Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 71

When Officers Really Screw Up They Receive Unpaid Leave

Earlier this week it was announced that an officer who was fired for getting drunk and beating his K-9 partner was given his job back. In other words, the officer, Brett Arthur Berry, was given an unpaid vacation instead of the standard paid vacation. But some people are probably willing to give his some leeway because he beat a dog, not a person. Here in Minnesota beating a person also results in nothing more than an unpaid vacation:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — WCCO has obtained video that led, in part, to a police officer’s firing. That officer now has his job back, as an arbitrator ruled he should be reinstated last week. Minneapolis police officer Blayne Lehner is currently on paid administrative leave.

The video shows Lehner pushing a woman. Seconds later he swatted a cellphone out of her hand and pushed her to the ground after she tried to grab him.

Instead of receiving an unpaid vacation he is now receiving a paid vacation. Some might wonder, especially after watching the video of him attacking the woman, what justification allowed him to return to the force. Not surprisingly, the justification was “officer safety”:

“She’s talking on the phone right now and he wants her attention. When he knocks it out of her hand, her left hand is coming up towards him. He’s looking at that as a possible threat,” Dutton said.

See? She threatened him! When he initiated force by knocking her cell phone out of her hand she moved her left hand! His only option to avoid possibly being slapped was to throw her to the ground! She’s lucky he didn’t shoot her because his life was totally on the line and therefore deadly force was obviously justified!

When apologists talk about the supposedly brave men and women in blue I can’t help but scoff. It seems like police officers see a threat hiding in every shadow, lurking under every bed, and hiding in every closet. Does a person walking down the street in the dead of winter have their hands in their pockets? Threat! Is a kenneled dog barking at the officers who just kicked down the door in the middle of the night? Threat! Did a woman move her hand after an officer initiated aggression? Threat!

Law enforcement has become a self-feeding delusion. New officers are taught that they have signed up for an extremely dangerous job where everybody is trying to kill them. This deludes them into seeing every single encounter with a member of the public is potentially life threatening. Their delusion is held up whenever one of their encounters doesn’t involve a completely submissive citizen. When they tell their fellows about their encounter their delusion is further affirmed by being reminded about how dangerous the job is. Then they move on to teach other new officers about how dangerous being a cop is.

But reality is far different. Law enforcement isn’t that dangerous of a profession, at least not for the law enforcers. Law enforcement has become a dangerous profession for the people. Because of the self-feeding delusion law enforcers have they respond far more aggressively than they ought to. This is why a seemingly routine traffic stop can into a motorist being murdered by a police officer. The fact that few officers are punished for using excessive force just further feeds the cycle by teaching officers that their misdeeds will be forgiven in almost any case.

The Slave Suggestion Box Doesn’t Matter

Voting, when you boil it down, is nothing more than a slave suggestion box. From a curated list of approved options we’re granted the privilege of submitting our opinion. But what happens when the slaves submit the wrong suggestion? That’s when the machinations of the court systems kick in. The slaves in the United Kingdom were given the option of voting to secede from the European Union and they voted to do so. That turned out to be the wrong way to vote so the courts have nullified their suggestion:

LONDON — The British government’s plan for leaving the European Union was thrown into uncertainty on Thursday after the High Court ruled that Parliament must give its approval before the process can begin.

The court’s decision seemed likely to slow — but not halt — the British withdrawal from the bloc, a step approved by nearly 52 percent of voters in a June referendum.

Democracy is an illusion upheld only as long as the slaves vote the way their masters want. When it looks like the slaves will vote the wrong way the rules are either changed or the courts are brought in to invalidate the vote. Here in the United States, for example, most states have implemented various restrictions on who can appear on an official ballot or is considered an acceptable write-in candidate. These rules exist to both prevent the slaves from voting for somebody who isn’t approved by their masters and to maintain the illusion that they can vote for an unapproved master.

