where they were or what form that criticism took. Following his arrest, China has seized a Hong Kong billionaire from the city’s Four Seasons Hotel, spiriting him away in a wheelchair with his head covered by a blanket; blocked a local democracy activist from entering Thailand for a conference; and repatriated and imprisoned Muslim Chinese students who had been in Egypt.

I have a lot of respect for individuals to trade in prohibited information. They’re the ones who ensure that any attempt at censorship fails in the long run. However, a lot of them often die before the information becomes so widely disseminated that censorship efforts are no longer feasible.

As China continues rising to dominance, it’ll be interesting to see how it attempts to expand its power outside of its borders. With how big of a market China is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it attempts to put pressure on international publishers in the future by refusing to allow them to sell any of their titles inside of the country if they publish a single undesirable title outside of the country (I also wouldn’t be surprised if this is already happening and I’m simply unaware).

I’m Sure There’s a Perfectly Reasonable Explanation

Stephon Clark was the most recent unarmed black man to make headlines for being gunned down by law enforcers. As is usually the case, law enforcers claimed that Clark appeared to be holding a gun. However, some people are questioning that narrative after hearing the results of a recent autopsy:

Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man who was fatally shot last week by Sacramento police officers, was struck eight times, mostly in his back, according to an independent autopsy released Friday, raising significant questions about the police account that he was a threat to officers when he was hit.

[…]

In its initial account, the Police Department said Mr. Clark had “advanced toward the officers” while holding what they believed to be a firearm. In body camera footage provided by the police, it is not clear which direction Mr. Clark is facing, and the family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, said the independent autopsy contradicted the assertion by the police that he was a threat.

I’m not sure why the autopsy results bring the department’s account into question. It’s obvious what happened. Mr. Clark must have drawn his gun while facing away from the officers and aimed it over his shoulder behind him! Because that’s what people commonly do.

While I’m being sarcastic, there are a lot of law enforcement worshipers currently concocting a narrative that exonerate the officers and their concoction will likely look something like what I just pulled out of my ass. People have a knack for dismissing or contorting information that doesn’t fit their narrative.

Preparing Kids for Prison

Approximately 2.3 million Americans are currently sitting behind bars. Public schools are sold, in part, as facilities to prepare children for the real world. With so many individuals behind bars, it makes sense that schools should prepare children for a life in a cage, where everybody is watched by guards and zero privacy is allow:

MIAMI—The Florida high school where a gunman killed 17 people last month will require students to carry only clear backpacks, school administrators announced on Wednesday, after the shooting suspect’s brother was charged with trespassing on campus and two students were arrested on charges of carrying knives.

[…]

Robert Runcie, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, sent a letter to the families of Stoneman Douglas High students imposing the new backpack rule, reminiscent of security measures at airports and professional sports venues. He said any student without a clear backpack would be provided one at no cost after spring break, which takes place next week.

Students also will be issued identification badges, which they will be required to wear at all times while in school. Staff members have badges as well.

In addition, Runcie said the district was considering using metal-detecting wands at school entrances and installing permanent metal detectors — a safety measure Runcie recently criticized as ineffective. A person intent on committing an atrocity would find his or her way around them, he said in an interview last month.

I’m glad to finally see some real world applicable education taking place! I also appreciate that the school administrators have finally decided to punish all of the students in this school for the crime of attending the same school as a murderer. Hopefully these students will decide to be reincarnated in a school district without a murderous fellow student.

The real tragedy about this policy is that the students who did nothing wrong are the ones being punished, which is the norm in the United States. When somebody goes on a shooting spree, laws are proposed and passed to punish the gun owners he didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree, students are subjected to new levels of humiliation because of a shooting spree they didn’t perpetrate, and students who didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree are dragged through hell by school administrators who are more concerned about appearing tough than the student’s welfare.

Everybody involved in implementing this decision can fuck right off.