Archive for January 2015
Police shooting of unarmed man with hands up: No accountability
Interesting that, although 4 officers saw that the shooting was totally unjustified, the department still protects the policeman who shot the man to death. The police protect their own. Tom Jackman reports in the Washington Post:
John B. Geer stood with his hands on top of the storm door of his Springfield, Va., townhouse and calmly said to four Fairfax County police officers with guns pointed at him: “I don’t want anybody to get shot . . . .And I don’t wanna get shot, ’cause I don’t want to die today.”
But as one officer tried to ease Geer through the standoff, another officer, Adam D. Torres, shot and killed Geer from 17 feet away, telling investigators that he saw Geer move his hands to his waist and thought he might be reaching for a weapon, according to newly released documents from the county.
The other three officers, and a lieutenant watching from a distance, said they saw no such thing, the documents show.
How and why Geer died that afternoon in August 2013 after police responded to a domestic dispute at his home have remained a mystery, as police and prosecutors have declined to comment on the case for 17 months. But Friday night, under a court order obtained by lawyers for the Geer family, Fairfax released more than 11,000 pages of documents that shed new light on the police shooting.
The other officers contradicted Torres’s story, all agreeing that Geer had his hands above his shoulders, did not move them to his waist and was unarmed when he was shot.
The documents also show that Torres was involved in an argument with his wife in the 16 minutes leading up to his arrival at Geer’s home that may have caused him to miss key facts about Geer and the situation at the townhouse. He also did not issue a warning to Geer before he pulled the trigger.“When the shot happened, his hands were up,” Officer Rodney Barnes, who had been talking to Geer at the moment of the shooting, told investigators that evening. “I’m not here to throw [Torres] under the bus or anything like that, but I didn’t see what he saw.”
The documents, which include police investigative reports, transcripts, timelines, photos and dispatcher audiotapes, indicate that Torres said he considered Geer “a credible threat,” because he had placed a holstered gun at his feet at the beginning of the standoff. But the other three officers told investigators that they never considered firing at Geer.
“It’s not good,” Officer David Parker, who was crouching 15 feet behind Torres, told investigators. “He killed that guy and he didn’t have to.”
But Torres said he thought Geer could have had another weapon hidden at his waist. “It was not accidental,” Torres told investigators. “No, it was justified. I have no doubt about that at all. I don’t feel sorry for shooting the guy at all.”
The files also reveal for the first time why the Fairfax prosecutor shifted the case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria: an internal affairs investigation into a loud, angry “meltdown” Torres had in the Fairfax County Courthouse. In that incident, five months before the Geer shooting, Torres repeatedly cursed at an assistant county prosecutor and stormed out of the courthouse, according to the prosecutor’s statement included in the released documents.
But county police refused to make the internal affairs file available to Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh. A frustrated Morrogh has said he passed the investigation to the Justice Department because he was unable to get anywhere with the Fairfax police department. [A policeman shot and killed someone who was unarmed with his hands raised, but the department still protects him: that is the situation with the police in the US today. – LG]
Mike Lieberman, an attorney for the Geer family, said: “If this was a similar situation involving two ordinary citizens, there is little doubt that any individual who shot an unarmed man who was holding his hands up in the air and claiming that he did not want to hurt anyone would have been arrested and charged.“Within days of the shooting, the police department, at the highest levels, knew of the gross discrepancies between Officer Torres’s version of the events and the accounts provided by every other eyewitness.” . . .
Why cops should be closely monitored and do not deserve automatic respect
Read this. Decorated police officers. And note that the city fought fiercely to avoid paying compensation to the victim’s family. Disgusting.
Fibonacci sequence used visually
What is that? Becky Ferreira explains at Motherboard:
The geometric beauty of the Fibonacci sequence is frequently expressed in nature, from the fractal growth of plants to the spiral arms of galaxies. It’s no surprise that such an elemental pattern in the universe has also inspired countless works of art, including, most recently, a series of mesmerizing moving sculptures designed and 3D-printed by artist John Edmark. The final result was posted this week on Vimeo, and it’s definitely worthy of a “whoa, dude.”
Edmark, who teaches design at Stanford University, created these trippy visuals with the Fibonacci sequence very much in mind. “These are 3D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light,” Edmark explained in the video’s summary.
“The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers,” he continued. “The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the sculpture turns 137.5º—the golden angle. If you count the number of spirals on any of these sculptures you will find that they are always Fibonacci numbers.”
So basically, the extra detail provided by the strobe light and shutter speed creates an optical illusion of lifelike motion from the sculptures. Even without the animation enhancement, the sculpture would still produce an uncanny mobility, but slowing the process down makes the piece look even more detailed and biological. . .
Prime numbers and the story behind a proof
Very intriguing article in the New Yorker by Alec Wilkinson about Yitang Zhang, “a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving a problem that had been open for more than a hundred and fifty years.”
