The days of the peace officer are long gone, replaced by the militarized police warrior wearing uniforms making them indistinguishable from military personnel. Once something is defined as a “war” everyone becomes a “warrior.” Balko offers solutions ranging from ending the war on drugs, to halting mission creep so agencies such as the Department of Education and the FDA don’t have their own SWAT teams, to enacting transparency requirements so that all raids are reported and statistics kept, to community policing, and finally to one of the toughest solutions: changing police culture.
Police culture has gone from knocking on someone’s door to ask him to come to the station house, to knocking on a door to drag him to the station house, to a full SWAT raid on a home.
Two quotes from the HBO television series The Wire apply quite appropriately to this situation:
“This drug thing, this ain’t police work. Soldiering and police, they ain’t the same thing.”
“You call something a war and pretty soon everyone’s gonna’ be running around acting like warriors. They’re gonna’ be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs and racking up body counts. And when you’re at war you need an enemy. And pretty soon damn near everybody on every corner’s your enemy. And soon the neighborhood you’re supposed to be policing, that’s just occupied territory.”
Detective John J. Baeza, NYPD (ret.), posted review of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop at Amazon.com, 2013-07-01
July 3, 2013
QotD: Militarization of the police
US public opinion on abortion has been stable for decades
Nick Gillespie says the stability of beliefs on the topic of abortion is one of the most striking things about the whole debate:
So despite decades of polling data showing that large majorities of Americans believe abortion should be legal under some circumstances, you could be excused for thinking there are only two possible positions when it comes to terminating pregnancies: either all abortions should be allowed, or none should be.
Yet the most striking thing about attitudes toward abortion is how stable they’ve been over the 40 years since Roe v. Wade. Gallup has been tracking public sentiment on the matter since 1975, when 22 percent of Americans agreed that abortion should be illegal under any circumstances and 21 percent believed it should be legal under any circumstances. Those numbers are now 18 percent and 28 percent respectively. In 1975 54 percent believed abortion “should be legal only under certain circumstances.” The number is now 52 percent and has never gone above 61 percent or below 48 percent. Over the past 15 years, the number of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice” has narrowed to a few points, with 48 percent identifying as pro-choice and 44 percent as pro-life (in 2011, those figures were basically flipped).
Official political stances on abortion are absolutely Manichaean, however, with the Republican Party and most of its leading figures stressing that life begins at conception, a belief that would outlaw virtually all abortions except those necessary to protect the health of the mother. The Democratic Party platform — and most of its highest-profile members, including President Barack Obama — “strongly and unequivocally supports” abortion at any time and for any reason during a pregnancy.
Most Americans reject such categorical, extreme views and instead offer conditional support for abortion depending on when it’s performed. Gallup found that while 61 percent of Americans think abortion for should mostly be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 27 percent felt it should be legal in the second trimester, just 14 percent agreed it should be allowed on demand in the final three months.
Unlike their political representatives, then, Americans hold a far more nuanced view of abortion, and one that comports with the reality of the procedure. Of the roughly 1 million abortions performed a year in America, about 90 percent take place within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and only 1 percent take place after 20 weeks (in fact, over the past decade, there has been a marked trend toward earlier abortions). That helps explain why 62 percent of Texans supported S.B. 5, the bill that Wendy Davis filibustered.
Update: You went full Satanist. Never go full Satanist:
Not that invoking Satan isn’t serious, but the response on Twitter included some great humor. A few of my favorites:
3 rules: don’t start a land war in Asia. Don’t go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Don’t #HailSatan at your abortion rally.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 3, 2013
Shouldn’t abortion be between a woman, her doctor, and the Dark Lord of the Underworld? I mean, come on.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 3, 2013
They just want abortion to be safe, legal, rare and performed on the Fiery Blood Altar of the Plain of Tartarus by Dr. Kermit Beelzebub.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 3, 2013
The Democrats do not support chanting #HailSatan. Satan is a patriachal oligarch who refuses to pay his fair share. Plus he believes in God.
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 3, 2013
Never go full Satanist.
— Just Karl (@justkarl) July 3, 2013
The Blaze noted:Obviously, it is much more likely that the abortion supporters were chanting “Hail Satan!” to mock pro-lifers rather than actually hailing Lucifer, but anything is possible.
