Month: August 2014

Columbus, Ohio, has a cop on the force whose feud
with his brother—while out sick he’s coordinated other cops to
serve a protection order against him, he’s gotten an arrest warrant
issued against his brother, and he’s threatened to put a bullet in
him and secretly bury him—has brought them to court and could cost
the city millions. Tommy Tarini, brother of Sgt. Steve Tarini, is
suing Columbus and its police department in federal court, accusing
the city of not taking the threats against him posed by his brother
seriously.

Columbus has tried to get rid of Tarini before. The Columbus
Dispatch
reports:

On at least two occasions, police and court records show, Steve
has wielded police powers in a family feud that has recently
spilled over into a federal lawsuit against the Columbus Division
of Police.

City records show that Steve has been investigated for lying,
not showing up to work, leaving early and not following orders. In
some cases, he was given a written reprimand or suspended. Once,
the city fired him, but an arbitrator gave him his job back.

Another problem cop who could end up costing taxpayers millions
getting his job back because of the
privileges enshrined in law for “public servants.”

The protests in Ferguson have exposed a
tension between two threads on the populist right. On one side,
there are people whose resentment of the federal government is tied
up with the idea that the local authorities’ hands should not be
tied when meting out violence. On the other side, a relatively
libertarian element extends its critique to the local police as
well as the feds.

I just called those threads “sides,” as though they’re
entirely distinct. In practice, things can get kind of tangled.
Consider the St. Louis/St. Charles branch of the Oath
Keepers.

The Oath Keepers are a collection of current and former
military, police, and public safety officials who have pledged not
to obey unconstitutional orders. Institutionally, the group has
been harshly critical of the cops’ behavior in Ferguson. Last week
it released a
communiqué that begins like this:

The events in Ferguson have shown us daily that the
looting and violence by a few is not being stopped, while the right
of the people to peaceably assemble and petition government for
redress of grievances is not being respected. The current riot
control tactics of the local police, rooted in outmoded techniques
developed in the 1950’s—and only made worse by the ongoing
militarization of our police—are failing the people of Ferguson,
giving them a false choice between rampant looting on the one hand,
and hyper-militarized police and curfews on the other (which also
fail to stop the looting, leaving the mistaken impression among
many of the American people that even more militarization
and curtailment of free speech and assembly is
needed).

Some earlier
comments from the Oath Keepers hit a similar note, declaring:
“The police should not be militarized in logistics or in attitudes.
The people are not an ‘enemy.’ Police should not make war on the
people.” The St. Louis chapter’s president, Duane Weed, has
a Facebook
feed filled with critiques of police behavior in Ferguson,
along with conspiracy theories blaming violence
among the protesters on agents provocateurs. The photo
above shows Weed at a Ferguson protest—he’s the one on the right.
The woman with him is wearing a T-shirt that says “National
Cannabis Coalition.”

Meanwhile: Last Friday, the St. Louis County Police Department

suspended Dan Page, an officer who achieved some infamy during
the protests by pushing protesters and a reporter
live on
CNN. That isn’t what got him relieved of duty. He was relieved
of duty because someone dug up a video of him giving a talk to
Weed’s chapter of the Oath Keepers. In his lecture, Page warned
that Washington was plotting to impose a dictatorship, offering a
conspiracy story of a sort that Oath Keepers often embrace. But he
didn’t stop there, or even start there: He also declared that the
Constitution is a Christian document, fretted that the military was
filled with “sodomites and females,” and went off on a variety of
other bizarre and sometimes offensive tangents. There’s plenty in
there to embarrass the St. Louis Oath Keepers, but the most
embarrassing thing for them should be the sight of Page
participating in the very activity their group just denounced. (“We
need officers focused on looters, not on bullying the media and
protesters,” their communiqué declares.)

Weed has
told CNN that Page was merely a guest speaker, not a member of
the group. And indeed, Page says in his talk that he didn’t realize
he was going to be speaking to the Oath Keepers (“I thought that
this was just a church meeting”), and he always refers to the
organization in the second person. He does accept an Oath Keepers
pin at the end of the video, but he looks a little uncomfortable as
he takes it; I doubt he ever wore it. But Page’s presence at the
meeting—and the friendly reaction he gets on the video—show how
entangled those two threads can be.

