Officer Regina Tasca Goes “Rogue” [Pro Libertate]
Every so often I run across a story about a good cop. These stories inevitably include a mention that the good cop isn’t a cop anymore because he or she was fired for being good. This particular article includes an unusually clear example of why it is that cops all seem to be vicious psychopaths–in Regina Tasca’s case, she stopped other cops from beating a defenseless man for no reason, and was then fired for being “psychologically unfit” to be a cop. Or in other words, cops tend to be vicious psychopaths because that’s a requirement of the job.
The Shadow Superpower. System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.
[…]
Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.
The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure — call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan — it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is número uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn’t snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century. [Foreign Policy]
This article, published just six months ago, is generally credited with the widespread adoption of the term “System D” in place of older terms such as “underground economy” and “grey market” among English-speakers with an interest in the subject. I expect it will become more prominent in the future, as the US becomes more oppressive and its “official” economy heads down the drain.
Government trying to deny Megaupload fair legal representation. The United States government has adopted a take-no-prisoners attitude in its prosecution of Megaupload, seeming to raise every conceivable objection to Megaupload’s efforts to defend itself. We’ve already covered the government’s attempts to block Megaupload from spending money to preserve servers that the company says contains data needed for its defense.
Now, the government has adopted a new tactic: making it as difficult as possible for Megaupload to obtain legal counsel. The prominent law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan has sought permission to represent Megaupload in the case. But in a legal document filed on Wednesday, the government raised several objections to freeing up money to allow the law firm to represent Megaupload in court.
As Quinn Emanuel noted in a Thursday response, the government’s objections are so broad that they would effectively prevent Megaupload from hiring any lawyer with experience litigating major copyright cases. Indeed, they could could make it impossible to hire any lawyer at all. It’s hard to see how Megaupload could get a fair trial if the government’s objections are sustained by the court. [Ars Technica]
From Ars Technica’s coverage of this case, it’s pretty obvious that they’ve never paid any attention to the US legal system before. Everything that’s happening in this case is perfectly normal for a case in a US Federal Court. Megaupload isn’t supposed to get a fair trial–after all, if the government went around giving people fair trials, justice might leak into their legal system and they wouldn’t be able to keep up their 99.5% conviction rate. Nobody who has any say in the matter wants that to happen!
VIDEO: Largest handwritten Koran in Kabul. One of the world’s most exquisite copies of the Koran, has been unveiled in Kabul. It is the world’s largest handwritten copy of the Koran. [BBC News]
Afghanistan is not a very safe location for historically significant religious artifacts. They’d better get that across the border to Iran, or into some other country with an appreciation for history and no Imperial Stormtroopers to set it on fire.
Gadhafi’s Son Built a Ship With Deadly Shark Tank Inside. Hannibal Gadhafi–son of the assassinated Libyan dictator–built a ship with a 120-ton sea water aquarium inside. Why? To put six sharks inside, including two bull sharks and two whites, the most dangerous in the world. [Wired News]
Sadly, the article doesn’t address the question sure to be on everyone’s mind: do the sharks have laser beams attached to their heads?
Non-Lethal Heat Ray.
The U.S. military has a non-lethal heat ray. No details on what “non-lethal” means in this context.
[Schneier on Security]
In this context it means “able to torture an entire crowd of people simultaneously at the push of a button.”
Suspected Carjacker Slices His Neck During Police Chase. A man suspected of stealing a car at knifepoint (and later using that same knife to slice his own neck for unknown reasons) was hospitalized after leading police on a chase through South Los Angeles into the Mid-City area. [LAist]
“Unknown reasons,” really? I think the reason is pretty obvious and am only surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Anyone who’s not either completely delusional or has spent the past ten years living under a rock knows that the US government routinely tortures prisoners. Unless you’re a masochist, why wouldn’t you try to kill yourself if facing capture by Americans?
A Year Later, Mysterious Space Plane Is Still in Orbit. The Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane gets more mysterious by the day. Designed to spend up to nine months skipping across orbits on its unspecified errands, the second copy of the Boeing-made craft has now been in space for a year and two days — and is still going strong. The endurance milestone is unqualified good news for America’s space force at a time when its funding and future missions are in doubt.
The latest rumor has the Air Force extending OTV-2′s time in orbit in order to perform close passes on the new Chinese space station, which has been in orbit since September but does yet have astronauts on board. Some analysts have noted that the X-37′s path nearly intersects with that of the Tiangong station. Others point out that the two spacecraft would pass each other at thousands of meters per second, making useful surveillance impossible. [Wired News]
It would make an attack quite effective, though–all the X-37 would have to do is launch a bucket of gravel in the right direction. It seems to me that this is meant as a message to the Chinese government, saying “Put astronauts on your station and we can murder them any time we feel like it.”
“I just happened to glance over and saw this huge chainsaw ripping down the side of my door.”. “I just happened to glance over and saw this huge chainsaw ripping down the side of my door.”
If the purpose of these raids is to take dangerous people by surprise before they can shoot back at police, how exactly does taking the door down with a chainsaw fit that strategy? [The Agitator]
As several people pointed out in the comments on that post, there is really nothing more ideally suited to making an armed citizen empty their gun through their front door than some maniac cutting through it with a chainsaw! As tactics to use against an armed drug dealer, I can’t think of anything more incredibly stupid.
On the other hand, what this sort of thing is very good for is terrorizing a mother and her very young daughter and making sure that they will never make the mistake of thinking they live in anything other than a hideously oppressive police state. That, I think, is the real purpose of these raids–they’ve got nothing to do with policing, and everything to do with state terrorism.
Sadly, it could have been even worse. They’re not called the Federal Baby Incinerators for nothing.
Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases. The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:
(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.
(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.
(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.
(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you. [Glenn Greenwald]
It’s pretty obvious that the U.S. legal system really has nothing to do with justice except through the occasional coincidence, in much the same way that the U.S. Constitution has nothing to do with the U.S. government.