I’m certain that the intent was mockery. The overall effect of chanting “Hail Satan”? That’s another story, but one of those effects is surely clarity.
Right. Having been to Texas, I can assure you that the defense of “We were mocking Christians by invoking Satan,” might actually make things worse.
We’re just trying to raise your awareness…
… because we’re morally and ethically superior to you unwashed plebs:
Last Thursday was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day. If you missed it, that’s probably because every week there are awareness days. We’re swamped by them. There are literally thousands of organisations whose mission is to raise our awareness. There is also a vast number of politicians, policymakers, experts, professionals, academics and earnest volunteers who are all devoted to the cause of raising awareness.
Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. [. . .]
Campaigns designed to raise awareness are as much about advertising the status of the campaigners as they are about changing the outlook of a target audience. For example, advocates of breastfeeding produce literature that affirms the virtuous nature of their own lifestyles while also inviting those who have not seen the light to become aware. The very term ‘raising awareness’ involves drawing a distinction between those who are enlightened, who are aware of something, and those who are not. It draws attention to the fundamental contrast between those who know and those who are ignorant, between the morally superior and the morally inferior. So someone who allows his children to eat junk food is not only unaware and ignorant; he’s also morally questionable.
Awareness-raising campaigns impute to their advocates the values of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment. For that reason, the mission of raising awareness has become a key cultural resource for those who want to distinguish themselves from others. Awareness-raisers are invariably drawn towards inflating the behavioural and cultural distinctions between themselves and the rest of society; they are preoccupied with constructing a lifestyle that contrasts as sharply as possible to the lifestyles of their moral inferiors. What is really important about their lifestyles is not so much the values they exhort, but that they are different, in every detail, from the lives led by obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, xenophobic and fundamentalist consumers of the tabloid press and junk culture.
Sociologically speaking, the act of raising awareness is really a claim for moral respect, and more importantly moral authority. The possession of awareness is a marker of superiority — and the absence of awareness is taken as a sign of inferiority. Those who refuse to ‘be aware’ are frequently morally condemned
Kathy Shaidle’s “Dispatch from Canada”
Kathy will be writing a weekly column for our American friends, updating them with whatever’s up here in the Great White North. Given how little actually ever happens in Canada, it might be just a weather report or the latest style change for Justin Trudeau’s hair. However, to start it off, yesterday’s column attempted to correct a few common notions about Canada:
Because a lot of what you think you know about Canada is probably decades out of date.
As investment bigwig and journalist Theo Caldwell recently noted:
But Canada is far from American stereotypes of socialism, centralization and obeisance, at least in relative terms. By almost any measure, Canada is a freer country than the U.S.A.
Economically, the contrast is stark, for those who care to see. While folks reflexively state that Canadian taxes are higher than those of the United States, corporate and personal rates are lower up north.
How much lower are those corporate taxes? Canada ranks 6th lowest out of 185 nations. America came in at a shocking 69th place.
Believe it or not, Canada’s average household net worth is higher than America’s.
We also have lower unemployment, and our economy is holding steady, thanks in part to our ingenious refusal to give mortgages to welfare bums.
We have fewer divorces, fewer traffic fatalities, and way fewer tornadoes.
We’re skinnier, too. (Seriously: your restaurant portions are freakishly huge.)
But what about “the American Dream”?
According to one (Canadian) economist, “a son born to a poor father in the U.S. is twice as likely to remain poor throughout his life than if he had been born in Canada.”
[. . .]
We’ve got our flaws too, of course.
We literally have no abortion law, which means it’s easier to get one than a gun, even at the nine-month mark.
There’s no death penalty. And try getting an MRI, unless you’re a cat.
Our cops are increasingly corrupt, if not downright fascist. (Don’t be fooled by the propaganda about the noble, virtuous Mountie…)
We have this unelected Senate thing (long story) and a dorky constitution, especially compared to yours.
And don’t get me started on Quebec.