So does this Facebook post from Weed…

…with this weak caveat reserved for the comments below it:

The Page incident speaks to more than just the ongoing evolution
of the populist right. The point of
the Oath Keepers is to resist unconstitutional commands. If
just one of the officers deployed in Ferguson this month had laid
down his arms and refused to restrict people’s right to free
assembly, the effect could have been huge. Instead, the biggest
incident involving a cop connected to the Oath Keepers featured a
man who interacted with nonviolent people by literally pushing
them around. He wasn’t a member of the group, but he was the
only guy bringing their name into the news. Evidently, either the
St. Louis Oath Keepers aren’t very good at organizing civil
disobedience or the police being deployed in Ferguson have no
interest in being organized.

I like the idea of public officials defending liberty by defying
unjust orders. I’d like the idea even more if, at some point while
I watched those feeds from Ferguson, I’d actually seen it
happen.

Britain’s intelligence agency believes it knows
the identity of the man who beheaded American journalist James
Foley. Also, some are questioning if the video of the killing was
staged.

The investigation “is ongoing,” an unnamed police intelligence
source
tells The Sunday Times, but the alleged killer may be
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old rapper who was raised in a
well-to-do London home. Last year, he joined the terrorist
organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),
which is now wreaking havoc throughout Iraq.

The New York Times provides some
background on the man:

Bary’s father, Adel Abdel Bary, was extradited to the United
States from Britain in 2012 after a long legal battle to face
terrorism charges in Al Qaeda’s bombing of two American Embassies
in East Africa in 1998.

The younger Bary had considerable success rapping under the name
“L Jinny” or “Lyricist Jinn,” with singles played on BBC Radio and
much-watched videos on YouTube. …

Earlier this year, Bary posted on Twitter a photograph of
himself holding a severed head with the comment, “Chillin’ with my
homie or what’s left of him.”

Charming.

From
The Daily Mail:

Friends say Bary became
radicalised after coming into contact with extremists linked to
hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

A former friend said: “He had the talent – he could have been as
big as Dizzee Rascal. He was doing music with huge names in the
underground scene.

“People have got into his head – it’s transformed a talented
young guy into a vengeful extremist.”

Although Bary is a key suspect, there are
several other men also being eyed by British intelligence.

An estimated
1,000 Europeans have joined the Islamic State, half of whom are
from Britain. About 100 Americans have also joined.

Whoever actually beheaded Foley, here’s a twist: “I think it has
been staged,” an unnamed visual forensics expert told
the U.K. Times. “My feeling is that the execution may have
happened after the camera was stopped.”

The New York Daily News
explains that “several pieces of evidence that suggested the
video was a chilling bit of propaganda, but not an actual
decapitation.”:

First, although the masked jihadist can be seen
repeatedly drawing the knife across the 40-year-old war reporter’s
neck, no actual incisions were visible, the
analyst said.

Similarly, there didn’t appear to be any blood spilling from
Foley’s throat, and the sounds he made at the moment of his death
didn’t appear sound right.

The analyst also found a slight blip in the scripted remarks
Foley made in the video, suggesting he may have had to repeat a
line, which was spliced into the final version.

To be sure, the execution took place. It just may not have
happened as the video seems to show before it fades to black.

Read more Reason coverage of the ongoings in Iraq
here.

Boulder, Colorado, public
schools have decided not to install a giant rat cage intended to
frighten kids away from smoking pot. That’s great—but why was a
giant rat cage ever a possibility?

Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote about the curious
“Don’t Be a Lab Rat” anti-drug campaign last week. The campaign
was dreamed up by the state’s Department of Public Health and
Environment; as Sullum notes, its agenda is “relatively subtle.” It
purports to warn kids that the negative side effects of marijuana
are still unknown, and by using the drug they are unwittingly
becoming test subject.

Less subtle was the giant rat cage that state officials wanted
to erect inside schools. Boulder school district administrators
released a statement stating that no such cages will be featured on
school property, however, according to
The Daily Camera:

Boulder Valley School District, for one, already has announced
it will not participate in the campaign.

“We had concerns about the use of human-scale rat cages being an
effective tool for getting 12-to-15-year-olds to understand the
risks involved with their developing brains,” BVSD spokesman Briggs
Gamblin said.

