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.