From the article:
Prime numbers have so many novel qualities, and are so enigmatic, that mathematicians have grown fetishistic about them. Twin primes are two apart. Cousin primes are four apart, sexy primes are six apart, and neighbor primes are adjacent at some greater remove. From “Prime Curios!,” by Chris Caldwell and G. L. Honaker, Jr., I know that an absolute prime is prime regardless of how its digits are arranged: 199; 919; 991. A beastly prime has 666 in the center. The number 700666007 is a beastly palindromic prime, since it reads the same forward and backward. A circular prime is prime through all its cycles or formulations: 1193, 1931, 9311, 3119. There are Cuban primes, Cullen primes, and curved-digit primes, which have only curved numerals—0, 6, 8, and 9. A prime from which you can remove numbers and still have a prime is a deletable prime, such as 1987. An emirp is prime even when you reverse it: 389, 983. Gigantic primes have more than ten thousand digits, and holey primes have only digits with holes (0, 4, 6, 8, and 9). There are Mersenne primes; minimal primes; naughty primes, which are made mostly from zeros (naughts); ordinary primes; Pierpont primes; plateau primes, which have the same interior numbers and smaller numbers on the ends, such as 1777771; snowball primes, which are prime even if you haven’t finished writing all the digits, like 73939133; Titanic primes; Wagstaff primes; Wall-Sun-Sun primes; Wolstenholme primes; Woodall primes; and Yarborough primes, which have neither a 0 nor a 1.
Roald Dahl on vaccination
Robbie Gonzalez writes at io9:
Roald Dahl – author of such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda – lost his eldest daughter, Olivia, to measles in 1962. Twenty-six years later, he penned a cogent and gut-wrenching plea to parents, urging them have their children vaccinated against the disease,
In light of measles’ recent resurgence in the United States, Dahl’s take on the seriousness of the disease, the importance of immunization, and the inanity of refusing to vaccinate “out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear,” is as relevant today as it was when it appeared, in 1988, in a pamphlet published by the Sandwell Health Authority.
Measles: A Dangerous Illness
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.
On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.
It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.
Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.
LET THAT SINK IN.
Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.
So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised?
They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.
So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised.
The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.
Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.
Dahl’s letter remains eerily appropriate today, in light of the ongoing and expanding measles outbreak centered in California. More than 100 cases have now been confirmed in 14 states across the U.S., including Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington state. . .
From a report in the NY Times:
in California, anti-vaccine parents whose children have endured bouts of whooping cough and chickenpox largely defended their choice to raise their children on natural foods, essential oils and no vaccinations.
“There is absolutely no reason to get the shot,” said Crystal McDonald, whose 16-year-old daughter was one of 66 students sent home from Palm Desert High School for the next two weeks because they did not have full measles immunizations.
I don’t know whether Crystal McDonald is in fact as stupid as a box of rocks, but the emphasized statement is obviously, screamingly false. She claims to have done research into the issue, but in all her research she never noticed one single reason to get a vaccination and be immunized against the illness. This is a woman who totally fails the parenting test because she simply cannot read or reason.
How Guantánamo Diary Escaped The Black Hole And Got Past The Censors (Mostly)
Cora Currier reports at The Intercept:
The first word of Guantánamo Diary is a black bar.
The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.
The diary was finally published last week, more than nine years after Slahi wrote it, and it jumped onto bestseller lists. But the details of how his lawyers fought for its release are still under seal – highlighting the secrecy that still surrounds everything to do with the U.S. military prison and the 122 men who remain there.
“The starting point is that everything that Mohamedou says, like anything that any Guantanamo detainee says, is considered classified and has to be cleared by the government,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who was involved in the negotiations for the manuscript’s release.
Slahi, a 44-year-old Mauritanian educated in Germany, was rendered by the CIA to prison in Jordan in late 2001, then held by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The government claimed that Slahi had been an al Qaeda recruiter. He admits that he went to Afghanistan in 1990 to fight against the communist government [a fight, it should be noted, actively supported by the US with weapons and money—that is, he was in effect fighting on behalf of the US. – LG]; his brother-in-law was an adviser to Osama Bin Laden; and he’d met one of the 9/11 plotters in Germany. But Slahi maintains that he’d had nothing to do with al Qaeda since 1992, and the U.S. has never charged him with a crime.
Slahi began to write his memoir in the summer of 2005, soon after he first met with attorneys. But, consistent with its policy of censoring communications from detainees, the government refused to approve it for release: Instead, the manuscript sat in a facility near Washington D.C., off-limits to anyone without the right security clearance. His attorneys, Shamsi said, fought to get it declassified, but that litigation remains under seal. Once they obtained an unclassified version, it could still only be read by Slahi’s legal team. It took further negotiations to get the government to approve it for public release.
By the time the editor Larry Siems got hold of the manuscript in 2012, volumes of information about Slahi’s case had come into the public record. In 2006, the government released transcripts from hearings evaluating prisoners’ detention status, Slahi’s among them. Reports from the Justice Department and the Senate Armed Services Committee detailed his interrogation. Documents from a federal court challenge revealed aspects of the government’s intelligence against him.
Siems was able to cross-reference these materials to establish the chronology of Slahi’s narrative, in which all dates have been redacted.
For instance, Slahi writes:
“He dropped me on the dirty floor. The room was dark as ebony. [Redacted] started playing a track very loudly—I mean very loudly. The song was, “Let the bodies hit the floor.” I might never forget that song. At the same time, [redacted] turned on some colored blinkers that hurt the eyes. “If you fucking fall asleep, I’m gonna hurt you, he said.”
The Senate report recounts a July 8, 2003 session where Slahi was “exposed to variable lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool’s ‘Let the Bodies Hit [the] Floor.”
“He’s a remarkably accurate historian of his own experience. His account just lines up with publicly available information,” said Siems.
Some of Slahi’s lawyers have security clearance, and could read the full manuscript, but they are barred from talking about what might be behind the redactions. “These were not conversations that I could have with them,” said Siems. . .