It’s All About the Money

The war on drugs is probably been the single biggest government power grab in history. By declaring an ever expanding list of chemicals illegal the State has created a justification to expand law enforcement both in numbers and in equipment. In addition to expanding the power of its wealth expropriation force, the State has also written the laws in such a way as to better enable law enforcers to expropriate wealth. Consider civil forfeiture. Normally a law enforcement agent can’t just steal your cash or car. But if they claim that cash or your car are in any way possibly tied to a drug crime they can steal it and the burden of proving they weren’t related to a drug crime, a nearly impossible feat, falls onto you.

But the State isn’t the only culprit here. An entire industry has sprung up around helping law enforcement agencies expropriate wealth. One such industry is the manufacturing of field drug testing kits. These kits, which have an extremely dubious record in regards to reliability, give an officer probable cause to kidnap individuals. However, recognizing that the kits are unreliable most agencies will have the tested substance sent to a lab for more rigorous testing. But one agency that doesn’t is the Las Vegas Police Department (LVPD):

A new report from ProPublica and the Las Vegas Review-Journal finds that since the early 1990s, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has been using cheap drug field-test kits to determine whether found substances are illegal. While far too many police agencies have used the kits to determine probable cause for a search, in most cases the substances are later more thoroughly tested at a crime lab. In Las Vegas, the test results were apparently also used as evidence to help prosecutors win convictions.

As Billy Mayes would have said, but wait, there’s more!

All along, though, police and prosecutors knew the tests were vulnerable to error, and by 2010, the police department’s crime lab wanted to abandon its kits for methamphetamine and cocaine. In a 2014 report that Las Vegas police submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice under the terms of a federal grant, the lab detailed how the kits produced false positives. Legal substances sometimes create the same colors as illegal drugs. Officers conducting the tests, lab officials acknowledged, misinterpreted results. New technology was available — and clearly needed to protect against wrongful convictions.

Not only is the LVPD not using more thorough testing measures before brining charges but the department, as do all other departments, knows that the field testing kits are unreliable.

Why would the LVPD rely on unreliable tests to prosecute individuals? If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you already know the answer: law enforcement isn’t about justice, it’s about expropriating wealth from the populace. The whole point of the war on drugs is to give the State yet another method on top of taxes, citations, and permit fees to transfer money from your bank account into its own. But the State wants this expropriation to look legitimate so people don’t see it for the organized criminal gang that it is. To create an illusion of legitimacy the State surrounds its expropriation with a bunch of legal rituals. These rituals make the process of expropriation look impartial and fair.

If you’re charged with a drug crime you have the option of a jury trail. In a jury trail the State must convince 12 jurors that you are actually a very bad person. The process of convincing a jury that you’re a very bad person involves submitting evidence that proves that the glazed doughnut you were eating was actually crystal meth. Since field drug testing kits are biased towards false positives they make excellent evidence, especially when the jurors are selected specifically because they’re entirely ignorant of how the tests work and how unreliable they are.

“Libertarians”

I make no secret of my disagreement with political libertarians. While they claim that we need to implement incremental change by working within the system I’m rolling my eyes because I know that the system has numerous redundancies that prevent anti-statist meddling and that the State, like the One Ring, corrupts all who try to wield it.

The Star Tribune ran a story about the Crystal City Council. Crystal, for those who don’t know, is a suburb here in the Twin Cities. The Libertarian Party controls a majority of its city council. That’s the joke, this is the punchline:

At the same time, in a seeming departure from Libertarian principles of thrift, the city has raised property taxes and water and sewer fees.

Libertarians seized control of a municipal government and taxes went up. If these Libertarians didn’t exist I’d have to make them up to illustrate my point about political action being an ineffective strategy for libertarianism. One is probably wondering why a “libertarian” city council would raise taxes and water and sewer fees. After all, that seems like a pretty anti-libertarian decision. It’s for muh roads and the children, of course:

The alliance split in September when the City Council raised property taxes nearly 8 percent. One of the Libertarians, Councilwoman Olga Parsons, said she voted in favor because she thought the budget was already lean and she didn’t see anywhere to cut spending.

