“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.

Seen on Twitter:

The Irish Copy­right Act appears to have been copied almost ver­ba­tim from the UK Copy­right Act. How ironic.

@sensiblestu

That’s prob­a­bly because the copy­right indus­try lob­by­ist who wrote the act sent the same file to the politi­cians he bought in each country.

Yet Another Reminder That Democ­racy Is An Illu­sion. On the exact same day that every­one was cel­e­brat­ing vic­tory over SOPA/PIPA, the US gov­ern­ment sim­ply used another set of reg­u­la­tions to nab Dot­com and seize his assets. The fact that SOPA was scrapped turned out to be com­pletely irrel­e­vant, they just found other rules to apply (or break).

As usual, it’s prob­a­bly not legal. But such tech­ni­cal­i­ties don’t mat­ter in the ‘guilty until proven inno­cent’ sys­tem in which we live. Exec­u­tive agen­cies exer­cise extreme lat­i­tude when con­fis­cat­ing assets, and vic­tims often don’t have the oppor­tu­nity to address the mat­ter in front of a judge for years, if ever.

[…]

You see, we don’t live in a rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy. Democ­racy is an illu­sion to make peo­ple believe that they’re free. Instead, it’s blocs of large cor­po­ra­tions who are really in con­trol. If the enter­tain­ment busi­ness wants Kim Dot­com to go away, the gov­ern­ment will invent or break any law nec­es­sary to make it hap­pen. They’re all in bed together.
What’s more, it doesn’t mat­ter which group or party is in power. Demo­c­rat or Repub­li­can, Labour or Con­ser­v­a­tive, Lib­eral or New Demo­c­ra­tic… they’re all for sale. Cit­i­zens con­cern them­selves with the out­come of elec­tions, invest­ing heavy emo­tional and finan­cial sup­port for ‘their guy’. Com­pa­nies just wait it out and buy off whichever can­di­dates win. [Busi­ness Insider]

Today is SOPA black­out day, as many promi­nent web­sites protest a bill which, if passed, would allow the copy­right indus­try to shut down any site that links to another site which con­tains links to what they con­sider copy­right infringe­ment, such as The Pirate Bay. There would still be ways around it, so I decided to exer­cise one of them today: I saved a backup copy of every post here, and inserted it into Freenet, where it is impos­si­ble for any gov­ern­ment to remove it.

Scared Sober: LAPD Plan­ning at Least 2 DUI Check­points this Hal­loween Week­end. The Los Ange­les Police Depart­ment wants to remind rev­el­ers this Hal­loweek­end that there are few things scarier than drunk dri­vers. In addi­tion to issu­ing a reminder about ways to stay safe while cel­e­brat­ing, they will be oper­at­ing at least two DUI check­points this week­end. [LAist]

I can remem­ber when author­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ments that set up inter­nal check­points of heav­ily armed police were one of those scarier things–they were shown that way in movies set in the Third Reich and Soviet Union, at least. Of course, that was back in the 1980s when peo­ple were afraid of being con­quered by the Soviet Union. They should have been more afraid that the coun­try would vol­un­tar­ily turn itself into the Soviet Union.

Hyper­in­fla­tion Spe­cial Report (2011) [Shadow Gov­ern­ment Sta­tis­tics]

A detailed look at what’s likely to hap­pen to the econ­omy in the near future. The site where this is posted takes var­i­ous promi­nent government-published sta­tis­tics that are widely accepted as reflect­ing the state of the econ­omy, and deter­mines what they would be based on the way the gov­ern­ment used to cal­cu­late them in the past before chang­ing them to hide the true eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion from the chumps voters.

I’ve observed that some peo­ple have the idea that the US dol­lar is a safe store of value, and that if you buy $10 mil­lion worth of US trea­suries, “you can assume that the money you put into the US is going to still be there when you need it.” I couldn’t rec­on­cile this idea with my own mem­ory of chang­ing exchange rates, so I decided to do a bit of dig­ging into his­tor­i­cal exchange rates.

