Tag: Law and Disorder

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.

The FBI Thwarts Another Terrorist It Created

If you look at the raw numbers as they are reported, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has thwarted a number of terrorists. However, if you dig a little deeper, you quickly realized that the FBI manufactures many of the terrorists it catches. How does the agency manufacture terrorists? It looks for vulnerable people, usually people mostly isolated from society, and has an undercover agent befriend and radicalize them. When the undercover agent believes the time is right, they hand the sucker a fake bomb, send them on their merry way, and then arrest them. Tell me if you think that this story might fall under the category of manufactured terrorism:

“We as a family are extremely distraught about this situation with our son Jerry Drake Varnell, but what the public must understand is that he is a paranoid schizophrenic and is extremely susceptible to different types of ideology that normal people would deem immoral. Underneath his condition, he is a sweet-hearted person and we are extremely shocked that this event has happened. However, what truly has us flabbergasted is the fact that the FBI knew he was schizophrenic. The State of Oklahoma found him mentally incompetent and we, his parents have legal guardianship over him by the Court. These documents are sealed from the public, which is why no news media outlet has been able to obtain them. The FBI clearly knew that he was schizophrenic because they have gathered every ounce of information on him. Reading the criminal complaint against him has brought us great pause due to the numerous lies from the informant. We do not have an underground bunker! We built our home a few years ago and bought a storage container, as we use it for a storm shelter. We only recently pushed dirt up around it to make it safe. The building is used for storage and is NOT a bunker full of food and supplies, in fact the doors close from the outside. It has neither electricity nor anything that would make it habitable.

What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen. He has no job, no money, no vehicle, and no driver’s license, due to the fact that he is schizophrenic and we; his parents do everything we can possible to keep him safe and functional. The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him. He has attended college and just enrolled in welding school. His medications allow him to be somewhat functional but he will never be completely functional in life. His brain does not work like a normal person and never will due to the nature of his mental illness. He has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old. The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen none of which he had access to on his own. We know who their informant is and what the public should know is that he is that a drug-dealing criminal. On June 15, 2017, Jerry’s Father told the criminal informant “that he was not allowed back on our property and if he returned we would have him arrested for trespassing and drugs”. Apparently, he continued to sneak onto our residence. The FBI paid him to continue this operation and I believe they have cleared his criminal record.

The FBI found a paranoid schizophrenic who was judged mentally incompetent by the State of Oklahoma and was therefore entirely dependent on his parents, had an agent befriend him, and manipulated him into deploying a fake bomb that was provided to him by the agent. While the FBI might tout this as another terrorist attack thwarted by the agency’s efforts, in reality this attack wouldn’t have even been possible without the FBI’s involvement. Where else besides law enforcement could you receive credit for thwarting a crime that you created?

The FBI’s habit of creating the terrorists that it creates has a lot of ramifications. First, it completely skews the terrorism statistics. If you look at the raw numbers, the number of incidents of terrorism are artificially inflated because of the FBI’s antics. What are people supposed to do with bad data? Second, it shows that mentally ill individuals are nothing more than pawns for government agents. The FBI really has no choice but to prey on the mentally ill if it wants manufacture terrorists. But the various levels of government here in the United States often claim that they want to help the mentally ill. Those claims fall on deaf ears when agencies within the government are exploiting the same people the various other levels of government claim to want to help.

This problem isn’t likely to go away soon since the FBI hasn’t received any notable punishment for using this strategy. If that doesn’t demonstrate bad faith on behalf of the United States government, then I don’t know what does.

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.

Witch Hunts

I’m back. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time between Monday evening and last night to put together material for this blog. However, I did find one story that I felt was worth mentioning.

Much like the Bloods and the Crips, the neo-fascists and anti-fascists have an ongoing gang rivalry. While I couldn’t care less about two violent gangs wiping each other out, these rivalries always end up catching innocent bystanders in the middle. Earlier this week a man was stabbed by a supposed anti-fascists because of his “Nazi” haircut:

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the fascists are exploiting this attack to gain sympathy from the general public. Many of the anti-fascists, likewise, are claiming that this attack was a false flag performed by a fascist to make the anti-fascists look back. Was this attack perpetrated by an anti-fascist who decided a haircut is enough justification to stab somebody, was it a false flag, or are the facts being reported incorrectly and the real answer doesn’t involve either warring faction? It’s hard to tell.

