Published on 7 Aug 2017
Before the First World War, what are today Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were part of the Russian Empire. As that empire fought and fell, so to fought the soldiers of the Baltic States, first during the war, and then in their struggles for eventual independence.
August 8, 2017
The Baltic States in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR SPECIAL
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Civil asset forfeiture in Las Vegas – kick’em while they’re down
C.J. Ciaramella summarizes the findings of a new report on civil asset forfeiture in Nevada, where the Las Vegas police have been profiting nicely by confiscating even from the poorest members of society:
When Las Vegas police seized property through civil asset forfeiture laws last year, they were mostly likely to strike in poor and minority neighborhoods.Photo by Thomas Wolf, via Wikimedia.
A report [PDF] released last week by the Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI), a conservative think tank, found the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department raked in $1.9 million in asset forfeiture revenue in 2016. Two-thirds of those seizures occurred in zip codes with higher-than-average rates of poverty and large minority populations.
The 12 Las Vegas zip codes most targeted by asset forfeiture have an average poverty rate of 27 percent, compared to 12 percent in the remaining 36 zip codes. Clark County, Nevada, has an average poverty rate of 16 percent.
The 12 most targeted zip codes also have an average nonwhite population of 42 percent, compared to 36 percent in the other remaining zip codes.
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police may seize property they suspect of being connected to criminal activity. The owner then bears the burden of challenging the seizure in court and disproving the government’s claims. Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime by cutting off the flow of illicit proceeds.
But a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties groups and lawmakers have been calling for the laws to be reformed, saying asset forfeiture’s perverse profit incentives and lack of safeguards leads police to shake down everyday citizens, who often lack the resources to fight the seizure of their property in court.
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Mingles with Jingles Episode 209 – British Battleships in World of Warships
Published on 7 Aug 2017
In which I get all excited about incoming British battleships in World of Warships, and then I see the provisional stats of the higher tier ones and read what it is that makes them “special” and start to get a little worried. I’ve stockpiled hundreds of thousands of free xp for these thing, please don’t let them be shit!
Actually you may be able to help me with that. And then I speculate on what happens when a game starts running out of things it can do to make new units different…
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The worst part of being a pet owner
… is when it’s time to say goodbye. RIP Harry Paget Flashman, 2003-2017.
Harry Paget Flashman on the left, with Cinders and Ash, making sure that nobody can make the bed right now. October 2010.
Our cat population has now shrunk down to a single, elderly survivor (that’s Ash in the right foreground … he’s 17 now). Ash is now partially deaf and quite frail and had been looking less and less interested in life lately, and had developed an aversion to using the kitty litter, so we’ve been trying to prepare ourselves to say goodbye to him. Instead, around midnight on Sunday, it was Harry who suddenly needed to be taken to the emergency vet for evaluation. We’d had him in for treatment of a urinary blockage last fall, and it seemed that the problem was back. The vet was unwilling to operate on an elderly cat for this, given that Harry had also developed a heart murmur, so we crossed our fingers that the (expensive) treatment wouldn’t be necessary again. That was not to be, so we had to make the decision for euthanasia rather than put him through more stress and pain with no guarantee that the problem wouldn’t be back in a week’s time.
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Tank Chats #15 Tortoise
Published on 25 Feb 2016
Tank Museum Historian, David Fletcher is currently unavailable, so rather than make you all wait, Curator David Willey is here to present Tortoise!
The A39 Tortoise is the ultimate manifestation of the British concept of the heavily armoured, but slow, ‘Infantry’ tank.
It was built in 1947, making it a contemporary of the highly successful Centurion tank. The Tortoise proved to be too slow and unwieldy for the conditions of modern warfare and was a nightmare to transport.
The only service that the Tortoise had was when two tanks took part in trials in Germany in 1948. The Tank Museum’s Tortoise is now the only surviving example.
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QotD: The next “Carrington Event”
The last one happened in 1859. The Earth was hit by a cloud of magnetized plasma from a “coronal mass ejection” — something that our Sun often does. Most fly off in other directions; the last that barely missed us was in July, 2012. (You can tell it missed from the fact that the Internet still exists.) The last bullseye on our beloved planet was named after the brilliant English amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington (1826–75), who, in the course of figuring out what happened, demonstrated the existence of “solar flares.”
He was trying to explain why telegraph operators all over the world, on the 1st of September, 1859, were suddenly getting electric shocks; and then, prior to the whole cable system going down, why some had been able to send and receive messages even after disconnecting their power. Too, why auroras had lit up the night sky at temperate latitudes so bright people could read newspapers by it; or why those at higher elevations near the equator could enjoy the aurora borealis and the aurora australis — simultaneously.
Now, the world a sesquicentury ago was not so dependent upon electricity as it is today. And the system of telegraphy was so ridiculously simple, that it was soon repaired. I daresay Morse Code is worth learning in preparation for the next Carrington Event — which, when it comes, we will be able to predict, at best, a few hours in advance. (Other cosmic events might impinge on our lifestyles meanwhile, but I like to consider my apocalypses one at a time.)
Gentle reader may do a mental inventory of the gizmos in his environment that are connected directly or indirectly to the power grid. Then add in anything that contains a computer chip, whether it happened to be “on” or “off” when the Earth’s magnetic field was impacted. For I assume it will all turn “on” of its own, for a brief but memorable interval.
The “beauty” (as they say in Cape Breton) is that we have no back-up system, and moreover, there can be no back-up, except what we can rig from horse, or paddle. For we have made ourselves totally dependent upon sparks.
On the plus side, the environmentalists may exult, because the quick reduction of the world’s population to post-Plague mediaeval levels could prove a lucky break for the other endangered species.
It will, even more happily, improve national security for the survivors in USA. For the same magnetic storm that makes the cities (and towns) of America uninhabitable will also have disabled the military capacities of Russia, China, and Iran. If they want to come at us they will have to do so in sailing ships. Moreover, the depopulation of Mexico will probably reduce the invasion threat from there, whether or not Donald Trump is President.
David Warren, “The highest tech”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-08-22.
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