Tag: Shut Up Slave

Taxes Them Again

Whenever you mention privatizing roads some statist inevitably says, “But then we’ll all have to pay tolls to use the roads!” This is an especially funny criticism because many states including Illinois, Florida, and Texas charge tolls. And now Minnesota is looking to do the same thing:

State lawmakers have given Minnesota transportation officials an assignment: Study the feasibility of toll roads here and report back by January.

Were this to turn into a law Minnesotans would not only have to continue paying property taxes for local roads and gas taxes for state roads but they would also have to pay a toll on various roads. That is where privatized and government roads differ. On privatized roads you may have to pay a toll. However, unlike tolled government roads, you aren’t required to pay a tax in addition to the toll.

Lies and Damn Lies

Since Diamond Reynolds livestreamed the aftermath of Castile’s death the cop apologists have been desperately trying to spin the preceding events in a way that justified what Officer Yanez did. Now that the jury has ruled that Yanez wasn’t guilty of manslaughter based on the explanation of the statute that was provided to them, they’re celebrating. Of course, their celebration involves making a great many false claims.

One of the worst dens of cop apologists that has popped up on the Internet in recent times is Blue Lives Matters. Whenever an officer is involved in a use of force case the writers of that site are quick to character assassinate the victim, anybody connected to the victim, and anybody who disagrees with their narrative. Not surprisingly, their spin requires a great deal of speculation or outright false claims.

On Monday the site posted this article to celebrate Yanez’s court victory. It’s not only a great example of the tendency for cop apologists to revel in death but also a great example of the speculation and false claims their narratives are often based on. For starters:

“Philando Castile responded, “I don’t have to reach for it,” while reaching in the area where his gun was located.”

This statement is entirely speculative. Many cop apologists have pointed out that the dashcam footage doesn’t show what was happening inside of the car, which is correct. However, usually immediately afterwards, they then say that Castile shouldn’t have been reaching. Since the dashcam video doesn’t show the inside of the car there’s no way to know whether Castile was reaching for anything, had both of his hands placed on his steering wheel, or was playing with a Rubik’s Cube while eating ramen with chopsticks.

It was later determined that Castile was high on marijuana at the time of the stop, which impaired his ability to listen to Officer Yanez when he was instructed not to reach for his gun. Officer Yanez shot Castile after he ignored orders and reached towards his gun.

This is speculative but bordering on lying. Toxicology noted that Castile had THC in his body. However, that doesn’t mean he was impaired (“high”). THC can remain in the body for months after using cannabis so the fact that it was in his system doesn’t indicate that he had recently used the it. Furthermore, different people react differently to THC. Some people are not impaired by even high levels of THC. There is no way to know whether or not Castile was impaired from the THC in his system.

In fact, Officer Yanez asked for Philando Castile’s license and insurance near the beginning of the stop and Castile had already handed over paperwork before informing Officer Yanez about his gun.

I’m highlight this except because of what comes afterwards. From the court documents here are the contents of Castile’s wallet after he was killed. Specifically note his drivers licensed (middle card on the right side).

Philando Castile didn’t have a driver’s license to turn over to turn over because his license was suspended.

As you can see, this is entirely false. Castile clearly had a drivers license to hand Yanez and since it was in his wallet after he was killed he hadn’t handed it over yet. Officer Yanez clearly asked for Castile’s license and registration. Castile hand’t completely complied with his order before being shot. Even if Castile was reaching for his wallet, which we don’t know he was, he was doing so under orders from Yanez.

St. Anthony Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez had stopped Castile’s vehicle on July 6, 2016, because he believed Castile might have been involved in a convenience store robbery a few days earlier.

If you’ve watched the dashcam footage you know this is false. The footage makes it very clear that Yanez pulled Castile over for a broken taillight (the taillight was actually broken). While the article claims that pulling Castile over for a broken taillight was really just a clever ruse, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting that claim.

After making speculative and outright false statements the article moves on to character assassination.

Castile’s long previous criminal history does not show a tendency toward violence, although he had been stopped 52 times in the past few years for traffic-related issues.

Long criminal history is hyperbole at best. Castile was stopped 46 (six of the 52 noted incidents were for parking violations, not traffic violations) times but it was always for minor traffic-related incidents:

Castile had been stopped before, when officers spotted him not wearing a seat belt, or when an officer ran his plate number and found his license had been revoked for not paying an earlier fine. Numerous stops came after he didn’t use a turn signal. A few came after he was speeding. He was stopped for rolling through a right turn on a red light, having window tints that were too dark, and at least twice for not having a rear license plate light. He was rarely ticketed for the reason he was stopped. His interactions with police eventually slowed. Although he was continuing to receive licensing and insurance violations, there were only seven incidents involving police contact from 2011 to when he was killed.

