Monday, October 29, 2012

Police Tactics



The role of the police departments in this country is changing. Originally lawmen were charged with the responsibility of keeping the peace in society. This meant that after some bad act occurred the police would arrive to sort out the mess. Jails were build as needed to accommodate the increase in our slowly growing prison population.

Over the years the police departments began to take a more proactive role in crime. Police agents actively sought out crime organizations to infiltrate and as "gang members" the police were forced into acting like the people they were investigating. As a result of being undercover these policemen were then, technically, just as guilty as the actual gang members who they are trying to catch. (Aiding and abetting?)

The acceleration of the drug wars marked the first major deviation in police tactics. Originally the nature of crime required a crime to occur before police could get involved. The change in police policy now suggested that the best way to prevent crime was to "get out in front of it". Police agents would infiltrate drug gangs by the simple expedient of supplying vital ingredients or equipment to aid in the commission of a crime. The reasoning went like this. Sooner or later the gangs would accomplish their nefarious goals so why not accelerate the process? Police would assist the gangs along the way to, say, producing drugs so they can harvest both the drugs and the gangsters in one tidy bundle.

The increase in arrests was impressive. Of course along the way mistakes were made so drugs and money went missing, and successful drug lords lawyered up and went free. But you can't win them all. There is no way to tell whether society got a net benefit from police assistance in drug manufacturing but the prison system began to swell.

The most recent iteration in police activity in "getting ahead of the crime" involves the Internet. By a strange quirk in the law a shareware service called LimeWire, with over 100 million users worldwide, is providing a virtually unlimited resource for inmate production. The service was originally started as a music club whose members were able to share their favorite music with each other. Members would upload their songs or albums to the server so others could download them. As technology changed video sharing became as popular as audio. Police cyber cops recognized a potentially huge bonanza of fresh inmates.

These new criminals are being harvested as a result of a quirk in the way a law "encouraging child sexual abuse" is interpreted. By some absurdly defective reasoning it is legal to watch anything online your heart desires, including child pornography, but, as incredible as this seems, if you download an illegal video for viewing later you have just committed a crime. This subtle distinction has put every member of LimeWire at risk and here is how.

Let's say you are looking for a classic video called "Lolita" starring James Mason. The LimeWire server performs a search for keywords and produces a list of movies to choose from. In order to see if what you want is in the list you must download the video to view it. Whether the video you got was what you were looking for not, or whether the movie was a Lolita movie starring a child pornography actor makes the commission of a crime possible without the downloader even knowing in advance whether the movie was what he was looking for, or more importantly, illegal. As a result of this absurd police practice thousands of people nationwide are falling victim to and are having their lives destroyed by accident.

It is up to society to decide whether it is better served by a police department actively seeking to add to our prison population by prosecuting nonviolent accidental victims of a shareware service, or not.

One thing is for sure. Affording the 2 billion we spend weekly housing prisoners in this country is busting budgets in every state. Scarce resources are going begging for more socially beneficial projects. Allowing the police department unlimited funds to prosecute "thought crimes" may be the stupidest thing we Americans can do ourselves going forward.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Global Positioning Accuracy -- WOW!



The Earth is surrounded by satellite network of 31 spacecraft equipped with incredibly accurate clocks. To synchronize these clocks with Earth time an adjustment was necessary because the satellite clocks gain about 1 billionth of a second, when compared with surface clocks, every three days. That means that time travels faster in space than it does here on the Earth's surface. If this time differential was not accounted for and adjustments to global positioning made, the coordinates provided by the satellites would be off by as much as 6 miles per day.

With measurements accurate to the billionths of centimeters and seconds it is difficult for me to imagine how anyone can doubt the conclusions our scientists have reached with regard to the birth of the universe. Taking the simple step from realizing one plus one equals two to measuring the volume and age of the universe only took mankind a few thousand years. And yet…

Accepting global warming, evolution, the "Big Bang" theory, and acknowledging the "God" particle seem to be beyond the imagination or understanding of our religious right. What could go wrong with giving them charge of the country?


Parmsplace

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Welfare

Just about everyone in America understands welfare to be a benefit to the needy. Welfare is kind of a fail safe for those without the means to survive without our government's help. This help usually comes in the form of food stamps and cash to women with children who have no other means of support. What the good and trusting citizens of our country don't realize is that the lion’s share of welfare in the US goes to the greedy, not the needy. Corporate welfare in the form of "loopholes" allows huge chunks of corporate revenue to be ignored for tax purposes, and yet every worker on a payroll in America sees every dime of his or her income taxed. In fact, hundred cent dollars are something the American payroll earner never sees except as a line item in a box.