Gang rivalries have a nasty habit of going from a disagreement over an actual transgression to mindless “us” versus “them” fighting rather quickly. Once a fight stops being about actual wrongs suffered and begin being about group identity, the tactics tend to change to the means justifying the ends. After that point it becomes difficult to tell who did what. When the means justify the ends, false flags becomes acceptable as well so you have a hard time knowing what side actually perpetrated an atrocity. Zealotry becomes common and that brings with it individuals identifying with either side trying to prove their piety by performing a seemingly random act of violence. These seemingly random acts of violence are often indistinguishable from acts of violence performed by unaffiliated individuals.

Update: 2017-08-29: Now that an investigation has been performed it appears that Mr. Witt stabbed himself and then claimed an anti-fascist did it. However, I believe the point I made in this post, that ongoing gang rivalries tend to catch innocent people in the crossfire, still holds true.

The State Doesn’t Provide Protection

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcers have no obligation to protect you even though you have an obligation to pay them. Being paid for services that haven’t been rendered leads to some unfortunate situations. For example, law enforcers refused to provide protection to a Jewish synagogue during the Charlottesville fiasco so they had to hire professionals:

The Jewish community in Charlottesville hired armed security to protect its synagogue for the first time after local police declined to provide a guard for the site despite hundreds of white supremacists congregating on the town over the weekend for a rally that resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Unlike law enforcers, private security providers are motivated to provide protection because if they don’t then they don’t get paid.

This situation is a counterargument to the people who claim that the State is necessary to provide protection. These statists usually argue that in a society without a government poor people would be preyed upon because they wouldn’t be able to hire protective services. However, that situation doesn’t differ from the situation we currently live under. Even though there is a government people still have to hire private security if they want security because the State has exempted its own security providers from having to actually provide it.

Just More Heroes Doing Hero Things

While the majority of media outlets have been focused on Charlottesville, a threat that is far more significant than national socialists has continued waging war against the people:

Charnesia Corley was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when two cops from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office stopped her in June 2015 for running a red light.

After searching her car, police claimed to have found .02 ounces of marijuana. That was enough, they apparently felt, to justify a full-body cavity search. When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley’s pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley’s person.

The fact that an officer threw this woman to the ground and violated her for 11 minutes is goddamn awful. But the entire situation is made even more egregious by the fact that another officer participated.

Cop apologists, if they’re willing to admit to any corruption in modern policing, will often claim that there are just a handful of bad officers. However, if this were the case, we’d see a lot of incidents like this end with the bad officer’s fellow officers taking him down. That rarely happens. The chances of winning a lottery are probably higher than a bad officer being taken down by his fellow officers. If that doesn’t speak volumes to the severity of this problem, I don’t know what does.

A Disturbance in the Bordertarian Force

Bordertarians, a term I like for referring to “libertarians” who advocate for closed borders, were on the receiving end of some rather hilarious karma. Members of the band Backwordz, a band that raps about libertarian concepts, was recently ejected from Canada:

One of the people sympathetic to this idea, Eric July of the libertarian-themed band Backwordz, was on his way to a gig in Canada with the rest of his bandmates when they were stopped and held at the border going into Canada.

They were denied entry into the country. They were turned around. They have to cancel their date in Toronto.

One of the members of the band had a DUI on his record and, according to Canadian law, enough time had not passed to allow him entry into the country with that mark on his record.

The border was closed to them.

Justifiably, Eric July was not at all happy about what had happened. That seems like a ridiculous rule to have in place. But more importantly, an uninvited third party, the government of Canada, stepped in between Eric July and the venue that was supposed to host Backwordz. Without any actual authority to do so, they prevented the concert from occurring even though none of the private property owners involved had any issue over the arrangement.

For some reason this has upset some bordertarians. It turns out that they didn’t quite understand what closed borders entail.

In the fantasy utopia of bordertarians, governments pass laws that prevent people they don’t like from entering the country but allow people they do like to enter the country. But that’s not how things work here in the real world. When governments can decide who can and cannot cross their imaginary lines the people aren’t given a say. If, for example, the government decides that people with a DUI charge are prohibited from entering the country even if a majority of the people living in that country find such a rule stupid, people with DUI charges don’t get to enter the country.

As a radical individualist, I oppose any interference with voluntary association, which means I necessarily oppose closed borders. In my world, unlike the world of bordertarians, Backwordz would have been able to play its show because the venue wanted them to play there. The venue’s desire to associate with the band is all that should be needed for Backwordz to play there.

You reap what you sow. If you’re a bordertarian, you should be jumping for joy at this news since a government did exactly what you advocated.