About half of Castile’s charges were ultimately dismissed after he paid fines, made plea bargains, took driving courses, and in one case paid $275 to not have two violations show up on his record. (Previous media reports said he had been stopped 52 times; however six of those incidents were for parking violations.) He represented himself in most of the cases. At least three times the court granted him a public defender, which is provided to defendants who cannot afford a private attorney.

Hardly a long previous criminal history. After attempting to assassinate Castile’s character the article moves on to assassinating his girlfriend’s character.

After the Philando Castile shooting, Diamond Reynolds lied after Castile was shot and said that he didn’t have any criminal history. Reynolds also lied by claiming that she was Castile’s fiance, when she wasn’t. She claimed that she was held overnight by the police, when she was only interviewed for two hours before an officer bought her groceries and took her home. And Reynolds claimed that police didn’t provide first aid to Castile, when they did.

We now know that Reynolds’s account of the shooting did not reflect what happened.

Diamond Reynolds was later arrested in an unrelated case for being involved in an attack, using a hammer to attack other women.

This is a great example of the tactic I mention early on in this post. The writer wasn’t only content with assassinating Castile’s character but he felt the need to assassinate the characters of those connected to him. What Reynolds did or did not say after Yanez killed Castile has no relevancy on whether or not Yanez’s actions were justified or not. Likewise, her previous arrest is entirely irrelevant to the case. The only reason to bring it up is to establish guilt by association.

I hope this analysis was educational and illustrated some of the common tactics used by cop apologists when an officer is involved in a seemingly unjustified use of force.

Dashcam Footage from Yanez Case Released

Now that the jury has acquitted Officer Yanez of wrongdoing the dashcam footage from his cruiser has been publicly released:

The video is pretty damning. Officer Yanez pulled Castle over for a broken taillight. After handing the officer his papers Castile calmly informed Yanez that he was currently carrying a firearm. At first Yanez appears to be calm and tells Castlie not to reach for it. Almost immediately afterwards Yanez is drawing his firearm and screaming at Castile not to reach for it while he and his girlfriend scream that he’s not reaching for it. Then Yanez shoots Castile without any apparent regard for the child and girlfriend who were also in the car.

After that Yanez just stands there aiming his gun at the surviving occupants of the vehicle while screaming a few profanities. After a few minutes pass another squad car arrives. Unlike Yanez, those officers were decent enough to attempt to provide medical aid to Castile. Meanwhile Yanez was panicking or continuing to panic. He wasn’t even able to get his gun back into his holster.

The absolute best case scenario here is that Yanez panicked and gunned Castile down without cause. It really makes me wonder if the nine pages of instructions the jury received concluded with, “As you can see the law is written in such a way that an office who panics is not legally responsible for their actions and that’s why you must acquit Officer Yanez.”

Your Vote Really Doesn’t Matter

I often pointed out that statistically your vote doesn’t matter. Moreover, your vote literally doesn’t matter:

Watching the ongoing clown show in Washington, Americans can be forgiven for asking themselves, “Why did we give this bunch of clowns so very much power over our nation and our lives?”

Well, don’t feel so bad, voters. Because you didn’t actually give them that much power. They just took it. That’s the thesis of Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger’s new book, The Administrative Threat, a short, punchy followup to his magisterial Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Both deal with the extraordinary — and illegitimate — power that administrative agencies have assumed in American life.

[…]

But today, the laws that actually affect people and businesses are seldom written by Congress; instead they are created by administrative agencies through a process of “informal rulemaking,” a process whose chief virtue is that it’s easy for the rulers to engage in, and hard for the ruled to observe or influence. Non-judicial administrative courts decide cases, and impose penalties, without a jury or an actual judge. And the protections in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (like the requirement for a judge-issued search warrant before a search) are often inapplicable.

If you received a public school education, your civics teacher probably taught you that laws are written by Congress and signed or vetoed by the president. That’s a gross simplification of the actual process. While laws must be written by Congress and signed by the president, rules can be made by any government agency. Those agencies aren’t headed by elected officials yet they have the power to create rules that directly impact your life.

Gun owners are intimately aware of this since the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has the power to make rules based on its interpretation of the law. What is an Any Other Weapon (AOW)? According to the ATF you can turn your regular pistol into an AOW by attaching a vertical foregrip to its front rail. Likewise, according to the ATF an arm brace on an AR-15 pistol isn’t a short-barreled rifle… unless you hold it incorrectly. While the National Firearms Act (NFA) created these categories of weapons the ATF was given the power to decide exactly what those categories entail.

