Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Risking Lives to Enforce Petty Offenses

There’s no offense so petty that law enforcers won’t risk lives to enforce it:

In Bloomington, police topped 90 miles per hour in a chase to nab a driver whose car had a missing license plate.

In nearby Eagan, an officer reached speeds up to 107 miles per hour in hopes of catching a driver wanted for shoplifting.

State troopers chased a car at 115 miles per hour after spotting an air-freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Over the last three years, law enforcement officers throughout Minnesota have overwhelmingly engaged in high-speed, high-risk chases for low-level offenses, a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS investigation has found.

An examination of more than 700 court cases since 2016 shows police officers, deputies and Minnesota State Patrol troopers chased drivers for non-violent offenses 95 percent of the time.

Not only is risking lives to enforce petty offenses far riskier than the payoff justifies but high speed chases are also unnecessary in a surveillance state.

Law enforcement departments throughout the country have invested heavily in surveillance technologies. Many cities are now covered with license plate scanners and those scanners are often sophisticated enough to identify the make and model of a vehicle as well as to uniquely identify a vehicle by bumper stickers and other external features. It’s quickly becoming impossible to evade law enforcement using a vehicle. This means that instead of engaging in a high speed chase, law enforcers could instead tell dispatch to track the vehicle using the expensive surveillance technology already in place. The suspect can still be arrested and innocent bystanders don’t have to be put at risk to do it.

But using tracking technology doesn’t offer the adrenaline rush that engaging in a high speed chase does so I can see why that option isn’t utilized very often.

Go Be Homeless Somewhere Else

Minneapolis made national news because of its Hooverville. What didn’t get as much headline attention is St. Paul’s Hooverville. Fortunately for the government of St. Paul (but unfortunately for the homeless individuals) the lack of national attention has meant that it has more freedom to deal with its homeless encampment. The St. Paul Police Department distributed flyers that informed the individuals in the encampment that have to go be homeless somewhere else:

Late last week, St. Paul city officials said they were increasingly worried about how the onset of wintry weather was affecting a camp of homeless people at the base of Cathedral Hill, and hoped to come up with a plan for them over the next couple weeks.

Early Tuesday morning, they took action: police officers and workers from the Department of Safety and Inspections visited the encampment alongside Interstate 35E and handed out fliers.

“To protect your health and safety,” the flier told campers, “this site will be permanently cleared at 10 a.m. on Thursday, November 15th. You are required to vacate the site and not return.”

To protect their health and safety their community will dismantled and their meager possession will be taken if not cleared out by the deadline. Makes sense.

The flyers do promise the homeless individuals transportation to the handful homeless shelters in the area, which will appease the residents of St. Paul who want the homeless people gone but in a manner that won’t upset their conscious. However, if the homeless shelters were able to provide these individuals what they need, they probably would be using them instead of camping in tents in the winter. The homeless shelters in the Twin Cities are overcrowded and usually kick guests out in the morning so they have to find somewhere to hunker down until the shelter opens up again. But none of this matters because the existence of the shelters is only being mentioned on the flyers to make the act of destroying the encampment appear magnanimous.

Disposable Soldiers

The United States government is constantly demanding that we treat soldiers as heroes. However, this is a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” While the government is demanding that we treat soldiers as heroes, it’s treating them as a disposable commodity:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged that the failure of a new IT system for processing claims for Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits has been holding up payments for months and causing financial hardship for thousands of veterans. “Many of our Post-9/11 GI Bill students are experiencing longer than typical wait times to receive monthly housing payments,” the VA said in a statement, with processing times averaging “a little over 35 days” for first-time veteran applicants. More than 82,000 veterans were still waiting for housing payments for the fall semester as of November 8, with some having lost housing as the result of non-payment.

I’ve yet to hear a positive experience from a veteran who has had to deal with the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). Whenever the VA’s abysmal record is dragged out for yet another round of political maneuvering, politicians act outraged at how this nation’s supposed heroes are being treated and pledge to get to the bottom of it. Of course they never do and the system continues to provide endless pain to the veterans who have to rely on it. I doubt this will ever change because politicians use the term “human resource” in its most literal sense, to them humans are a resource to be used and discarded afterwards.

Every Vote Matters

Another national election has concluded. That can only mean that Florida is steeping in electoral shenanigans again:

The elections board in Florida’s Miami-Dade County has collected a set of mysterious ballots in the Opa-locka mail facility after Democrats raised concern about the uncounted votes.

The uncounted ballots have emerged as one of many battles over the fiercely contested Florida elections that moved this weekend into a recount phase.