US conduct has been illegal, immoral, and shameful, and saying that terrorists are even worse is scarcely an excuse. Much of the US conduct is strongly reminiscent of the Soviet gulag and torture chambers of the KGB. And none who were responsible, from the hands-on torturers and murders to those in the White House and CIA who ordered the actions, have faced any accountability, a decision solely due to Barack Obama, a man who protects torturers and murders and punishes those who try to reveal what the US has done.
Later in that report:
For Larry Siems, censorship is at the core of Slahi’s story, and while the redactions sometimes impede his narrative, they serve a literary function as well.
“Secrecy was imposed in order for abuse to happen, and then more secrecy was imposed in order to cover it up,” said Siems. “The redactions are like the fingerprints of that longstanding censorship regime.”
The redactions often appear to cover up details of the accusations leveled against Slahi, and the questions asked of him during interrogations. That gives the impression that the book elides the murky parts of his case, Siems says, when in fact, “he’s really open and transparent about the charges against him. It looks like information is being withheld but it’s not him that’s doing it.”
Comparison shave of Wolfman and LASSC razors, plus new Wholly Kaw soap and aftershave
What a morning: printer failure, trips to Staples, searching HP’s amazingly unhelpful Website for support info, etc. Frustrating, but thank heavens I was doing it on the good mood of a great shave.
I picked my Monarch brush, and my new Wholly Kaw Fougère Bouquet shaving soap made a really good lather. I started with a dampish brush, loaded for a few seconds, added a driblet of water, and loaded more—and the lather was thick and creamy: photogenic lather (and very effective—not just a pretty face).
WolfmanRazors.com makes also the BBS-1 razor for Los Angeles Shaving Soap Company, but his own line is a little different.
That’s the BBS-1 on the left and the Wolfman WR1-SB on the right. Note the interesting knurling patterns: not the standard diamond chequering.
The first shave with the BBS-1 was slightly harsh, with the WR1-SB totally comfortable—but I had used different blades. Today I loaded the BBS-1 with the same blade as the WR1-SB, a Voskhod, and compared the two.
Total comfort from the BBS-1: a different blade can make a big difference, so keep that in mind when you get a new razor. Both razors were in the very comfortable, very efficient category, and I got a BBS result.
Both razors are quite good, and you quickly learn each, unconsciously making appropriate angle adjustments as needed. But definitely always do renewed blade exploration with a new razor. If you don’t, you may not realize how good the new razor is.
I also got the sample of Wholly Kaw’s Fougère Bouquet aftershave. I sprayed some in the palm of my hand and applied. Wonderful fragrance—the soap’s fragrance was good but a little on the light side, I thought. But the aftershave was good, if somewhat heavy on the menthol for me. I am not one who enjoys seeing just how much menthol I can stand. Menthol, for me, is definitely in the “less is more” category. The aftershaves I like that have menthol have just enough so that you’re not sure it does have menthol. It’s cooling, but just slightly. So I’m a menthol wimp.
Still, I love the fragrance, and I imagine menthol fans will like the hit of cold.
Great shave, and just as well—it kept my mood level during the printer struggle.
Indisputable proof that prosecutors and politicians are penalized when they hold police accountable
Why it is so very difficult to reform police departments: because they like things the way they are and they are willing to fight dirty. Shaun King writes at Daily Kos:
When police officers shot and killed James Boyd, a homeless, mentally ill man they confronted for illegally sleeping in the mountains, the body camera footage of the incident was so disturbing that the local DA, Kari Brandenburg, recently decided to indict the officers and take the case to court.
Albuquerque, NM, somewhat shockingly to outsiders who don’t think of the city as being notorious for police violence, was reviewed by the Department of Justice and given a scathing review. The court monitored actions required by the DOJ will go into effect soon, but conditions have deteriorated so badly in the city that a resident of Albuquerque is now over 25 times more likely to be shot and killed by an officer there than they would be in New York City.
These problems are bad for everyone—ranging from the citizens who suffer the violence, to the public servants of Albuquerque who are widely branded as irresponsible and violence prone, to the business and tourism industries who may opt to distance themselves from a city mired in controversy of the worst kind.
That’s why when Kari Brandenburg took the rare step to pursue charges against the officers who killed James Boyd, that it was a powerful signal the city was moving in the right direction. The police, though, have started to act out against Brandenburg and her entire office. Just a day after filing charges against the officers, another Albuquerque resident was murdered by police.
And when a prosecutor from Brandenburg’s office went to the scene and sought to attend an investigative briefing, as prosecutors had been doing for years as part of their collection of evidence, police wouldn’t let her in. They claimed that now that the DA’s office had filed criminal charges against a cop, they had a “conflict of interest” and should be excluded.“Clearly, this could compromise the integrity of the investigation of this shooting,” an outraged Brandenburg told KRQE of the police department’s behavior. . .
The Reform the Military Is Already Undertaking
Another in the “Chickenhawk Nation” series by James Fallows. Like the others, definitely worth reading. Really some good stuff in this one.
Great news: The FCC Just Required Broadband to Be Faster (and Big Telecom Is Unhappy)
Interesting development, and high goddam time, too. Our 18 Mbps download connection (via AT&T U-verse) is now no longer a broadband connection. Broadband, in the new definition, starts at 25 Mbps and goes up from there.