The most blatant display of “one law for the rich, one law for the poor”
Reason‘s Mike Riggs points out the most amazing part of the Aaron Hernandez case:
Let me paint the scene for you: It’s broad daylight out. A group of six Massachusetts State Police officers in suits and ties approach Hernandez’s North Attleborough mansion from the front. Three of them walk up the steps of his porch, and — with their guns holstered — knock on the door. After roughly 50 seconds of knocking and doorbell-ringing, a shirtless Hernandez opens the door and lets six suited staties, plus a cop in uniform, come inside. As one officer starts to cuff Hernandez right there in the foyer, another officer closes the door, presumably to provide Hernandez with some privacy. A few seconds later, Hernandez — now with a tee-shirt pulled over his handcuffed arms and torso — is led outside to a cop car, where officers gently lower him into the back seat and put on his seatbelt.
No battering ram. No flashbangs. No paramilitary gear. I was shocked.
Compare and contrast this arrest — for homicide — with this arrest first reported by Radley Balko:
In 2011, a SWAT team conducted a midnight raid on Stamps’ home in Framingham looking for a couple of small-time crack dealers. In the chaos and cloud of adrenaline that results from knocking down someone’s door and flooding his home with men dressed like soldiers, an officer shot Stamps in the neck, killing him. The city’s chief of police would later say that Stamps was “tragically and fatally struck by a bullet which was discharged from a SWAT officer’s rifle”; as if guns fire themselves.
When police eventually found who they were looking for — not Stamps, but his stepson and the stepson’s cousin — neither of them was armed. Nor did police find any firearms in the house.
It almost sounds backwards, doesn’t it? Killing an unarmed senior citizen in the process of arresting two unarmed kids holding a couple hundred bucks and some crack, while sending guys in their Sunday best to bring in a man allegedly involved in not just one violent, gang-related murder, but three?
[. . .]
This trend isn’t limited to Massachusetts. Across the country, poor people experience an entirely different criminal justice system — from arrest to prosecution — than the wealthy. Oftentimes, this means blacks are treated more harshly than whites and that the people who sell illegal drugs for money are treated differently than bankers who launder that money.
While football fans are free to care about whatever they want, the most shocking aspect of the Hernandez case isn’t that an incredible athlete killed anywhere from one to three people, it’s that the location of his home and the name of his employer bought him courtesies that poor, nonviolent offenders committing consensual crimes seldom experience.
Update: The Hernandez case gets even more weird:
Investigators in the Aaron Hernandez murder case were prepared to interview a Bristol man who was killed early Sunday when he crashed a car registered to his father-in-law, the former New England Patriot tight end’s uncle.
Multiple law enforcement sources said Massachusetts investigators were interested in speaking with Thaddeus Singleton III, 33, because he was associated with Hernandez. Singleton, who records show has served time in state prisons on various drug-related convictions dating to the mid-1990s, was killed when the car he was driving shot 100 feet through the air and hit the Farmington Country Club 6 feet off the ground.
Maybe this is something new in Nissan automotive technology, but it’s a rare vehicle that can shoot 100 feet through the air and impact a building six feet up? Impressive.
July 2, 2013
Reason.tv – Up in My Grill: 4th of July Rap (featuring Remy)
Ain’t no party like a nanny state party.
Song written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Meredith Bragg. About 1:20 minutes.
Better batteries through soy
The Economist on a promising new development in battery technology:
LITHIUM-ION batteries are hot stuff. Affordable, relatively lightweight and packing a lot of energy, they are the power source of choice for everything from mobile phones to electric cars. Unfortunately, the heat can be more than figurative. Occasionally, such batteries suffer malfunctions that lead to smoke, flames and even explosions. In gadgets, such meltdowns can be distressing and dangerous. In aircraft, they can be fatal. Earlier this year airlines grounded their entire fleet of Boeing’s next-generation 787 passenger jet after the lithium-ion batteries installed in two planes caught fire. Last month they have been permitted back in the air after being retrofitted with a protection system in the form of a tough steel box that vents directly outside in the event of a fire.
A more comforting solution, of course, would be to build a lithium-ion battery that could not burst into flames in the first place. Katie Zhong at Washington State University might have just such a device. For the last few years, she has been working on battery technology for flexible and bendable electronic gadgets. By blending a polymer called polyethylene oxide (PEO) with natural soy protein, she had made a solid electrolyte for lithium ion batteries that could be bent or stretched to twice its normal size without affecting its performance.
Like all batteries, lithium-ion rechargeables consist of two electrodes separated by an electrolyte. In a typical lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a solution of lithium salts and organic solvents. Charging drives lithium ions from the electrolyte into a graphite anode. On discharge, the reverse happens, with a balancing flow of electrons through the device being powered.
