Month: October 2014

Details from the
great site Photography is not a Crime:

Deliberations in the trial of Peaceful Streets Project
founder Antonio Buehler lasted five hours before a Texas jury
returned with a not guilty verdict Wednesday after an Austin police
officer surprisingly testified on Buehler’s behalf – most likely
losing his job in the process.

Buehler was on trial for an incident that occurred
on New
Years Eve of 2012 where he witnessed Austin officers
abusing the passenger of a vehicle during a routine DWI
stop….

Buehler probed the officers with questions as he took pictures
of the male officers holding the female passengers in a torture
hold, known as the Strappado where
her arms were cuffed behind her back and pulled upwards. Buehler
can be heard in the video asking officers, “What are you doing?”
Buehler described the hold as ‘being meant for causing extreme
pain.”

Buehler was arrested and accused of spitting at one of the cops,
Patrick Oborski. In the trial Oborski himself admitted it was just
a little spittle in the course of Buehler asking him questions, not
a full on contemptuous “spit in the face.” Buehler has a civil suit
against Oborski over the incident ongoing.

And Buehler had an unusual witness in his defense in this trial:
a police officer.

Austin police officer Jermaine Hopkins…was told by APD brass
that if he testified, he would lose his job by October 30th, which
is today.

Hopkins testified anyway, telling jurors that Buehler had broken
no law and that his fellow officers had violated his Constitutional
rights by arresting him.

Hopkins has a hearing tomorrow to determine his fate with the
department. He said he sent Buehler an email after seeing his case
and wanted to testify out of concern that Buehler’s rights were
being violated.

Hopkins said in an interview with PINAC after the verdict that
there are some good things about his department, but ulitmately he
has no regrets and that he did the right thing by testifying. He
also said if he could change anything it would be “accountability
at the administrative level.”

Buehler will still be in court over this incident in the future,
tho, with three additional charges and his civil suit still
pending. He discusses his situation in this video interview:

Jacob Sullum reported on how Buehler’s
civil suit was allowed to go forward against the police’s
insistence that Buehler had no right to film them back in July. All
of Reason‘s coverage of Buehler’s
case.

One pilot was killed and
another was injured today in a crash during a test
flight of Virgin Galactic’s space tourism craft, SpaceShipTwo.
SpaceShipTwo was lost. The jet that carried the ship aloft,
WhiteKnightTwo, is fine. This was the 55th test flight for
SpaceShipTwo and the 35th for WhiteKnightTwo.

Paired with the explosion of the
NASA/Orbital Sciences Antares rocket on Tuesday, it’s been a
rough week for commericial spaceflight.

Not to get all “Dubious
News Hook Lets Me Confirm and Blog My Preexisting Views,” but
human deaths have a way of attracting the attention of regulators,
and this
point from Rand Simberg in Reason‘s February 2012
space-themed issue is worth keeping in mind: Risk is part of
innovation, and we should let people continue to put their lives on
the line if they do so with full understanding of those risks.

[Good space policy requires] smarter regulation to encourage
entrepreneurship and accept risk. For instance, current law
prevents the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Space
Transportation (FAA-AST) from regulating the safety of passengers
aboard spacecraft; it is constrained to regulating only those
issues that affect uninvolved third parties.

The hand of the state has rested lightly on the space industry
so far, thanks to that 2004 law, which imposed an eight-year
moratorium on regulation. The view at the time was that until
private space passenger vehicles actually took flight, the industry
was too poorly understood to intelligently regulate. The moratorium
is about to expire, and the House is willing to extend it to cover
another eight years after flights begin. But the Senate is
resisting the extension, demanding stricter regulation while
simultaneously seeking to cut the budget of the FAA-AST. If the
stalemate continues, the industry could wind up regulated out of
existence before it even gets off the ground.

This FAA policy was hard won and may now be in jeopardy if
politicians get in the mood to Do Something. 

Fridays are theme-show nights chez Independents,
so tonight’s was a no-brainer. I MEAN YES-EAT-BRAINS-ER,
amirite?

On Fox Business Network at 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT
(with repeats three and five hours later), you will be treated
to:

* Daniel Drezner,
author of
Theories of International Politics and Zombies, on how
various schools of American foreign policy thought are equipped to
combat the triple-threat of
zombies, Ebola, and ISIS.

* Timothy
Sandefur, principal attorney of the Pacific Legal Foundation,
on the surprising legal, regulatory, and jurisprudential treatment
of haunted houses, psychics, and cannibals.

* Steve
Gonzalves, star of the paranormal-investigative reality series
Ghost
Hunters and Ghost Hunters
Academy, on his elusive search for a wandering spirit.

* Benjamin Radford,
Snopes.com contributor and
deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, on why
claims of the paranormal should be treated with a raised eyebrow or
three.

* Party Panelists Michael Malice
(n’er-do-well) and Jimmy
Failla (comedian) on
Halloween urban legends, appropriate/inappropriate costumes,
and important Hallow’s Eve trivia.