Read the full article by Sam Gustin at Motherboard. It begins:
The US baseline standard for “broadband” internet speed just increased dramatically—and so did the conflict between the federal government and the largest internet service providers over the future of the internet.
By voting on Thursday to change the definition of broadband upward sixfold to at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, from 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up, the Federal Communications Commission sent a clear message that the status quo is not acceptable, a view that is not shared by the cable and telecom industry.
“Today’s report offers a valuable assessment of US broadband and will hopefully serve as an impetus for meaningful improvements in the speed and availability of true high-speed networks for all Americans,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement. “We know where we need to be. Now we need to do the hard work to get there.”
The robust new broadband standard is just the latest evidence that the federal government is making internet policy issues a top priority, from net neutrality—the internet’s open access principle—to community internet networks, which are proliferating around the country. President Obama has spoken out forcefully in favor of strong net neutrality protections, and has made clear that he supports local efforts to build super-fast networks.
The new broadband definition, which was adopted by the FCC 3-2 along party lines, formalizes a rhetorical point that Wheeler made several months ago: 25Mbps is now “table stakes,” or a minimum acceptable level, for advanced broadband networks in an era of exploding bandwidth usage due to the popularity of services like Netflix.
“By changing this definition, the FCC has set a new bar that will get America thinking about how to meet it,” said Jim Baller, president of Baller Herbst Stokes & Lide, a law firm that represents communities across the country that are pushing for advanced communications networks. “This puts positive pressure on everyone to think about what we want our advanced communications future to look like.”
The FCC’s new definition of broadband means that 55 million people, or 17 percent of the US population, now lack access to advanced broadband connections. DSL connections, for example, do not meet the new standard. Moreover, 53 percent of rural Americans lack access to the new service standard, sharply highlighting the digital divide.
“There is a large, and unacceptable, disparity in broadband access between urban Americans and Americans in rural areas and tribal lands,” said Wheeler. “Despite the billions in network investment, progress in deployment of faster networks to underserved areas is too slow.”
The new definition of broadband service creates a fresh point of contention between the cable and telecom industry and the federal government.
Next month, the FCC is expected to follow Obama’s cue and reclassify internet service providers under the “common carrier” provisions of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Many net neutrality advocates argue that such a move would allow the FCC to ensure that the internet remains an open platform for free expression and economic growth.
The FCC will also soon decide whether to help two cities—Wilson, North Carolina and Chattanooga, Tennessee—that have asked the feds to preempt state laws that pose barriers to super-fast community networks.
Most industry giants oppose the government’s apparent move toward strong net neutrality rules, arguing that a tough new regulatory regime could stifle private investment.
The industry giants also oppose most community internet projects, arguing that they pose an unfair competitive threat to private industry. In a filing with the FCC last fall, AT&T opposed government supported community networks, claiming they would create a “non-level playing field.” . . .
Things change: 1 Tbyte storage in a very small SSD
More in the Mashable article by Raymond Wong. From the article:
Samsung’s Portable SSD (solid state drive) T1 ticks both the security and speed checkboxes, and does so in high style without going overboard.
The T1 measures 2.1 x 2.8 x 0.36 inches — smaller than a standard business card — and weighs a featherlight 0.9 of an ounce. It’s so light that it feels like there’s nothing inside its plastic casing, let alone 1 terabyte (TB) of storage.
Samsung says you can slide it into a wallet. It fits in my normal-sized leather bi-fold, but it just won’t close. So not really. It’ll fit in a clutch, small purse or pocket fine, though.
In the age of potential hacking, security is everything. The T1 includes AES 256-bit hardware encryption — real NSA-level protection. Locking up your data is as easy as installing a special driver and then creating a password. Be smart: Don’t use “123456” or “password.”
In addition to being safe from digital snooping, the T1 is also safe — physically. Unlike hard drives, which have platter disks and moving mechanical parts, the T1 has none. Its SSD nature means it can be thrown around like a hot potato and the stored data will be safe at all times.
Fast transfers
Waiting for big files to transfer is as exciting as watching paint dry. Depending on your drive and cable interface (USB 2.0, USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, etc.), your transfer speeds will vary.
The T1 boasts read and write speeds of 450 megabytes per second (MB/s) when connected through USB 3.0, which itself supports transfer speeds of 5Gb/s. In practical terms, Samsung says you can transfer a 3GB movie in eight seconds.
Spanish Peacekeeper Is The Latest Example Of Israel Killing United Nations Personnel
Murtaza Hussain wrote in The Intercept:
On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.
His death came in the midst of a recent flare-up of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, and Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations placed blame for the incident firmly upon the Israeli Defence Forces, citing an “escalation of violence [which] came from the Israeli side.” The exact circumstances which led to Soria’s death are still under investigation; Israeli officials expressed condolences for his death and said their forces were responding to fire in the area.
What is clear however is that Israeli forces have been killing an alarming number of United Nations personnel in the course of their recent military operations — and that UN officials have vociferously criticized the attacks, sometimes saying they appeared deliberate.
This past summer in the Gaza Strip, Israel forces attacked seven different schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, schools that had been serving as temporary shelters for the displaced population of the territory. Despite repeated warnings, condemnations and entreaties, United Nations targets were hit again and again by Israeli airstrikes and shelling during the conflict.
As many of 46 civilians are believed to have been killed in these attacks, as well as eleven UNRWA staff members. One particularly lethal strike on a UN-administered elementary school in Beit Hanoun killed 15 civilians and wounded 200 others. That attack reportedly sent shrapnel flying into crowds of families who had been awaiting transportation in the school’s playground. . .