Russia’s French amphibious ships
As reported a few months back, the Russian navy will be getting a pair of amphibious ships from France. The deal isn’t going quite as smoothly as the Russians had hoped:
Russia recently bought two French Mistral class amphibious ships. Russia has not bought foreign warships for a long time, but this purchase was largely because of an eagerness to acquire Western shipbuilding technology and construction skills. This has already paid off, although not exactly how the Russians had planned. This became evident when a Russian official recently announced that the first Mistral would be built entirely in France. It had earlier been decided to have Russian shipyards build some sections of the first Mistral. It was quickly discovered that the Russian shipyard was not capable of building to the French specifications or do it according to the French timetable. The Russians expected to learn some valuable lessons from the French and, while embarrassing, this was one very valuable lesson. Russian shipyard officials have had their faces rubbed in the embarrassment of not being able to compete the way using their current practices. Russian experts on Western production methods and techniques have long complained of the antiquated and inefficient methods still favored by Russian shipbuilders. Navy leaders have been complaining for decades about the poor quality of work coming out of Russian shipyards. The Mistral purchase was to put this to the test.
The Mistral class BPC “Bâtiment de Projection et de Commandement” Tonnerre. Photograph by Yannick Le Bris
One thing American marines and sailors notice about the Mistral is the wider and higher corridors. This came about because the ship designers surveyed marines and asked what ship design improvements they could use. It was noted that in older amphibious ships, the standard size (narrow) corridors were a problem when fully equipped troops were moving out. That, plus the smaller crew size, makes the Mistrals appear kind of empty but very roomy. That, plus larger living accommodations (made possible by the smaller ship’s crew and marine complement), make the Mistrals a lot more comfortable. The French ships can be rigged to accommodate up to 700 people for short periods, as when being used to evacuate civilians from a war zone.
After the first two, additional Mistrals for the French Navy are being built using more commercial techniques and are expected to cost closer to $500 million each. France has three Mistrals with several more on order. Russia says it plans to base some of its Mistrals in the Far East, where there is an ongoing dispute with Japan over Japanese islands Russia occupied after World War II and never gave back. The Mistrals will probably show up elsewhere, because the Russian fleet is again patrolling the high seas and showing up wherever its government needs some muscle.
The Russians will name their two Mistrals the Vladivostok (initially planned to be based in its namesake city) and the Sevastopol (to be based at Novorossiysk).
British high speed railway run
As part of the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s record breaking 126mph run in 1938, sister loco 4464 Bittern was temporally permitted to exceed from 75mph to 90mph on the mainline. This was to be a rare look at steam running at higher speeds, following recent high speed test runs. On June 29th Bittern hauled a London-York special “The Ebor Streak” which ran along the A4’s native racing ground the East Coast Mainline.
4464 is first seen at Langford in Bedfordshire running like a greyhound at 90mph! Well…I think it was doing a little more than 90! After a high octane pursuit on the A1 carriageway, the next location is what better place to see an LNER A4 would be Doncaster. Ending on a high note, the A4 whistles and echoes past Doncaster Works where she, Mallard, Flying Scotsman and all other LNER locos were built.
With special thanks to Locomotive Services Limited, DBS and Network Rail for this miracle to happen.
I’m now in high hopes in getting the next two 90mph runs on July 19th and 27th.These shots and much much more will be included in the forthcoming documentary: “BITTERN: The Need for Speed” as part of the “MALLARD 75” celebrations. Which will include at an depth look at the preparations and build up to the main events in June & July, along with interviews with the crews & officals at this historic event in railway preservation history. See http://www.ovpsteam.co.uk/48.html
H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.
July 1, 2013
Positive developments in Canadian government digital policy
Micheal Geist rounds up some good news for Canada Day:
As Canadians grapple with news of widespread secret surveillance, trade agreements that could upend intellectual property policy, and the frustrations of a failed wireless policy, there are plenty of digital policy concerns. Yet on Canada Day, my weekly technology law column argues that it is worth celebrating the many positive developments that dot the Canadian digital policy landscape. Eight of the best include:
1. The Supreme Court of Canada’s strong affirmation of user rights and technological neutrality in copyright. [. . .]
2. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s policy on network neutrality. [. . .]