* Kmele Foster losing
his shizz in a haunted house (pictured).

No better way to come down after a night of drinking blood than
watching your favorite weirdos make merriment and at least some
public policy out of Halloween night on the television!

Follow The Independents on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for more video of past segments.

Steve Hanke, co-Director of Applied Economics at
the libertarian Cato Institute today released what he calls the
“World
Misery Index.” The United States’ position is not
encouraging.

The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave lands itself in spot
66 (the lower the number, the worse), right between Romania and
Hungary. The least miserable country in the world is Switzerland,
at spot 109. Our beloved northern neighbors, Canada, beat us by 30
spots. Perhaps the only thing it ranks #1 in these days, Syria is
crowned the world’s most miserable country.

Hanke explains, “Every country aims to lower inflation,
unemployment, and lending rates, while increasing gross domestic
product (GDP) per capita.” He created his ranking system “through a
simple sum of the former three rates, minus year-on-year per capita
GDP growth.” The “largest contributing factor” to American misery
is unemployment.

Earlier this year a Gallup poll found the percentage of people
who feel satisfied with their level of freedom has plummeted from
91 percent to 79 percent in the last eight years. Another Gallup
poll found that Americans think government itself is the biggest
facing our nation. Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille
suggested that people feel these ways because they’re true.
 He laid out several other indices: The Index of Economic
Freedom, which found “the U.S. is the only country to have recorded
a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years. The
overall U.S. score decline from 1995 to 2014 is 1.2 points, the
fourth worst drop among advanced economies”; The Fraser
Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World:
2013 Annual Report gave an even harsher
assessment, dropping the U.S. from 3^rd to
19^th in a decade; The World Press Freedom Index and the
Committee to Protect Journalists have also sounded the alarm that
press freedom is on the decline in this country. 

Here’s Hanke’s full index:

Politico Magazine has a
lengthy expose by Garrett M. Graff of the financially bloated,
systemically corrupt, often violent U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP).

Earlier manifestations of the CBP, such as the Immigration and
Naturalization service, have historically been understaffed,
underfunded, and largely ignored. But the post-9/11 hysteria
heightened fears about border security, leading to the creation of
the CBP under the Department of Homeland Security. It also ensured
that the new border protection agency would get a generous share of
the national security cash pie.

The CBP during the Bush years morphed into a goliath lumbering
along America’s borders. Tom Ridge, Bush’s post-9/11 homeland
security czar, recalled that “people just wanted to give me
unlimited amounts of money.”

The agency would eventually grow into “the nation’s largest law
enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying customs officers
and border patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual
budget”:

Customs and Border Protection not only employs some 60,000 total
personnel—everything from desert agents on horseback to insect
inspectors at airports—but also operates a fleet of some 250
planes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator
drones the military sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, making CBP both
the largest law enforcement air force in the world and equivalent
roughly to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force.

The Border Patrol wing of this vast apparatus has experienced
particularly dramatic growth: By the time the Bush administration
left Washington, the fiercely independent agency—part police force,
part occupying army, part frontier cavalry—had gone from being a
comparatively tiny, undermanned backwater of the Justice Department
to a 21,000-person arm of the largest federal law enforcement
agency in the country.

The Bush administration had been keen on increasing the
capabilities of the agency as quickly as possible. This urgency
came with its own human price tag—one the Obama administration has
been unwilling to address:

Corruption and excessive force have also skyrocketed along with
the massive hiring surge. In fact, between 2005 and 2012, nearly
one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day—part
of a pattern that Ronald Hosko, former assistant director of the
FBI’s criminal investigation division, calls “shocking.” During
Obama’s first term, the sheer number of allegations was so glaring
that, according to two CBP officials, DHS under Secretary Janet
Napolitano ordered Customs and Border Protection to change its
definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the
problem.

That redefinition differentiated between two supposedly distinct
types of corruption:

The agency began to differentiate between “mission-compromising
corruption”—bribery, narcotics-smuggling or human-smuggling
allegations—and “non-mission-compromising corruption,” a “lesser”
category of cases that included things like employees’ sexually
assaulting detainees or workplace theft. Only the
“mission-compromising” problems, the agency now decreed, would be
reported to Congress…The distinction helped them wipe nearly a
third of the corruption cases out of statistics.

Graff lists some examples:

There was the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement
status to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine
and heroin into Miami. There was the green-uniformed agent in
Yuma, Arizona, who was caught smuggling 700 pounds of marijuana
across the border in his green-and-white Border Patrol truck; the
brand-new 26-year-old Border Patrol agent who joined a
drug-smuggling operation to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of
marijuana in Del Rio, Texas.

Not to mention the excessive force complaints, the victims of
CBP assault, and those killed by trigger-happy border agents.

The expansion of the CBP into one of the most dangerous
government agencies in America should be deeply unsettling to
everyone—particularly now, when roughly two-thirds of Americans
live in
a “border” zone where the government claims the right to
conduct stops and searches without warrant or cause. 

The piece is eminently worth reading in its entirety.