Continue reading. It gets worse.
You can see why Israel doesn’t want to face an international court.
Some things should not be done for profit—e.g., prisons are now profit centers for banks
Hospitals, in my view. Courts. Law-enforcement (cf. civil asset forfeiture: very profitable, eh?) And prisons. Stan Alcorn writes in Marketplace:
Greg Cavaluzzi spent four years in federal prison, eating cold oatmeal and white bread for breakfast and bologna for lunch and dinner. So the first thing he wanted to do when he was released was to eat “something normal.” When his parents picked him up from Fort Dix in New Jersey, he took them to Wendy’s.
“We didn’t really talk,” he says. “We ate. We were just so happy to be next to each other.”
He ordered two bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, and paid for the meal with a JP Morgan Chase debit card featuring a photo of him in his prison-issued khakis, a backdrop measuring his height in the background. The cards are standard in the federal prison system for giving discharged inmates money sent by friends and family or earned at in-prison jobs.
Cavaluzzi’s meal cost about $10. Or as Cavaluzzi puts it: “Everything. It was everything. I was used to making $10 a month.”
He made that money as a librarian in prison, where wages start at 11 cents an hour. But those hard-earned dollars disappeared faster than he expected, and when he called Chase, he found out the reason was fees.
“It just seemed a little…” Cavaluzzi trails off. “It was sketchy.”
The fees on prison-issued debit cards were agreed to in a 2011 contract with a branch of the Department of the Treasury, which provided the schedule of fees below.
It costs 45 cents to check your balance at an ATM, $1.50 if your account is inactive for 90 days, $2 to withdraw money at a non-Chase ATM, and $7.50 to replace the card a second time within a year.
The absolute numbers aren’t radically high, but experts say even small penalties can be both more significant – and more insidious –for newly released prisoners, who tend to have less money and banking experience, and face many other barriers to reintegrating into society.
“It’s bus fare to a job, it’s a meal, it’s a room for a night,” says Karin Martin, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She researches debt and fees in the criminal justice system. . .
Continue reading. Video at the link.
Under Suspicious Circumstances, FBI Places Brother Of No-Fly Litigant On Most Wanted Terrorist List
The FBI needs better oversight than it now is getting. Congress spends too much time posturing and soliciting money to do much of its actual work of oversight. Glenn Greenwald writes in The Intercept:
In late December 2010, 18-year-old Somali-American Gulet Mohamed wasdetained in Kuwait without charges and tortured, almost certainly at thebehest of U.S. officials. Through a cellphone smuggled into the detention camp by another inmate, Gulet was able to call me and New York Timesreporter Mark Mazzetti and recount what happened; that morning, we both published articles reporting on the detention, and (with Gulet’s consent) Ipublished the recording of the 50-minute call I had with him, showing him in extreme distress as he described his ordeal.
After Kuwaiti officials concluded they had no cause to detain him, the teenager was told that he would be deported back to the U.S. as soon as his family presented a plane ticket. Once they did that, he was taken to the airport, only to be told by United Airlines that he was barred from boarding the plane because he had recently been placed by the U.S. Government (in secret, with no hearing or explanation) on the no-fly list. In other words – as has happened many times before to American Muslims – Gulet’s own government secretly exiled him with no due process by placing him on a no-fly list while he was traveling overseas. Only after a stand-off with the Kuwaitis did the U.S. Government issue a one-time waiver to allow him to fly back to the U.S. He remains on the no-fly list.
Once back in the U.S., Gulet (pictured, right) – who, to this day, has never been charged with a crime – sued the U.S. Government for violation of his constitutional rights, a case that challenges not just Gulet’s specific treatment but the no-fly process itself. The federal judge presiding over the lawsuit, Bush-43-appointee Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia,issued a series of rulingsdemonstrating clear skepticismabout the DOJ’s arguments in defense of the no-fly system. As my Intercept colleague Cora Currierreported in October, Judge Trenga rejected the DOJ’s argument that what was done to Gulet was a “state secret” and therefore could not be adjudicated by any court, thus ensuring the case would be fully heard.
As Gulet’s lawyer, Gadeir Abbas, told The Intercept last night, Judge Trenga has repeatedly signaled serious concern about the no-fly system, including asking why less restrictive means (e.g., subjecting suspects to greater airport security scrutiny, putting air marshals on their planes) couldn’t be used. The judge has also written eloquently about the substantial degradation and harm that comes to someone barred by their own government from boarding an airplane, with no charges to contest and no real process to challenge the prohibition.
One of the most important hearings yet in this case – the argument on the DOJ’s motion for summary judgment – was long-scheduled to take place this morning in Judge Trenga’s Virginia courtroom. Yesterday, the FBIsuddenly announced – via Twitter, a specially made YouTube video, and adramatic posting on its site – that Gulet’s older brother, Liban, has now been named to the agency’s Most Wanted List as its “New Most Wanted Terrorist.” The agency revealed that Liban is now charged with material support for terrorism for allegedly recruiting on behalf of the Somalian group Al Shabaab, and is offering $50,000 “for information leading to his arrest and conviction.”
Liban, who was working as a taxi cab driver when Gulet was detained and tortured, was one of his brother’s most vocal and eloquent advocates. I met with him several times in Washington, DC, and listened as he recounted with great sadness the psychological after-effects on his younger brother from his ordeal in Kuwait, as well as Liban’s own contained anger at being constantly surveilled and placed on the no-fly list despite never being charged with any crime.