How Civil Asset Forfeiture Reduces Economic Mobility

Believers in the American dream still talk about how people who had nothing managed to pull themselves up by their bootlaces and make it big. Proponents of socialism point out that such economic mobility almost never happens. Are believers in the American dream right? Can somebody from poverty elevate themselves to the middle class or higher? Are the socialist right? Is such economic mobility a pipe dream? They’re both correct.

In a free market and where property rights are recognized it is certainly possible for a person to elevate themselves from poverty to a comfortable or even luxurious life. However, such mobility seldom happens this day an age. Where both parties get things wrong is believing that the United States has a free market and property rights.

There is no free market in the United States and there sure as the fuck isn’t a concept of property rights:

Asset forfeiture primarily targets the poor. Most forfeitures are for small amounts: in 2012, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that has focused heavily on asset forfeiture, analyzed forfeiture in 10 states and found that the median value of assets seized ranged from $451 (Minnesota) to $2,048 (Utah). Given that law enforcement routinely take everything they find in a forfeiture case, these small values suggest the relative poverty of the victims.

The procedural hurdles for challenging asset forfeiture also mean that poor people are less able to get their money back. The average forfeiture challenge requires four weekdays in court; missing four days of work can be a prohibitive expense for Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Additionally, claims are challenged in civil court, where the right to counsel doesn’t apply, meaning that claimants need to hire their own lawyer.

Asset forfeiture is especially dangerous for the unbanked, because police and federal agents consider high amounts of cash to be suspect. In 2013, half of all households with incomes of less than $15,000 were either unbanked or underbanked. In a report on non-criminal asset forfeiture, the Center for American Progress argues that “low-income individuals and communities of color are hit hardest” by forfeiture.

Civil asset forfeiture allows the State to seize your property if one of its law enforcers accuses you of a drug crime or affiliation with terrorism. The only time proof comes into play with civil asset forfeiture is when the accused party has to prove that the officer’s accusation was incorrect, which is nearly impossible to do under ideal circumstances. However, as the article notes, poor individuals aren’t operating under ideal circumstances. Many of them cannot afford to take several days off of work to plead their case in court. This makes them prime targets for civil asset forfeiture because law enforcers know that they chances of the property being returned to its rightful owner is practically zero.

As I noted, economic mobility requires property rights because you have to be able to keep what wealth you acquire. If you’re able to scrape together some capital to start a side business but then have that capital stolen, your ability to elevating yourself economically through entrepreneurship is also stolen.

Alabama Legislators Moves to Hasten Executions

The State of Alabama found itself in an embarrassing position. A man who has been on death row for 30 years managed to prove his innocence. While the legislature won’t pass a bill to compensate the man for the three decades of his life the State stole from him, it did ensure that a mistake like this never happens again:

Meanwhile, since Hinton’s release the Alabama legislature has passed a different bill related to capital punishment — the Orwellian-named “Fair Justice Act,” which aims to limit the appeals of death row inmates and speed up executions. As Hinton himself wrote in an op-ed, had the Fair Justice Act been in place at the time of his conviction, he’d almost certainly be dead.

If the State can execute inmates quicker, it doesn’t have to worry about them possibly proving their innocence and thus embarrassing it. See? Problem solved!

Get Them Indebted Early

I have some wonderful news! People no longer have to wait until they go to college to rack of debt:

In a Thursday article for The Telegraph, a man named Andre Spicer wrote about the experience of his five-year-old daughter who tried to open a small lemonade stand in the family’s East London neighborhood.

After about 30 minutes, four local council enforcement officers stormed up to her little table,” he wrote. “‘Excuse me,’ one officer said as he switched on a portable camera attached to his vest. He then read a lengthy legal statement – the gist of which was that because my daughter didn’t have a trading permit, she would be fined [$195]. ‘But don’t worry, it is only [$117] if it’s paid quickly,’ the officer added.”

That’ll teach that little punk not to be entrepreneurial! But, hey, at least the government is benevolent enough to knock that almost $200 fine down to $117 if it’s paid quickly!

Law enforcers shutting down children’s lemonade stands is nothing new, which isn’t surprising since going after small children is apparently fairly profitable and they’re not likely to put up any meaningful resistance so the profit comes with almost zero risk. As if armed thugs preying on children wasn’t bad enough, there is been almost no backlash. Why aren’t members of these communities up in arms over the fact that law enforcers are wasting time preying on children? Why is the fact that something that has been a staple of childhood for generations now being seen as heinous enough to warrant law enforcer involvement? And how is anybody saying that the United States isn’t a police state with a straight face?