The militarization of law enforcement

From Salon:

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. 

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team. 

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart. 

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?” 

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution. 

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

Maybe it's just me, but I really don't like trust our government much anymore. There are of course, many brave and honest and good cops (I have a beloved nephew who is a cop), and many fine folks working in government. But bad stuff is happening.

Juvenal asked: who will guard the guardians?

This explains a lot about Chicago

Instapundit:

GANG VIOLENCE, TERRORISM, AND GUN CONTROL: I suspect, though, that the reason Chicago gangs aren’t targeted is that they’ve got a political accommodation with the Chicago machine. Law enforcement knows how to put a crimp in gang activity when it wants to, without engaging in the extreme measures here. If it doesn’t do that, the presumption is that it doesn’t really want to. 

UPDATE: Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance. “Most alarming, both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities—in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little impact.”

Big surprise. The Chicago Democrat machine is in bed with the Chicago gangs. Tom Wolfe explained it well in one of his best essays-- Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers-- available on Kindle!

Big city Democrat politicians buy off local thugs with government grants, easing off on law enforcement, etc. in exchange for political support and favors. It became quite a game in the 60's and 70's, and persists to this day. 

Business as usual, you might say. But some things are beyond the pale. There is no excuse whatsoever for cutting deals with thugs like that-- cutting deals with amoral men who reduce neighborhoods to war zones and waste lives and grasp power by inciting fear and hate and by laundering money taken from their neighbors at gunpoint. In their reckless avarice these men leave a trail of devastation and ruined lives. 

It's a disgrace to be in bed with evil on that scale. 

The gangs should be ashamed of themselves. 

The oceans ate their global warming

The AGW comedy skit continues:

Has global warming stopped? No - it’s just on pause, insist scientists, and it's down to the oceans

Huge amounts of heat – equivalent to the power of 150 billion electric kettles – are being continuously absorbed by the deep ocean, which could explain why global warming has “paused” over the past 10 to 15 years, scientists have concluded in a series of reports to explain why the Earth’s rate of warming has slowed down.

Global average temperatures are higher now than they have ever been since modern records began. However, after a period of rapid temperature increases during the 1980s and 1990s there has been a significant slow-down since the turn of the century, leading some sceptics to claim that global warming has stopped. 

A scientific assessment of the planet’s heat balance has found that the most likely explanation for the recent hiatus in global warming is the continual absorption of thermal energy by the huge “heat sink” of the deep ocean many hundreds of metres below the sea surface, according to scientists from the Met Office. 

Senior climate scientists said that they had always expected periods when the rate of increase in temperatures would level off for a few years and emphasised that the last decade was still warmer than any previous decade, with 12 of the 14 hottest years on record occurring since 2000. 

Professor Rowan Sutton, a climate scientist at Reading University, said the temperatures have levelled off in the past, the latest example being in the 1940s and 1950s when sulphate pollutants from the post-war boom in industrial production may have acted as a shield against incoming solar radiation. 

“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said. 

“Climate scientists absolutely expect variations in the rate at which surface temperature will rise….but that is not to say we understand all the details of the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said. 

The problem for the Met Office is to explain why the rate of increase in global temperatures has declined in recent years while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate. Sceptics claim that this shows there is not a strong link between the two...

Heh.

None of this was predicted by the models, on which warmists demanded we base the restructuring of global economics and government. Global warming "scientists" are now telling us that global warming isn't happening because hot water sinks.

At least the quality of the science hasn't changed.

Again:

“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause."

Some people call it fraud.  

The Western academic origins of China's One Child Policy

A great essay on the academic origin of China's One Child Policy:

In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Misadventures in Baby-Making,” we describe an academic paper by a Dutch mathematics professor that might have been one of the inspirations of the controversial One Child Policy in China. 

Here’s the story: in the early 1970s, Geert Jan Olsder co-authored the paper “Population Planning; a Distributed Time Optimal Control Problem.” He saw population as a mathematical constraint problem, where an optimal birth rate could be found: 

“Given a certain initial age profile the population must be “steered” as quickly as possible to another, prescribed, final age profile by means of a suitable chosen birth rate.” 

The model considered the natural birth rate and mortality rate, an economic constraint, and time. And like any good empirical scientist, Olsder makes this warning in his paper: 

“This paper is not concerned with the social and political problems involved in establishing the best mechanism for a program of population management….The optimal birth rate may unbalance the age distribution during the time interval concerned, which could give rise to economic and social problems.” 

He meets Song Jian, a visitor from China with a Ph.D. in engineering from Moscow University. According to Olsder, they went out for beers and talked about population planning. Olsder thought nothing of it. 

Song was a ballistics missiles specialist, but by the end of the 1980s he had established a theory of population control in Chinese political and science circles. Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the One Child Policy who served 10 years at the Population Council, notes in her book that Song formed his theory largely based on ideas from the Club of Rome publication The Limits of Growth — a 1972 Malthusian work that hinted at catastrophe if resources and population were not balanced. It applied straight forward equations to economic outlooks without data, an approach that economists have since dismissed. 

Armed with The Limits of Growth, along with computations and models that called for drastic policy change, Song took his hard science approach to powerful party leaders in Beijing. Here’s Song’s bio from the China Daily website: 

“With his knowledge of cybernetics, Song worked out a theory of a bidirectional limit to the total fertility rate. This helped the Chinese leader to formulate the state family planning policy, particularly the “one couple, one child” policy.” 

The rest is history. Three decades later, the policy has led to severe gender imbalances in some parts of China, which is also facing a potential demographic disaster due to its aging population. Ironically, China might have the opposite population problem now: too low a birth rate. 

For more on Song Jian and the One Child Policy, check out Mara Hvistendahl‘s piece inScience.

Western population control junk science is the foundation for China's One Child Policy.

The frauds and misanthropes who peddle this totalitarian trash bear a direct responsibility for China's brutal policy, which is one of the worst crimes against humanity in history.  

"... and on these faces there is no smile."

Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc on modern paganism and atheism:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers .... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true...

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

We are in a spiritual war. We of course always have been, but this century brings this war to a cusp. Our barbarians rule our entertainment and our arts and our science and much of our industry and too much of our government. Sometimes they're plainly menacing, sometimes exasperating, sometimes even entertaining. But Belloc is right. Awful faces are watching, and not smiling.  

Hitler finds out about the roll-out of Obamacare

Inevitable, but funny still:

Gee. When law-abiding people buy guns, crime goes down. Who would'a guessed?

Mystery: Virginia gun violence falls as gun sales soar

Excerpt:

“It’s quite possible that you can sell a whole lot more guns and crime is still going down,” [gun control lobbyist] Goddard said. “But is the crime going down because more people are buying guns, or is the crime going down because the crime is going down?” 

Goddard said he would not have expected a rise in crime from a rise in legal gun sales, because legal gun buyers are not usually criminals – otherwise they would not pass a background check to get them. “Predicting the actions of criminals by analyzing the behavior of legal gun buyers is not likely to be productive,” he said.

Gun control is worthless. It's a typical fact-and-logic-free liberal cause that ultimately causes far more harm than good. The only effective strategy against crime is criminal control, which greater gun ownership by law-abiding citizens can help foster.