The budget was already tight? She is obviously not a libertarian. Any libertarian could find a significant amount of unnecessary crap to cut. For example, they could start with the police. Most police departments invest the majority of their time in enforcing victimless laws such as drug offenses and speeding citations. Stopping the department from enforcing those nonsense laws would greatly reduce the need for officers and the city could downsize the department (I would personally eliminate it entirely but this is me trying to play the libertarian political game). City “services” could be privatized or eliminated entirely and the city properties related to providing those “services” could be sold. Doing that would allow the market to decide what the community actually wants and what has been forced down its throat by a handful of politically connected community members. The bottom line is that if the budget is tight that means the city is providing things it shouldn’t be providing.

In spite of what the Star Tribune and these “libertarians” claim, paying cash for government projects isn’t libertarianism. Libertarianism is dismantling the government. If there’s a government project any libertarian worth their salt should be working to eliminate it, not fund it.

Your Daily Two Minutes Fear

In George Orwell’s frighteningly prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four members of the Party in Oceania had to participate in a daily Two Minutes Hate. During the Two Minutes Hate the Party members are shown an image of Emmanuel Goldstein and are expected to scream obscenities, make threatening gestures, and perform other acts that demonstrate their hatred of the author of the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.

Here in the United States that theme has been taken a slightly different albeit related direction. Instead of Two Minutes Hate we have a daily routine of Two Minutes Fear. Although the theme is slightly different the purpose is the same: instill loyalty to the State. Where Oceania’s Two Minutes Hate tried to accomplish this by focusing the populace’s anger at an outside source the United States plays on the populace’s fears. By instill a deep fear of pretty much everything the State tries to convince people that it is the only thing keeping them safe.

Halloween was yesterday so today’s Two Minutes Fear is not surprisingly Halloween related:

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) – The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office will offer free Halloween candy X-ray screening at the Washoe County Courthouse and the Mills Lane Justice Center the day after Halloween.

Court security staff will screen candy at the X-ray stations inside the courthouse entrances from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, November 1, 2016. The Mills Lane Justice Center is at 1 S. Sierra Street and the Washoe County Courthouse is at 75 Court Street, both in downtown Reno.

Can you remember an incident in your neighborhood where a child ended up getting a piece of candy that had an embedded needle or razor blade in it? I’m guessing you can’t because the number of times that that has actually happened is so low that it is a statistical anomaly. If you’re worried about protecting your children you’d be far better off taking them to swimming lessons to protect them from drowning than getting their Halloween candy x-rayed by the Sheriff’s Office.

There is no value in taking candy to get x-rayed and there’s no conceivable way that the people running the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office are ignorant of that fact. After all, they have access to the number of criminal instances that have happened within the county and therefore know that the number of cases where metal has been embedded into Halloween candy is either zero or damn close to zero. But playing to people’s fears is what the State does. Why throw away a perfectly good opportunity to subtly encourage the people of Washoe County to be slightly more dependent on law enforcers to feel safe?

It’s Good to Be the King’s Men

In 2000 the Federal Law Enforcement Animal Protection Act was passed. The law made it a federal offense, one carrying some fairly stiff penalties, for harming a law enforcement animal:

Under the Federal Law Enforcement Animal Protection Act, which went into effect this week, anyone convicted of purposely assaulting, maiming, or killing federal law enforcement animals such as police dogs and horses could be fined at least $1,000 and spend up to 10 years in prison. Previously, the animals were covered by a variety of state, rather than federal, laws.

Were you or I to beat a drug sniffing dog we’d face a potential decade in a cage. Because this is a nation of laws and all are equal under the law the same applies to law enforcers themselves, right? Wrong. As usual, the law is applied differently to serfs and the king’s men. If you wear a badge the Federal Law Enforcement Animal Protection Act apparently doesn’t apply to you:

A Ramsey County deputy who pleaded guilty to animal cruelty after beating his canine partner during an out-of-town event will keep his job despite the sheriff’s office’s attempt to fire him.