Suzy Trutie, a spokesperson for the county’s supervisor of elections, told CNN there were 266 ballots in the shipment and that the votes will not be counted. Florida law requires all ballots sent by mail to arrive at the election facility by 7 p.m. on Election Day, and these ballots did not meet that standard, Trutie said.

There are two possible explanations here. The first is that these votes were somehow lost in the mail. The second is that these votes were conjugated out of thin air when it a race was so close that ballots had to be recounted. Neither explanation supposed the advocate of democracy’s claim that every vote matters.

If the first explanation is true, then the votes of the 266 individuals who voted on those ballots don’t matter because they weren’t received by the legal deadline. If the second explanation is true and the people arguing that those ballots should be counted get their way, the power of the legitimate votes that were cast will be watered down.

It turns out that creating a pseudonymous voting system that is also secure is a task that has so far eluded the people of the United States. So long as that continues to be the case, your vote really can’t be said to matter.

Jim Crow Never Went Away

If you ever need an illustration of just how stupid the average voter is, find a voter who is complaining about racist government policies and ask them how they plan to change it. 99 percent (a conservative estimate, it’s probably higher) of the time the voter will tell you that they’re planning to beg the government to change its policies. If you point out how stupid that idea is, they’ll point to the elimination of slavery and the striking down of Jim Crow laws as proof that their strategy works, which should prove to you that the person you’re conversing with is extremely gullible (on the upside you probably just found a buyer for that bridge that you’re trying to offload).

While the government has said that it eliminated slavery and Jim Crow laws, it really just changed some legal definitions. If you’re being held against your will and forced to provide labor, you’re not legally considered a slave, you’re legally considered a prison laborer. Likewise, there are no longer laws that overtly treat people differently based on the color of their skin, instead there are algorithms that do the same thing but provide plausible deniability:

But what’s taking the place of cash bail may prove even worse in the long run. In California, a presumption of detention will effectively replace eligibility for immediate release when the new law takes effect in October 2019. And increasingly, computer algorithms are helping to determine who should be caged and who should be set “free.” Freedom — even when it’s granted, it turns out — isn’t really free.

Under new policies in California, New Jersey, New York and beyond, “risk assessment” algorithms recommend to judges whether a person who’s been arrested should be released. These advanced mathematical models — or “weapons of math destruction” as data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls them — appear colorblind on the surface but they are based on factors that are not only highly correlated with race and class, but are also significantly influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system.

As O’Neil explains, “It’s tempting to believe that computers will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in mathematics.”

For the record, when people were celebrating California’s decision to eliminate cash bail, I predicted that it would result in this outcome (although I didn’t predict the use of algorithms, I did predict that since the decision to let somebody out on bail would be the sole decision of some bureaucrats, nothing would actually change).

Plausible deniability is the staple of modern politics. A politician who wants to pass a racist policy just needs to make sure that race is never mentioned in their law and when the policy results in the politician’s desired outcome, they can claim that they had no way to predict such a result. Additional plausible deniability can be added by handing decisions over to algorithms. Most people think of algorithms as mysterious wizardry performed by the high priests of science and are therefore impartial and infallible (because, you know, scientists are always impartial and never wrong).

However, algorithms do exactly what they’re created to do. If you want a machine learning algorithm to perform in a certain way, you either write it to do exactly what you want or you provide it learning data that will skew it towards the results you want. When the masses wise up and realize that the algorithm is racially biases, you can just claim that the complexity of the algorithm prevented anybody from accurately predicting what it would do. Their ignorance will make your explanation believable to them and you can claim that you’ve now made improvements that should (i.e. won’t) lead to more impartial results.

Intended Consequences

That didn’t take long:

FERNDALE, Md. — Two police officers ordered to remove firearms from a house on a “red flag” protective order fatally shot an armed man Monday morning in Ferndale, Maryland, police said. Anne Arundel County Police arrived at the house at 5:17 a.m. to remove guns from the home under a new law that temporarily allows for the seizure of firearms if a person shows “red flags” that they are a danger to themselves or others, CBS Baltimore reports.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you hate the fact that individuals outside of the government can legally own guns. You’ve advocated for every single overt gun control bill only to see your hopes and dreams mostly squashed by politicians who preferred to deal with issues that weren’t proverbial third rails. What could you do? If you’re observant, you would quickly realize that law enforcers have a track record of gunning down people, especially when they’ve heard the word “gun” shortly before an encounter. You could then combine that factoid with a piece of legislation that isn’t overt gun control. So instead of pushing a bill that would make standard capacity magazines illegal, you would push a bill that would give law enforcers the freedom to steal guns from individuals without due process by using the magical term “dangerous individual.” From there you would just have to sit back and wait for law enforcers to start killing gun owners.