So are tax benefits to corporate America welfare? Untaxed income to corporations for things like a depletion allowance (this is the oil company welfare program and amounts to billions of dollars annually) and for crop subsidies to our agribusinesses (which amounts to more billions annually) add up to many times what the government spends on food stamps and welfare for women with dependent families. The difference between what is welfare and what is not appears to be that the money given to a “person” is welfare and money generated but untaxed on corporate income is good for business and a job creator.

Another form of federal welfare which goes under the radar is the tax exemption federal workers enjoy. If you get a federal paycheck no federal income taxes are deducted from those earnings. Most people in America earning $50,000 or more annually are obligated to pay federal income taxes of at least $10,000. In addition to that they have to pay all or most of their own health care costs. Free healthcare is another privilege provided to federal employees. If these perks are available to some citizens they should be available to all citizens and considered welfare payments. Everybody should have free healthcare as long as every federal employee does, but for some reason our congressmen don't see it that way.

Clearly what is welfare and who is receiving it is a matter of opinion, but if we look at corporations and federal worker tax subsidies as free income, or at least extraordinary benefits, and are willing to call a spade a spade, that would make our federal employees and corporations the largest welfare recipients in the country. If we look at free healthcare for life for federal employees and look at what the rest of America's expected to live with we begin to realize just what exalted status our federal employees enjoy.

We have created a sector of our society which believes they are entitled to more than the rest. We have put some real low riders on high pedestals and allowed them to dictate policy to us, the peasants, as if they are distributing alms to the poor. What is amazing to me is just how many people in this country, those who are on the low-end of the totem pole, support the policies which keep them firmly in place at the bottom of the barrel.

(Sorry about the mixed metaphor.)

Thursday, October 11, 2012

The simple truth about truth

The truth is there is nothing simple about "the truth".

Truth is supposed to embrace reality, to conform to fact and what is accepted as common knowledge, and to fit into the belief systems we have established like those of organized religion. Guess what? All of the above criteria are subject to change without notice. None of the above "standards" which are designed to measure "truth" can withstand the test of time. Therefore, “the truth” is not absolute but subject to modification as new information becomes available.

What people are giving you when they are "telling the truth" is giving you a version of truth from their point of view. Frequently their version of truth is based on nothing more than hearsay, biased news reports, or hand-me-down beliefs regurgitated over the centuries and which may never have been true to begin with. For example…

Every truth the people in the Middle East believed about their life and destiny in year 100 BC was, for the most part, either turned upside down or severely challenged by the year 400 A.D. Everything society thought they knew about the Earth and sun revolving around them in the year 1000 was proven to be false by the year 1500. Everything the entire world had gained in knowledge about itself doubled from 1500 A.D. to 1850 A.D. By the time the year 2000 A.D. rolled around the knowledge base of the planet was doubling every other year. Incredible as it sounds, very little of what we thought was true one thousand years ago, let alone 2100 years ago, turns out to be true today.

A significant amount of what we were taught as children turns out to be false by the time we reach adulthood. For example, when I grew up we had nine planets. My favorite planet was Pluto. A few years ago Pluto was de-planetized and reduced in stature to a gigantic iceberg full of sand and dirt. So it turns out there is very little we know about our world today that can withstand the test of time. We are gaining in knowledge and experience at a ferocious rate. The new information we gain daily paints a different picture than the one we grew up with.

The universe, as it is now understood, is as misrepresented by the traditions of 7 billion people today as it was during the years when the Earth was host to less than 1 billion people and the consensus of opinion was the earth was flat. These distant ancestors of ours were certain their theory was correct; the church guaranteed it! Daily advances in all intellectual disciplines are so astounding anymore that everyone paying attention is gasping for breath.

It now appears as though rivers once ran on Mars! Folks, as we learn more, life just keeps getting better and more mysterious. Can real progress be far behind?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes, some beliefs impede progress. Intelligent people in this country still deny the truth revealed by modern science and insist that fairy tales and hand-me-down beliefs thousands of years old still hold water. There is only room for one correct sequence of events that contains the kernels of truth important for us to utilize going forward. It is important for our future generations to believe in a truth which contains as much factual knowledge as we are capable of developing. Superstition and innuendo offer no help when included in a foundation necessary to build our future. That is about as smart as building a home on a seashore cliff or below flood level. Unfortunately we still do both of those.