3. The defeat of the government’s lawful access legislation. [. . .]
4. Canada’s promotion of user generated content. [. . .]
5. The CRTC’s pro-consumer agenda. [. . .]
6. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s aggressive investigations of top Internet companies. [. . .]
7. Canada’s notice-and-notice system for Internet providers. [. . .]
8. Canada’s balanced patent law standards. [. . .]
Happy Dominion Day!
Another annexation-free year is complete! Happy Dominion Day everybody!
— Sir John A Macdonald (@PMJAMacdonald) July 1, 2013
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood HQ attacked
In the Guardian, Patrick Kingsley reports on the latest troubles in Cairo:
The headquarters of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have been burned and ransacked following an all-night siege — one day after millions protested on Egypt’s streets calling for President Mohamed Morsi’s resignation.
In an episode reminiscent of the sacking of Hosni Mubarak’s political headquarters during Egypt’s 2011 uprising, around 50 anti-Brotherhood protesters spent the night attacking the compound — situated on a rocky, isolated outcrop in east Cairo — with molotov cocktails, causing a series of small fires and explosions.
With police nowhere to be seen, Brotherhood cadres returned fire, killing at least four, and injuring at least 80 — according to medics at the scene.
Both sides told the Guardian that the other had started the battle, which began at around 7pm on Sunday. It was not possible to verify either claim.
At roughly 7am, after 12 hours of fighting, Brotherhood reinforcements arrived — possibly, bystanders said, because one of the fires had grown too big, and those inside now feared being smoked out. The reinforcements covered their colleagues’ exit with live fire — the Guardian later saw bullets being plucked from the wall. Bystanders said that some Brotherhood members were injured and handed to the authorities during the blaze.
Update:
The Egyptian army has given parties 48 hours to resolve political crisis, or it will 'take responsibility'
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 1, 2013
The rise and fall of economic powers
Charles Hugh Smith has a guest post at Zero Hedge, talking about the theme of economic decline of great powers:
Our collective interest in the rise and fall of empires is not academic. The meteoric rise of China and the financialization rotting out global capitalism are just two developments that suggest we are entering an era where some great powers will collapse, others will remake themselves and others will gain ascendancy.
[. . .]
In 1987, pundits were predicting that Japan’s “5th generation” computing would soon dominate what was left of America’s technological edge. They were spectacularly wrong, as the 5th generation fizzled and Japan became an also-ran in web technology, a position it still holds despite its many global electronic corporations and vast university research system.
Japan’s modern economy was set up in the late 1940s and early 1950s to exploit the world of that time. Sixty years later, Japan is still a wealthy nation, but its relative wealth and power have declined for 20 years, as its political-financial power structure clings to a model that worked splendidly for 40 years but has not worked effectively for 20 years.
The decline is not just the result of debt and political sclerosis; Japan’s vaunted electronics industry has been superseded by rivals in the U.S. and Korea. It is astonishing that there are virtually no Japanese brand smart phones with global sales, and only marginal Japanese-brand sales in the PC/notebook/tablet markets.
The key dynamic here is once the low-hanging fruit have all been plucked, it becomes much more difficult to achieve high growth rates. That cycle is speeding up, it seems; western nations took 100 years to rapidly industrialize and then slip into failed models of stagnation; Japan took only 40 years to cycle through to stagnation, and now China has picked the low-hanging fruit and reverted to financialization, diminishing returns and rapidly rising debt after a mere 30 years of rapid growth.
There is certainly evidence that China’s leadership knows deep reform is necessary but the incentives to take that risk are low. Perhaps that is a key dynamic in this cycle of rapid growth leading to stagnation: the leadership, like everyone else, cannot quite believe the model no longer works. There are huge risks to reform, while staying the course seems to offer the hope of a renewal of past growth rates. But alas, the low hanging fruit have all been picked long ago, and as a result the leadership pursues the apparently lower-risk strategy that I call “doing more of what has failed spectacularly.”
Though none of the historians listed above mention it, there is another dangerous dynamic in any systemic reform: the very attempt to reform an unstable, diminishing-return system often precipitates its collapse. The leadership recognizes the need for systemic reform, but changing anything causes the house of cards to collapse in a heap. This seems to describe the endgame in the USSR, where Gorbachev’s relatively modest reforms unraveled the entire empire.