In April 2012, I wrote about one of my meetings with Liban, describing the indignities he (and so many other young U.S. Muslims) experienced after going to the airport to try to visit Somalia for the first time, only to be told at the airport that he was barred by his own government from flying (at the time I wrote that article, he was unwilling to be publicly identified in connection with that event due to his fear that government harassment would intensify). The FBI claims he left the U.S. to join Al Shabab in Somalia a couple of months later: “Traveling with his U.S. passport, Mohamed is thought to have left the United States on or about July 5, 2012.”
I obviously have no idea whether Liban has done anything the FBI accuses him of doing: the indictment remains sealed. But independent of that issue, there is a serious question about why the FBI waited until the day before a key hearing in Gulet’s no-fly case to so melodramatically brand his brother as one of the world’s “most wanted terrorists,” particularly since they have had the arrest warrant for almost a full year. . .
What is beyond doubt is that the FBI has previously used dubious criminal charges, specifically terrorism accusations, to demonize and punish those who had the temerity to challenge the legality of the U.S. Government’s terrorism policies. One of the most egregious such instances involved Yonas Fikre, in a case very similar to Gulet’s.
In 2011, Fikre, an Eritrean-American businessman, . . .
A memorable commencement address from St. John’s in Annapolis
Bob Neidorf was a fine tutor, IMO, and also later became a dean. St. John’s College is based on the reading and discussion of the great works of Western civilization (though some non-Western titles may have been added). Classes are small, with a tutor (as faculty are called—not “professors,” since they don’t profess things: their function as guides and coaches) and perhaps 12 students; the seminar (which met in the evening when I was there) was about 20 students with two tutors.
At any rate, Neidorf one year was asked to give the commencement address in Annapolis. It’s short—less than four pages—and you can download the PDF and read it.
This was back during the Vietnam war, to give you some context.
The Problem with Unbundling College
Interesting essay by Daniel Luzer.
An interesting discussion in higher education policy today has to do with “unbundling” college. Like music, so proponents of the idea argue, we will soon see a world in which people receive higher education based on individual needs and desires. There’s no need to show up at the University of Maryland, after all, if you can just download all the courses you need to get a BA from colleges around the country.
College might become an on-demand exercise that has little to do with specific institutions. This is a popular idea, but is it a realistic assessment of what’s going on? No, this is bullshit, writes Derek Newton at the Atlantic
It’s a fantasy that higher education is careening toward an unbundled future of consumer choice, lower prices, and efficiency. Those making such predictions are peddling flawed analogies, while the technology they rely on is flawed. They just don’t understand the economics of higher education.
Higher-education consumers—students and parents—behave exactly the opposite: They shop for schools, not for professors. The consumer choice is for the bundler—the brand, the label, university—and not the individual course content. Consumers buy Stanford or Princeton in a way no one ever bought EMI or Universal. College data underlines this reality. For example, the 2012 UCLAannual survey of incoming college freshmen found that nearly two-thirds said “a very good academic reputation” was “very important” in their decision on which college to attend.
It’s an interesting take, but he’s overstating his case. Higher education will be unbundled, it just won’t matter for the way most of us think of college. Schools like Princeton or Pomona or the University of Missouri will remain more or less the same. It’s the schools that serve working people that will end.
College, as we know it (or as we know it) will not be unbundled (Newton is entirely correct about how this works). The upper-middle class in this country buys college in bundled form, and pretty much always has. You do not go to college specifically for skills development; you go to college for the college. The bundle, the whole experience, is the reason to go.
This is the problem with so much of this unbundling discussion. Proponents make it sound like technological changes will “revolutionize” education. As Jeff Selingo, a former editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote once , technology will give “students more options to take classes outside of their home institution, accelerating the pace to completing a degree, or serving as a supplement to a face-to-face course.”
Not really. We will not see college students in general “take classes outside of their home institution, accelerating the pace to completing a degree, or serving as a supplement to a face-to-face course.” What this means is that in the future poor people won’t have any chance go to college, because we’re not devoting the public resources necessary to make that happen.
It’s not about the American college system at all; it’s just about the colleges that the relatively poor attend.
In truth, unbundling isn’t about technology at all; it’s about resource priorities. It’s not that people are seeking out online education because the technology is so magical and wonderful that everyone flocks to it. No, it’s because since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public colleges has more than tripled. People are seeking out online education because the United States increasingly fails to makes real college affordable to working people.
The truth is that unbundled training is nothing new. . .
The FBI in action: Creating terrorist plots so it can disrupt them and get headlines (and ruin lives)
The FBI often acts in a manner many would call “sleazy.” For example, Lindsay Abrams reports in Salon:
In 2007, then 26-year-old Eric McDavid was sentenced to over 19 years in prison on charges of conspiring to commit environmental terrorism. Nine years into his sentence, on Jan. 8, 2015, he walked free, it having emerged that federal authorities withheld information pertinent to his case.
Just as improbable-seeming as McDavid’s release, 10 years ahead of schedule, are the circumstances that he and his lawyers say led to his conviction in the first place: His romantic feelings for a pink-haired, 18-year-old activist, “Anna,” who spent months encouraging him and two others to join her in committing acts of eco-terrorism — and who also happened to be a paid FBI informant.