Truth may come in more than one variety. People equate “feelings", especially if they come from "the heart", as being the purest form of truth because they believe feelings come straight from the depths of our soul. It is important to note that just because we fervently believe in something, or someone like Jesus, our belief does not automatically convey the property of truth to our belief. Those less romantic believe truth must pass some form of empirical test, like a math test, and a theory must have some scientific verifiability before it can be accepted as truth. Pragmatists reject the "heart felt" component people use to justify their belief system. They believe feelings have no part in the truth behind the universe and "feelings" should be considered irrelevant to any meaningful description of “the truth”.

At any rate, the United States can no longer afford to have its belief system interfere with providing our children a truthful education. Our attempt to build a proper foundation in our colleges and universities for our children going forward must embrace the most current information available. Otherwise, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the planet just as those in the Middle East, stuck in Middle East beliefs, have done for thousands of years.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Prisoner Production Measures


Over the past five decades America has been invested in an ongoing policy aimed at, of all things, cleansing our society of every imagined threat to our 200 year old Victorian-style morality, or to our 2000 year old religious based 10 commandment code of conduct. During the process of cleaning up our society we have made victimless crimes our number one priority. We have built thousands of prisons and jails sufficient to accommodate an influx of millions of new inmates, staffed them with hundreds of thousands of jailers, and then massively increased government payrolls for local and federal law enforcement officers to feed the funnel.

Court officials oblige the need for an ever growing prison population by sending everyone not financially able to afford an adequate defense to jail. If the truth were known, our court-appointed system for defending indigent defendants is a farce. Think about it. Why would any legislative body vote to spend as much money to defend the accused as they do to prosecute the accused? That sounds self defeating to me. They might lose as many or more cases than they win which would be an in our tax payer face obvious huge loss to society and a good reason to stop prosecuting victimless crimes in the first place.

Nationwide statistics on time invested per case by public defenders on behalf of their clients indicates that court-appointed attorneys, on average, provide less than 8 seconds per defendant on any one case; this statistic includes capital murder cases where the death penalty could be in play. Folks, money talks, and most public defenders are dump trucks whose real job is to speed the accused into jail, not to keep them out.

Bottom line, if you are broke you are going to jail.

We could save the taxpayers in this country a fortune if we weren't concerned with providing the appearance of a fair trial. This is one of the best, or worst, arguments in favor of a dictatorship (what I say is what is true!). Image is everything in a democratic society and unless you can control your image by controlling the media you had better appear to be on the right side of law enforcement and the wrong side of crime (even if you are one of its biggest beneficiaries!).

This process seems to be irreversible. At any given time only about 2% of our society is behind bars, or in the system, so most of us feel immune to prosecution. Our society, however, delights in seeing our neighbors go to the gray bar hotel for no better reason than to provide fresh gossip for the coffeehouse. The interesting thing about the prisoner production process is that sooner or later it may expand to the point where it includes everyone.

By any objective world measure we are a jail happy and uniform crazy society. Our solution to the inevitable erosion of an obsolete moral code is to "fight another war" against any and all perceived immoral behavior. Legislators pass laws which they know will statistically slide another slice of our society into jail. Society rolls over on its brothers and sisters and accepts yet another limit to the freedom of expression here in America.

Fellow Americans, we have been so successful at identifying and prosecuting nonviolent victimless offenders of obsolete morality statutes that fully 86% of our prison inmates are in jail for victimless crimes. We are spending 2 billion a week prosecuting and incarcerating, for the most part, pot and sex offenders, whose only crime is sharing a different moral code of conduct than our legislators act like they adhere to.

If you follow the headlines in any given week you could get the very real impression that the lawyers who write the laws don't follow their own laws. If Congress was held to a strict honor code and members were forced to admit to their own law violations I wouldn't care to guess how many congressmen would remain seated, but I can guarantee that the members remaining wouldn't amount to a quorum.

As more and more citizens become outraged by the massive amount of money being squandered by law enforcement officials hypocritically trying to enforce antique moral codes of conduct still on the books, legislators will be forced to find fresh meat (legislate a new class of imagined offenders) to prosecute. Until citizens everywhere realize they are being swindled on a massive nationwide prison scam, more and more of our money will be wasted on harvesting new and different slices of society to feed our prison system.

The next time a politician puts pen to paper it could be your own slice of vice on the line and your own freedom in jeopardy. Beware!