Deputy Brett Arthur Berry was fired April 8, a few months after a Carlton County, Minn., judge sentenced him to a year of unsupervised probation for the June 2015 incident at Black Bear Casino. Berry admitted that he got drunk while at the casino for a canine officers’ certification event and beat his K-9 partner, Boone, out of frustration when he had a hard time putting the German shepherd back on the leash after taking him outside for a walk.

[…]

In a decision filed Monday, state arbitrator Gil Vernon wrote that the sheriff’s office did not sufficiently consider mitigating factors when it moved to fire Berry, and those factors show Berry is at a low risk of future misconduct. He noted that Berry had been forthright about his behavior that night and he sought alcohol abuse treatment afterward.

Not only did Mr. Berry receive an extremely lenient punishment for attacking his K-9 partner but he won’t even lose his job in the end. Can you imagine the shit show that would have occurred had one of us mere serfs beat his K-9 partner? I highly doubt admitting to our misconduct and seeking alcohol abuse treatment would satiate the State enough to keep us out of a cage.

It’s good to be the king and it’s good to be one of the king’s men.

Obedience to the Law isn’t Praiseworthy

Without government who would deport the heinous criminals? Take this bloke for instance. This heinous criminal has been illegally living in this country for almost four decades. His crime? You won’t believe it. He had the audacity to be adopted by parents who couldn’t be bothered to fill out some paperwork:

Adam Crapser was brought to the United States when he was 3, to start a new life — new parents, new culture, new country.

But his adoptive parents didn’t complete his citizenship papers. Then they abandoned him to the foster care system.

And now, as a 41-year-old father of four, he’s being deported. Despite his appeals for help, he has been ordered to be sent back to South Korea, a country The Associated Press describes as “completely alien to him.”

We need to get this son of a bitch out of the country less he continues his terrible crime spree!

This man was brought into this country when he was 3-years-old, spent almost all of his childhood and his entire adulthood here, and now has to go to a country he’s totally unfamiliar with through no fault of his own. Stories like this are why I scoff when people hold up the law as being high and might. The law isn’t moral, it’s arbitrary. Some idiots in Washington DC, idiots who almost nobody in this country considers examples of even modestly acceptable morality, wrote some words down, took a vote, and passed those words off to their associate who was occupying the White House at the time to rubber stamp it. Through that process a man who was brought into this country almost four decades ago became a heinous criminal.

When people say this nation is a nation of laws what they’re actually saying is that this nation is a nation of arbitrary orders issued by politicians. There’s nothing admirable about that and there’s nothing admirable about being compliant with those laws. But people do admire (more accurately worship) this nation’s arbitrary system or laws and even brag about being obedient to it.

Yes, believe it or not, a lot of people think that being a law abiding citizen is praiseworthy. There are people who brag about being law abiding citizens. Why? I have no idea. I mean, seriously, am I supposed to give them a gold star and a pat on the back? Is publicly professing obedience to masters admirable? Is there some reason I should view them as being better than the poor son of a bitch facing deportation because he was adopted by people who couldn’t fill out some forms?

Over time I’ve learned that there’s seldom anything admirable about being a law abiding citizen but there is a great deal to be admired about being a law breaking citizen.

Who Watches the Watchmen

Who watches the watchmen? Not Congress:

DO THE COMMITTEES that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take intelligence community whistleblowers seriously? Do they earnestly investigate reports of waste, fraud, abuse, professional negligence, or crimes against the Constitution reported by employees or contractors working for agencies like the CIA or NSA? For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding “no.”

This article is an excellent read for anybody who thinks Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and other whistleblowers should have gone through “proper channels.” It covers a couple of examples of individuals who did go through “proper channels” only to discover that the government has no interest in voluntarily overseeing itself (shocking, I know). Take William Binney for example:

Enraged that a program they believed could have prevented the 9/11 attacks had been jettisoned, Binney and his colleagues privately approached the House Intelligence Committee. When that failed to produce results, they issued a formal complaint to the Defense Department’s inspector general.