To understand how this all could have happened, you have to go back a decade, to when the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and other environmental and animal rights extremist groups were considered the nation’s No. 1 domestic terror threat. (These days, the honor is held by the sovereign citizen movement.) According to the FBI, McDavid was the ringleader of an ELF plot to blow up California’s Nimbus Dam and other targets. According to McDavid, all the incriminating things he was caught saying on tape amounted to mere talk — and it was all instigated by Anna.
Anna told the jury in the McDavid case that she was recruited by the FBI in 2003 after infiltrating a group of anti-free trade activists for a college paper. She met Zach Jenson, one of McDavid’s co-defendants, at a G-8 summit, and, through him, connected with McDavid and Lauren Weiner, his other co-defendant. (Both Jenson and Weiner pleaded guilty and testified against McDavid in exchange for lesser sentences.) Anna spent extensive time and money bringing the trio together, at one point assembling them at a cabin, wired for surveillance, that had been paid for by the FBI. Once there, it was she who gave the group a book of (fake) recipes for firebombs, also provided by the FBI. The group did experiment with building a bomb, but maintains that they never made solid plans to blow anything up. Each time they showed signs of balking, recordings played at the trial showed, it was Anna who urged them to keep going.
Trying to rein in the right police have to break into your home in the middle of the night with no warning
And not only can the police break into your home, they apparently love to toss in flash-bang grenades, one of which landed on an infant before it exploded. (Infant was innocent of any crime.)
Radley Balko discusses the attempts to reform the law to restore presumption of innocence and require probable cause before turning the paramilitary groups loose on someone’s home:
The legislatures of two relatively conservative states are considering new bills that would put some restrictions on when and how police can break into private homes. First, in Georgia, “Bou Bou’s Law” would require police to show probable cause that suspects could be dangerous to police or could destroy evidence if police were required to knock and announce themselves before forcing their way into a home. It basically raises the standard of evidence for no-knock raids from reasonable suspicion to probable cause. The bill is named for Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, a toddler who was badly burned and nearly killed by a flash grenade during a drug raid last year.
But as Jacob Sullum points out at Reason, it’s far from clear that the new law would have even prevented the incident for which it’s named.
The cops who raided the home where he was staying with his sisters and parents were looking for his cousin Wanis Thonetheva, a small-time meth dealer, and they argued that his history of gun charges suggested they would face violent resistance.
It turned out that Thonetheva no longer lived in the house, where police found no drugs or weapons. He was unarmed when police arrested him later that day at a different location.
The Habersham County grand jury that investigated the raid nevertheless concluded that Thonetheva’s history justified the no-knock warrant. Even under the stricter standard favored by [Sen. Vincent] Fort, a judge might agree.
Assuming police could not meet that test and therefore had to announce themselves, it might not have made any difference, since the raid occurred between 2 and 3 a.m, when everyone in the house was asleep. It is doubtful whether the Phonesavanhs would have heard and understood the police, let alone that they would have had enough time to answer the door before it was knocked down.
Police are supposed to wait a “reasonable time” after announcing themselves, but it’s not clear what that means. According to a 2003 Supreme Court decision, the relevant question is not how long it takes to answer the door but how long it takes to flush drugs down the toilet. In that case, the Court said 15 to 20 seconds was plenty of time. For people awakened in the middle of the night, that is probably not enough.
And this gets to the heart of the problem. The no-knock raid is different from other raids in that it dispenses with the knock-and-announce requirement. This requirement, which dates back centuries to English common law, is part and parcel with the Castle Doctrine, the idea that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary and that even when police have just cause to search a house, residents should be given every opportunity to come to the door, answer peacefully and let the officers in, thus avoiding damage to their property and violence to their person. (It also gives innocent residents the opportunity to point out to the police that they have made a mistake.) Under the Castle Doctrine, suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The Supreme Court began chipping away at that presumption in 1963 with Ker v. California. In that case, the majority allowed for a home entry without announcement if police encountered one or more exigent circumstances, specifically if the police believed that announcing themselves would give suspects the opportunity to destroy evidence or to arm themselves. As Justice William Brennan pointed out in his dissent, the majority opinion does “obvious violence to the presumption of innocence.” That is, it begins its evaluation of when police may enter a home without announcing by presuming that the suspects are guilty — not just of the crime of which they’re suspected, but that they’re also capable of committing the additional crimes of destroying evidence and/or assaulting or attempting to kill law enforcement officers.
The case to which Sullum refers, U.S. v. Banks, in some ways represents a complete abandonment of the Castle Doctrine. As Sullum points out, the issue in the case is how long the police must wait after knocking and announcing before they can force their way into a home. But the majority goes about calculating that period of time not by estimating how long it would take a resident to come to the door to avoid violence and destruction of property — as it would do if it were starting with a presumption of innocence — but by estimating how long it would take someone to destroy drug evidence, as it would do if it were starting with a presumption of guilt. So while the court’s majority in Banks affirmed the knock-and-announce requirement, it dispensed with the very reason the requirement exists in the first place. It reduced the requirement to a mere formality, a kind of ritualistic but ultimately meaningless tribute to a time when the law took more seriously the presumption of innocence and the sanctity of the home.
If you’re asleep in a bedroom, there’s little difference in whether the police burst in without knocking; announce themselves as the door is coming down; or even knock, announce and wait a few seconds before applying the battering ram. The entire point of “dynamic entry” is to take the occupants of a building by surprise — to overwhelm them with force and violence before they have an opportunity to do much of anything, much less come and answer the door.