Without Government Who Would Tear Up All of the Roads

Statists claim that roads are a technology so complex that only a government can build and maintain them. However, if you live in the Twin Cities you know that the government is far more interested in tearing up roads than letting you actually used them. Most of the major arteries in the Twin Cities are currently under some amount of construction. There is an entire bridge missing from 169, 394 is under construction, 35W will be under construction later this year, 94 is under construction, and soon the Lowry tunnel will be torn up:

The Lowry Hill Tunnel is congestion central in the Twin Cities on most days. A tie-up in the tube can bring traffic to a crawl and have far-reaching effects, choking things on Interstate 35W and Interstate 394, routes that feed lots of vehicles into the tunnel on the west end of downtown Minneapolis.

Now construction there is slated to begin and it won’t be pretty, with the potential to cripple traffic at all hours of the day for the next three months. Motorists will share one side of the Lowry Hill Tunnel with only two lanes 10 feet wide in each direction and a lower speed limit. Drivers on I-394 and I-35W will feel the pinch, too, as ramps to and from those arteries will shut down at times.

And here’s the real kick in the teeth:

“This is a significant project and will be a challenge for drivers,” said Minnesota Department of Transportation spokesman David Aeikens. His warning also comes with a plea: “Give yourself plenty of time, plan alternate routes and don’t drive through neighborhoods.”

According to the Minnesota Department of Transportation motorists need to plan alternate routes but they should not use the only alternate routes that are still available, roads going through neighborhoods.

Only government could be incompetent enough to tear up all of the major traffic arteries at the same time. Were the roads privatized the owners would have a financial interest in keeping traffic flowing so they would likely perform maintenance in a staged fashion to minimize the disruption to their customers. But government doesn’t suffer when it inconveniences its subjects. They have to pay their taxes for the roads whether they can drive on them or not.

Legalizing More Thievery

Civil asset forfeiture is simply a euphemism for theft. Unlike most other forms of government theft, civil asset forfeiture doesn’t even have the thin veil of criminal or civil charges either being proven in court or confessed to by the accused to justify it. Instead civil asset forfeiture relies on the concept of guilty until proven innocent. If a man with a badge believes that your assets are in any way tied to a drug crime they can legally steal them and the only way you can get them back back is by proving they aren’t, which is an impossible task.

While there has been a lot of pushback in recent years to civil asset forfeiture by a handful of individual states, the United States Senate is working hard to expand it:

A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000.

Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and imposes other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture.

The best thing about a law like this is that most people won’t know about it and therefore will fail to comply with it out of sheer ignorance. Since ignorance of the laws isn’t an excuse a law like this creates a huge number of new criminals for the State to prey on.

There are a lot of banking laws that people violate every day because they are simply unaware of them and the government loves to go after them. The Internal Revenue Service was going after people who turned their legitimate deposits over $10,000 into multiple smaller deposits to avoid filling out reporting paperwork. Legally this is known as structuring and the law that prohibits it was passed under the guise of catching tax evaders but most people are entirely ignorant of it so they violate it accidentally. Senate Bill 1241 aims to create a similar law that will likely be violated by innocent people who are simply unaware of the law, which will give the State an excuse to seize their assets. Best of all, if it happens under civil asset forfeiture, the government doesn’t even have to prove guilt.

The System Worked as Intended

The Iron Maiden concert wasn’t the only big thing to happen on Friday. The jury for the Jeronimo Yanez case finished their deliberations and, as expected, determined that the officer was innocent. What was also unsurprisingly is that protesters responded by shutting down I-94.

A lot of people have been arguing that the system has failed but I would argue that the system is working as intended. Some people raised questions about the charges being brought against Yanez, mostly noting that other charges could have been brought against him that would have been easier to prove. I’m not familiar enough with the subject of charges to know if there’s any validity to that claim but brining difficult to prove charges against agents of the State isn’t unprecedented. However, we do know that the judge seemed to be extending a little professional courtesy to Yanez by denying the jury’s request to review some of the evidence. Since I wasn’t on the jury I don’t know whether that denial had any bearing on the ruling or not but it’s a fact that will likely haunt this trial for a while.

We know from previous trials that the courts purposely feed jurors erroneous information that benefits the State. For example, jurors are usually instructed that they must rule on the letter of the law, which goes against a jury’s right of nullification. As the Yanez trial demonstrated, judges also hold a great deal of sway over what jurors are allowed to see and not allowed to see. If the jury requests to review evidence, a judge can deny their request.

