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.

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!

Scenes from a Mil­i­ta­rized Amer­ica.

About a thou­sand pro­test­ers showed up at the Vir­ginia state cap­i­tal over the week­end to protest pend­ing anti-abortion leg­is­la­tion. Cour­tesy of Style Weekly, here’s how the Vir­ginia State Police responded:

[The Agi­ta­tor]

The third pic­ture, with the two masked sol­diers (excuse me, “police”) stand­ing in front of an aban­doned sign say­ing “No War on Women” seems par­tic­u­larly appropriate.

“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.

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.

The Evil Empire has done every­thing it can to shut down dona­tions to Wik­iLeaks, and it’s been pretty suc­cess­ful. I decided to try mak­ing a dona­tion of $100 using one of the alter­na­tive meth­ods avail­able: Bit­coin. This was a multi-step process. First, I had to trans­fer money from my check­ing account to Dwolla, which took four days. From there, I trans­ferred the money to Mt. Gox, which took another day. Once it was there I pur­chased $100 worth of bit­coins, which was about 7.14 at the time. Finally, I sent those bit­coins to the dona­tion address for Wik­iLeaks. The last two steps took just a few min­utes, most of which was spent deal­ing with the Mt. Gox interface.

Over­all, this was rather incon­ve­nient due to the has­sle involved in actu­ally get­ting the bit­coins. I expect this will only get worse in the future, as Bit­coin is some­thing of a com­peti­tor for Dwolla. Pay­pal has a long-standing pol­icy of cut­ting off busi­nesses which are in any way involved with alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies (steal­ing their bal­ances in the process)–we saw that with e-gold well before they were attacked by the Evil Empire. I wouldn’t be at all sur­prised if Dwolla either adopted an anti­com­pet­i­tive pol­icy them­selves, or else were ordered to by Gestapo agents.

The good news that once I actu­ally got my hands (fig­u­ra­tively) on the bit­coins, it was triv­ial to bypass the block­ade on WikiLeaks.

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!

Postrel: Need a Light Bulb? Uncle Sam Chooses. in Cal­i­for­nia, where I live, this plen­i­tude no longer includes what most shop­pers want: an inex­pen­sive, plain-vanilla 100-watt incan­des­cent bulb. Sell­ing them is now ille­gal here. The rest of the coun­try has until the end of the year to stock up before a fed­eral ban kicks in. (I have a stash in stor­age.) Over the next two years, most lower-wattage incan­des­cents will also disappear.

[…]

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expres­sion of cul­tural sanc­ti­mony, with a lit­tle technophilia thrown in for added glam­our, or as a round­about way to trans­fer wealth from the gen­eral pub­lic to the few busi­nesses with the know-how to pro­duce the light bulbs con­sumers don’t really want to buy.

Or, of course, as both. [Bloomberg]

Not con­tent with ban­ning cap­i­tal­ism, agri­cul­ture, and chem­istry (aka “the War on Drugs”), the Evil Empire is now ban­ning light bulbs. Of course, this is the same coun­try that pre­vi­ously banned toilets–there’s really noth­ing so minor or silly that the gov­ern­ment won’t threaten to mur­der peo­ple over it.

Did you know that six peo­ple were mur­dered in a bru­tal attack just a few days ago? The answer is almost cer­tainly “no,” because the attack I’m refer­ring to hap­pened in a for­eign coun­try, and the only U.S. Gov­ern­ment offi­cials involved were the ones who ordered it and car­ried it out.