Once you’ve decided to use dynamic entry tactics, you’ve already dispensed with the entire purpose of the knock-and-announce requirement. In fact, when the police do knock and announce, any resident who does manage to open the door before it is blown open is probably subjecting himself or herself to a lot more danger. (You certainly don’t want to be holding anything in your hand.)
This is why the proposed Georgia bill is basically meaningless. . .
Continue reading. He goes on to point out that the Utah effort at reform is substantially better. From the article:
On the other hand, the reform bill just introduced in Utah is quite a bit better. The bill’s chief sponsor is state Sen. Steve Urquhart (R) and is the product of the continuing great work of Connor Boyack and the Libertas Institute, a libertarian think tank in Salt Lake City. The bill would eliminate no-knock raids for the preservation of evidence. It would require the police to show that a suspect poses a risk to their safety for any forced-entry raid (not just a no-knock raid), and it raises the standard of evidence to probable cause. It would require raiding cops to wear uniforms with large, conspicuous lettering indicating that they are police, and it would require all raiding cops to wear a body camera. Incredibly, in Utah (and quite a few other places) the warrants for these raids can be issued by magistrates and justices of the peace who have no training in criminal law. The new bill would end that, too. Most interesting, the Utah bill would statutorily override the Supreme Court’s decision in Hudson v. Michigan. In that case, the court found that even when the police clearly violate the knock-and-announce rule, any evidence they find in the subsequent search can still be used against the suspect in court. Under this bill, such evidence would be inadmissible in Utah.
The Utah bill hasn’t yet passed. I suspect it will be vigorously opposed by police organizations and will probably be watered down a bit if it does pass.
Video-recording cops in public places is protected by the First Amendment, but court rules that the police can arrest you anyway
The police can arrest you for doing something perfectly legal that they happen not to like, and you have no recourse: the police in the US can do pretty much what they want with impunity.
Here’s the decision by a Federal judge:
Christopher Montgomery, Alexine Fleck, and Coulter Loeb were all arrested in 2011 for separate incidents arising from their interactions at different times and places with Philadelphia police officers. Montgomery alleges that Officer David Killingsworth arrested him in retaliation for filming Killingsworth and other officers as they arrested people on a public street outside a Wendy’s restaurant. Fleck claims that Officer Alex Nicholson and Officer Jane Doe arrested her for objecting to Nicholson’s treatment of an intoxicated man sitting on a stoop on her street. And Loeb contends that Officer George Gaspar arrested him for photographing Gaspar as he escorted a woman from a public park. They each filed separate § 1983 lawsuits against their respective arresting officers, also naming the City of Philadelphia as a defendant.
Against the individual defendants, Montgomery, Fleck, and Loeb brought claims of First Amendment retaliation and Fourth Amendment malicious prosecution, false arrest, and false imprisonment. Additionally, Montgomery asserted a Fourth Amendment illegal search and seizure claim, and Fleck a Fourteenth Amendment excessive force claim.[1]
Although filed individually, these lawsuits were consolidated for discovery and summary judgment purposes. Killingsworth, Nicholson, Doe, and Gaspar filed a joint motion for partial summary judgment, asserting qualified immunity on the First Amendment retaliation claims. The court will deny Nicholson and Doe’s motion based on qualified immunity, for Fleck has alleged enough facts to show that they violated her clearly established constitutional right when they arrested her. But the court will grant summary judgment to Killingsworth and Gaspar, finding that the constitutional right asserted by Montgomery and Loeb was not clearly established in 2011.
[Emphasis added. – LG]Killingsworth, Nicholson, Doe, and Gaspar did not move for summary judgment on the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment claims and concede there are genuine issues of material fact with reference to those claims.
I. Factual Background[2] . . .
NYPD includes machine guns to handle protests
Amazing. The militarization of our community police departments seems to be picking up speed. Azi Paybarah reports in Capital:
New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton unveiled a sweeping new plan to redeploy officers in order to boost police-community relations, while also increasing the city’s counterterrorism efforts.
At a breakfast hosted by the Police Foundation at the Mandarin Oriental, Bratton announced 350 officers will be permanently assigned to rove throughout the city, with rifles and machine guns, in anticipation of possible terrorist attacks. These officers will also be used to assist on crime scenes, and help with crowd control and other large-scale events.
Previously, some of this work was done by officers assigned to local precincts throughout the city. Now, those officers will be able to stay in their regularly assigned precincts, enabling them to work in a more focused way on their beats, Bratton said.
Also, officers assigned to local precincts will see their work re-prioritized.
Bratton called it a “new patrol model for how we deploy resources.” . . .
And the story also is carried by CBS News:
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced Thursday that the NYPD is establishing a new anti-terror strike force.
The unit of 350 cops will be specially trained in high-tech weaponry to deal with protests, “lone wolf” attacks and evolving threats posed by terrorists, CBS2’s Marcia Kramer reported.
The Strategic Response Group, Bratton said, will be dedicated to “disorder control and counterterrorism protection capabilities.”
“It is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris,” the commissioner said.
Funding for the new squad is expected to come from both the city and federal Homeland Security grants.
“They’ll be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” Bratton said. “They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns — unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” . .
Continue reading. Videos at the link.
Interesting that Bratton is talking openly of using machine guns to quell protests. This is really getting out of hand.
Later On 