The subsequent investigation validated the allegations of the NSA ThinThread team. But in spite of this vindication, all who had filed the complaint were subsequently investigated by the FBI on bogus charges of leaking classified information. The episode is now the subject of an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower reprisal investigation, involving former NSA senior manager and ThinThread proponent Tom Drake. I have read the Defense Department inspector general report, which is still almost completely classified, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking its declassification. The Pentagon has stonewalled my request for more than a year and a half.

Not only were his pleas ignored but Congress even sicced its attack dogs, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), on him. When the response for going through “proper channels” is both being ignored and having men with guns storm your home early in the morning, which is exactly what the FBI did, and hold your family at gunpoint the message is quite clear, Congress doesn’t want any of the State’s dirty laundry being aired.

Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden aren’t criminals, they’re products of a government that both sweeps its illegal activities under the rug and viciously attacks anybody who tries to raise an alarm. They both did what was necessary to bring attention to some really nasty government programs. Instead of calling them traitors why not put the blame where it belongs with Congress? Because they’re supposedly the watchmen but they’re not only failing to do their job but they’re also attacking anybody who tries to help them do their job.

I Hope the ACA Mandates the Coverage of Lube

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a massive stack of paper that no single person could ever hope to read and fully comprehend. I only hope that somewhere buried in that mountain of paper is a clause that requires insurance companies to cover lube because us Minnesotans are going to need a lot of it:

Big rate increases next year in the state’s individual market mean that Minnesotans who buy health insurance on their own will pay above-average premiums — a startling reversal from 2014 when individual market rates in much of the state were among the lowest in the nation.

A federal report this week looked at rates for “benchmark” plans across 44 states and found a family of four in Minnesota will pay $1,396 per month for the coverage. That’s about 28 percent higher than the average across most of those states at $1,090 per month.

Everybody is getting fucked in the ass by the ACA but us Minnesotans are going to get fucked a bit harder. Predictably a lot of people are upset about this and have decided that the only fix for more government is even more government. Democrats are talking more seriously about single payer while the Republicans are obsessing over what they want to replace the ACA with. With both major political parties seemingly uninterested in deregulating the healthcare market this situation is only going to get worse.

At least the universe has a sense of humor because the number of people covered by health insurance, the metric being used by proponents of the ACA to prove it has been successful, is going to dwindle as fewer and fewer people are able to afford even a basic health insurance plan. When that happens the proponents of the act will have to find a new metric to declare victory with (which won’t change anything but watching them desperately scramble to spin things into victory again will be amusing to watch).

Denying Math

Many of the e-mails released by WikiLeaks about Clinton’s campaign have been, shall we say, embarrassing. Of course the e-mails haven’t dissuaded Clinton’s true believers but they might cause a slight inconvenience during the election if people on the fence begin to perceive her for the criminal she is. The only defense the campaign has offered against any of these e-mails is that they are fake but math doesn’t lie:

In order to bloc spam, emails nowadays contain a form of digital signatures that verify their authenticity. This is automatic, it happens on most modern email systems, without users being aware of it.

This means we can indeed validate most of the Wikileaks leaked DNC/Clinton/Podesta emails. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest is to install the popular Thunderbird email app along with the DKIM Verifier addon. Then go to the Wikileaks site and download the raw source of the email https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2986.

Cryptographic signatures are wonderful things. In addition to verifying that a communication was sent by a specific individual or organization, cryptographic signatures also indicate whether or not the contents of the communication have been altered. Thanks to anti-spam measures we have a form of digital signature on many e-mails by default. This means that we can verify that the WikiLeak released e-mails remain unaltered.

A failure to understand the technology they’re using continues to bite politicians in the ass. But it’s good for us mere plebs because it gives us a glimpse behind the curtains of the State and that glimpse continues to show uglier and uglier things.