Jury trials are often thought of as a check on government power but the “justice” system here in the United States is designed in such a way that the State almost always wins. But the State holds a monopoly on writing, interpreting, and deciding the legality of laws. It makes the rules so it should come as no surprise that the rules favor it just as the rules of a Casino favor the house. When the State wins in its courts, even when the case against it is damning, people should realize that the system isn’t broken. In fact it’s working exactly as intended.

Judging a Case on Some of the Facts

The trail of Jeronimo Yanez took a strange turn yesterday when it was revealed that the jury wouldn’t be allowed to review the evidence:

Jurors requested to view the video of the shooting captured on Yanez’s squad car camera as well as the video that Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed on Facebook in the incident’s immediate aftermath on the evening of July 6 in Falcon Heights.

Both videos were played during the trial.

Leary let jurors watch the two videos in court Tuesday.

The judge declined jurors’ requests to see transcripts of the squad car video as well as the initial statement Yanez gave about the shooting to in

Why did the man in the muumuu refuse the jury’s request to review the evidence that had already been presented? Since the judge didn’t give a reason and a spokesperson for Minnesota’s Judicial Branch only said that a man in a muumuu has the right to regulate jury deliberations we’re left to speculate. I’m not going to go so far as to say that the man in the muumuu is trying to extend a little professional courtesy to his fellow government stooge but I also won’t deny that it looks that way. What I do know is that this will likely be latched onto by protesters if the trial ends in a hung jury or a decision of not guilty (and I guarantee that there will be protesters in either of those two cases).

Government Holds Everything Back

What if I told you that we could have had cellular technology as far back as 1947 if the government hadn’t interfered? You’d probably label me a cooky conspiracy theorist and file me with the people who say that we could have had electric cars decades ago if it weren’t for oil companies. But a conspiracy theory ceases to be a theory when it turns out to be true:

When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not “in the nature of convenience or luxury.” This view—that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base—persisted well into the 1980s. “Land mobile,” the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC’s list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter.

Television broadcasting had become the FCC’s mission, and land mobile was a lark. Yet Americans could have enjoyed all the broadcasts they would watch in, say, 1960 and had cellular phone service too. Instead, TV was allocated far more bandwidth than it ever used, with enormous deserts of vacant television assignments—a vast wasteland, if you will—blocking mobile wireless for more than a generation.

The Fascist Communications Club Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was granted a monopoly on electromagnetic spectrum by the United States government (or, in other words. the government granted a monopoly to itself). Through this monopoly the FCC enjoyed and still enjoys life or death powers over a great deal of technology. Back in 1947 when AT&T wanted to develop cellular technology the FCC decided the technology should die. As television became more popular the FCC decided that the technology should live. It didn’t matter that there was enough spectrum for both technologies to coexist, the FCC wanted one to live and the other to die so it was made so.

The FCC’s power isn’t unique, it’s the inevitable result of any monopolized authority. Cannabis, a plant that shows a great deal of promise in the medical field, is prohibited because the United States government has a monopoly on what you can and cannot legally put into your own body. A lot of drugs and other medical technologies either don’t make it into the United States or are delayed for years because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been given a monopoly on deciding which medical technologies are legal and illegal.

It’s a Cyberpocalypse

Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion that an author of an article was given a keyword and paid based on the number of times they managed to insert that keyword into their article? I’m fairly certain that’s what precipitated this article. Doing a page search for “cyber” resulted in 29 hits.

If you can overcome the tedium of reading the word “cyber” every other sentence, you’ll find an article discussing the difficult the United States is having with fighting the Islamic State. It turns out that treating a decentralized organization like a centralized organization results in bad tactics. Who could have guessed that?

What’s even funnier though is the little tidbit the author snuck in that is supposed to justify the United State’s prohibition on carry-on electronics on flights originating from certain airports:

Even one of the rare successes against the Islamic State belongs at least in part to Israel, which was America’s partner in the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers.

Those must be some fantastically shitty x-ray scanners if they can’t actually tell the difference between legitimate laptop parts and bombs.

That tidbit might justify the carry-on electronics ban if it was in any way uniform. But the ban targeted specific airports, which means any terrorist with one of these highly advanced laptop bombs could get around the prohibition by flying to another airport, perhaps one in Europe, first and then flying to the United States from there. In other words, the “solution” to this threat wouldn’t have protected anybody and was therefore implemented for other reasons or was nothing more than security theater.