I’m fairly certain this was the thought process that many advocates of Maryland’s “red flag” law followed. Not that they would admit it. But it’s certainly an obvious solution considering the leeway law enforcers are given to use deadly force.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

A fight breaks out in a bar and results in four individuals being shot. One of the suspects flees but the armed security guard at the bar manages to catch him and pin him down. He calls the police and when the police arrive they see that there is an armed black man. Can you guess what happens next? Exactly what you would expect… from the old slave patrols:

An armed security guard at a bar in suburban Chicago was killed by police as he detained a suspected gunman, according to officials and witnesses.

After gunfire erupted around 04:00 local time on Sunday, Jemel Roberson, 26, chased down an attacker and knelt on his back until police arrived.

Moments after police came on the scene, an officer opened fire on Roberson, who was black, killing him.

Law enforcers in this United States have a tendency to dislike unarmed black men so it should be no surprise that they also have no tolerance for armed black men, even when they do a law enforcer’s job for them by detaining a suspect.

Dog and Pony Show

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the open socialist who won a New York congressional seat, is bitching that since she doesn’t start receiving money stolen from taxpayers for another three months, she can’t afford housing in Washington DC:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist and youngest woman ever elected to Congress, can’t afford to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C. before her job starts in January.

“I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment?” Ocasio-Cortez, 29, told the New York Times. “We’re kind of just dealing with the logistics of it day by day, but I’ve really been just kind of squirreling away and then hoping that gets me to January.”

She’s full of shit by the way. She’s three months away from receiving a guaranteed $174,000 per year salary (plus other benefits), which means she’ll have no problem whatsoever getting a short term loan from pretty much any bank. Moreover, she managed to raise enough money to run for Congress, which isn’t cheap. If she has enough suckers willing to fund her economic illiteracy all the way to Congress, she can almost certainly sucker them into dumping money into a GoFundMe for three months of housing.

But whining about an inability to afford housing will endear her to her fan base. Since they’re gullible enough to support an open socialist, they’ll buy pretty much any fool thing you tell them.

Government Helping the Homeless Again

The Kansas City Health Department discovered that a group of individuals were feeding the homeless and decided to step in and help those poor homeless individuals in the only way it knows how:

A coordinated wave of Kansas City Health Department inspectors simultaneously shut down large picnics across the city Sunday that were serving food to homeless and hungry people.

On Monday, a city health official said they trashed the food out of concern for public safety.

[…]

It looked ugly Sunday. Home-cooked chili, stacks of foil-wrapped sandwiches, vats of soup and other food prepared by volunteers with Free Hot Soup Kansas City were dumped in bags and soaked in bleach to make sure no one went back to try to recover it.

Homeless individuals can’t get food poisoning if they starve to death!

Despite what health officials claim, this has nothing to do with concern for the homeless. This has everything to do with making the lives of homeless individuals so miserable that they have no choice but to go somewhere else. If they’re forced out of the city, city officials can claim that they solved the homeless problem and the morons who are gullible enough to believe bureaucrats will assume that all of the homeless individuals were given homes or otherwise provided for.

Spending Money to Make Money

You know the old saying, you have to spend money to make money? It’s especially true in politics:

Weapons makers are moving last-minute money to the Democratic congressman in line to chair the defense industry’s key House committee, as he is under assault from a fellow Democrat, who is attacking his pro-war record just ahead of a rare intra-party general election.

[…]

Sensing an opportunity to influence the race and the potential future committee chair, major weapons contractors have given the lawmaker last-minute campaign support. Lobbyists and executives associated with General Dynamics, one of the largest weapons makers in the world, have given over $10,000 in recent weeks, in addition to the $9,500 from the company over the last quarter.

In just the last week of October, Teresa Carlson, an Amazon industry executive overseeing the company’s bid for a $10 billion military IT contract, gave $1,000; Bechtel, which managed Iraq reconstruction contracts, gave $1,000; Rolls-Royce, which manufactures parts for a variety of military jets, including a model of the controversial F-35, gave $3,500; and Phebe Novakovic, the chief executive of General Dynamics, gave $2,700.

If you’re going to the polls tomorrow, remember that your vote is meaningless. Your options will consist of a list of curated politicians who might disagree on minor details but all agree that the government must continue to oppress you. Moreover, consider your politician’s position. If they have to weigh the value of the single filled in oval on a piece of paper that you offer versus thousands or millions of dollars in campaign contributions, who do you think they’ll choose to appease?