Sup­pose a hypo­thet­i­cal rich Euro­pean has €10 mil­lion that he wants to keep safe as of July 31^st, 2001. He puts it all into Dol­lars, which at the time gives him $8,752,050. Now, ten years later, he decides to con­vert his dol­lars back into Euros, and he gets €6,137,480.09.

If our hypo­thet­i­cal Euro­pean had instead decided to store his money in Swiss Francs (given their rep­u­ta­tion as the least worth­less fiat cur­rency), his €10 mil­lion would have got­ten him 15,127,900 Swiss Francs ten years ago. Con­vert­ing those Francs back into Euros today gets him €13,249,166.10.

Finally, let’s sup­pose I had €10 mil­lion on July 31^st, 2001. I had to look else­where for the gold price in Euros ten years ago, but found that this would have got­ten 32,559.71 ounces of gold. Today, that would con­vert back to €52,544,860.

I think it’s pretty obvi­ous that if you’re look­ing for a safe place to store your wealth, the US Dol­lar is emphat­i­cally not it. In fact, attempt­ing to safely store wealth in any­thing other than gold is a good indi­ca­tor that some­one either knows noth­ing at all about eco­nom­ics (which is actu­ally the norm for Amer­i­cans) or else is pro­foundly stupid.

Fea­ture: A pound of flesh: how Cisco’s “unmit­i­gated gall” derailed one man’s life.

High-tech entre­pre­neur Peter Adekeye’s year­long night­mare began after he dropped his wife off at the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional air­port and headed down­town to The Wedge­wood, a posh bou­tique hotel. Inside a taste­ful board­room adorned with gilt-framed mir­rors, the US Dis­trict Court for North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, San Jose divi­sion, had con­vened a spe­cial sit­ting to hear Adekeye’s depo­si­tion as part of a mas­sive antitrust action he had launched against his for­mer employer, the com­puter giant Cisco Sys­tems. An offi­cial court video cam­era recorded the pro­ceed­ings on May 20, 2010—Adekeye affa­bly answer­ing ques­tions in an ele­gant black suit accented with a pale blue shirt and a coral tie.

At 5:15pm, how­ever, two plain­clothes women—the shorter one bran­dish­ing a badge—and two uni­formed police offi­cers entered the room. Adek­eye was con­fused, as were his two Wall Street lawyers and the spe­cial judi­cial mas­ter con­duct­ing the hear­ing. But the four lawyers for Cisco knew exactly what was going on.

“I’m from the RCMP,” the taller woman said, “I’m sorry I have to inter­rupt your meet­ing here.”

[Ars Tech­nica]

From this arti­cle we learn that if you annoy Cisco, by bring­ing a law­suit against them for exam­ple, they can get the KGB’s immi­gra­tion peo­ple to keep you out of the coun­try (and away from the court­room), and if you find a workaround for that they can get a pros­e­cu­tor to charge you with a phony “crime” and arrest you in the mid­dle of tes­ti­fy­ing for the law­suit (thus keep­ing you from being heard). Clearly Cisco is get­ting their money’s worth from their bribes “cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions” to elected officials.

In the end their use of bla­tant cor­rup­tion didn’t help Cisco, as they still lost the law­suit, so appar­ently their bribes where misplaced–it seems like it would have been more effec­tive for them to bribe the judge in the law­suit. Still, this case pro­vides an exam­ple of how cor­rupt the US legal sys­tem is, and how it can be sub­verted by an orga­ni­za­tion with a lot of money.

Animé Expo 2011 Spe­cial Guest Appear­ance: The LAPD Bomb Squad! [LAist]

The cops love these phony “bomb scares,” as they get an excuse to throw their weight around and bully peo­ple, while also ter­ror­iz­ing any­one gullible enough to take them seri­ously. Not too long ago I had the oppor­tu­nity to take an up-close pho­to­graph of a ter­ror­ist attack in progress (as defined by the LAPD). Cau­tion: if you are a cop, the fol­low­ing image may cause short­ness of breath, heart attack, loss of bowel con­trol, and gen­eral hys­te­ria. Run away!