Superintendent Bruce Messinger emailed all district principals
prior to the launch of the cages in Denver, informing them that the
BVSD administration would formally oppose “Don’t Be a Lab Rat” on
the grounds that “a human scale ‘rat cage'” may not be the most
effective prop for the campaign’s message.

I guess this counts as a slight win for prohibition sanity?

Hat tip: Greg Campbell / The Daily Caller

FYI: This is the logo of the
Fresno County SWAT/Crisis Negotiations team. 

For lots of coverage about why glamorizing SWAT might not be a
great idea, check out Reason‘s SWAT coverage archive. Or just go
straight to this new
infographic about the SWATification of America.

BONUS: First commenter to identify the Asian character wins a
no-knock raid!

Via John Q.
Public (@FCDAWatch).

A few months ago, Damon Root
noted a New Jersey eminent domain case in which the Casino
Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) was seeking to condemn a
home near the Atlantic City boardwalk so the property could be used
as part of a “mixed use development project” intended to
“complement the new Revel Casino and assist with the demands
created by the resort.” Since then Revel has gone bankrupt, and the
casino is scheduled to
close at the beginning of September. The Institute for Justice,
which represents the homeowner, Charlie Birnbaum, a piano tuner who
inherited the house from his immigrant parents, reports
that the CRDA is nevertheless pressing ahead with condemnation of
the property, for reasons even vaguer than its original nebulous
plan. “CRDA is not condemning Charlie’s property because CRDA needs
it,” says I.J.,
“but because it thinks it can.” 

Whether the CRDA is right about that remains to be seen. I.J.

argues that the proposed condemnation is illegal because the
CRDA cannot provide any reasonable assurance that the property will
be put to “public use,” because development alone cannot justify
the use of eminent domain, and because the CRDA cannot show that
the property is necessary to its project. I.J. says the CRDA’s plan
does not even pass muster under the permissive standard established
by the U.S. Supreme Court in
Kelo v. City of New London. That decision hinged on
what its author, Justice John Paul Stevens, described as a
“carefully formulated” development plan (which nevertheless
led
nowhere in the end). 

“CRDA had no plan for this property two years ago, and they have
no plan now,” says
I.J. attorney Dan Alban. “CRDA is taking Charlie’s property merely
because they think they can. CRDA should demonstrate some common
sense and common decency and announce that it will once and for all
just leave Charlie alone. That’s all he is asking for: to be left
alone to enjoy what is rightfully his.”

Eating too much salt raises blood pressure,
causes kidney failure and so forth. But how much is too much? The
U.S. Food and Drug Administration is trying to persuade the food
industry to cut back on the amount of salt in their products with
the aim of getting Americans to consume an average
2300 milligrams of sodium chloride per day (about a
teaspoon-full). The American Heart Association wants people to cut
back to 1500 milligrams.

The problem is that recent research shows that forcing people to
consume amounts of salt that low will most likely result in more
deaths than allowing them to eat the current American average of
3400 milligrams per day.

In fact, the New York Times reports that
two recent studies in the
New England Journal of Medicine found that consuming
between 3000 and 6000 milligrams of salt daily is not associated
with higher mortality. From the Times:

It found that people who consumed more than 7 grams of sodium
per day had a significantly higher chance of death than people who
ate 3-6 grams per day. People consuming high levels of sodium had
higher rates of heart attacks, heart failures and strokes as
well…

The second New England Journal of Medicine study

did just that. In addition to looking at high sodium diets, it
also compared the health outcomes of those who had very low sodium
diets. What they found was worrisome. When compared with those who
consumed 3-6 grams per day, people who consumed less than 3 grams
of sodium per day had an even higher risk of death or
cardiovascular incidents than those who consumed more than 7 grams
per day.

By seeking to impose, with the best of intentions, a
one-size-fits-all requirement in order to protect people who are
disposed to high blood pressure and kidney failure from consuming
too much salt, the health nannies may well kill more people than
they hope to save.

For more background on FDA health nannyism see Baylen Linnekin’s
“The
FDA’s Idiotic Attack on ‘Added’ Ingredients.”

Disclosure: My blood pressure was 105/80 when my physician
checked it earlier this year.