NASCAR Bans Confederate Flag After Black Driver Demands Action

NASCAR Bans Confederate Flag After Black Driver Demands Action

Tyler Durden

Wed, 06/10/2020 – 17:23

For the first time since its inception 72 years ago, NASCAR is banning the Confederate flag from its events – a symbol which now “runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry.”

The move comes one day after the the first full-time Black NASCAR driver in 25 years, Darrel “Bubba” Wallace, called on the organization to ban the flag which serves as a reminder of the days when southern Democrats owned slaves.

According to NPR, the 26-year-old Wallace wasn’t offended by the Confederate flag until he ‘made an effort to educate himself on what the flag signifies for many people, according to NPR.

“What I’m chasing is checkered flags, and that was kind of my narrative,” Wallace told CNN in a Monday interview. “But diving more into it and educating myself, people feel uncomfortable with that, people talk about that — that’s the first thing they bring up.”

“My next step would be to get rid of all Confederate flags. No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race. So it starts with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them,” he added.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UuGbUy Tyler Durden

Orwell & Huxley’s Warnings To The World

Orwell & Huxley’s Warnings To The World

Tyler Durden

Wed, 06/10/2020 – 17:05

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

As George Orwell neared his death, he made one final warning to planet Earth and every human on it. Scarily, we are seeing human beings demand their own enslavement and that of others which was exactly what Orwell said would happen.

The woman interviewing Orwell from his death bed asked if he demonstrated that he had the ability to face some of these unpleasant facts. Orwell replied:

“I think that allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like 1984 could, actually happen. This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self basement. The sex instinct will be irradiated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the party (the government/ruling class) but always there will be the intoxication of power.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot, stamping on a human face. Forever.”

As David Icke said, “Stop acquiescing to power.”

David Icke To LEOs & Military: “Look Your Children In The Eye” & Tell Them YOU Enforced Tyranny

Orwell’s eerie warning is coming to fruition right before our eyes and even “freedom-loving” Americans are allowing it, even cheering for it to happen. “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on YOU,” Orwell said.

Yet we have people in the “land of the free” calling for martial law and the use of violence to put down dissent. We have violent people stealing, looting, and rioting to protest police violence.  We see people defend the military for firing on innocent people on their own porch.  We have people demanding free speech be eliminated because they don’t like what’s being said. We have people get outraged the second they read something that disagrees with the brainwashed bias in their mind (cognitive dissonance.) And we have a government and military all too ready to go to war with the American people in order to maintain control and eliminate every single right all humans are born with to usher in the New World Order. This is absolutely absurd, but it’s happening right before our eyes.

Aldous Huxley also tried to warn humanity of their fate:

Orwell and Huxley both said all basic human rights will be eliminated and slavery will prevail in one way or another. Mostly because humans cannot fathom functioning without a master, or ruler commanding them thanks to the brainwashing that has been highly effective. 

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

-Aldous Huxley

The solution is to realize what has been done to us.  We all need to wake up to the damage of giving anyone power over anyone else. Giving other humans power over other humans has never worked out well for those being controlled, and democracy has been no salvation. The argument over how big a government should be is one of “just how much slavery will the population tolerate.”

“So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”

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Google Searches For “Day Trading” And “Call Options” Explode To Record Highs

Google Searches For “Day Trading” And “Call Options” Explode To Record Highs

Tyler Durden

Wed, 06/10/2020 – 16:45

We have extensively discussed the topic of retail daytreaders flooding the market in recent months, but the following chart summarizes everything we have said clearly and succinctly: it shows that google trends for “day trading” and “call options” have exploded in recent weeks, surging to never before seen levels.

Source: Jesse Felder

We hope this satisfies all those journalists who are searching for an explanation for what we described three weeks ago in “how retail traders taking over the stock market.”

That said, this is nothing new: as John Hussman pointed out, we have seen this before every time the surging market makes geniuses out of everyone: “Bucket shops and boiler rooms are alive and well. The only things that change are the faces.”

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NYC’s Official Guide to Pandemic Sex Is Awkward but Accurate

Coronavirus dictates from public health officials and government bureaucrats have been confusing, contradictory, and arbitrary for months now. The World Health Organization, for instance, has repeatedly misled people about the efficacy of wearing masks, post-recovery immunity, and asymptomatic contagiousness. National, state, and local officials in the U.S.—including in pandemic-wracked New York City—have also spread misinformation.

An underlying issue has been the experts’ failure to grapple with the realities of human nature. People can’t just stay inside indefinitely, cut off from most social contact. As compliance with aggressive social distancing begins to slip, officials must pivot toward offering scientifically sound advice about what kinds of activities carry risk, rather than doubling down on impractical and wide-ranging lockdowns.

Thankfully, New York City’s recently published guidance on “safer sex and COVID-19” is a remarkably sober—and, yes, awkwardly descriptive—piece of realistic guidance. It acknowledges that while the absolutely safest course of action would be to refrain from sex, it also accepts that abstinence-only education does not work. People are going to get together and they’re going to get it on.

The best thing that the experts can do is educate people about how to make these activities less risky. To that end, the three-page document correctly notes that kissing might be a riskier amorous activity than actual sex, given that respiratory droplets are the most effective vehicles of disease transmission. (This is an inversion of standard safe sex practices: Kissing generally carries little risk of spreading STDs.) While the document’s suggestion that people consider using “physical barriers, like walls” when they have sex was mocked on social media as an endorsement of the glory hole, the logic here is correct.

Just compare this guidance with a new U.K. law that criminalizes all sex between people who don’t already live together. Britain’s strategy is authoritarian and ignorant of human behavior; New York City, on the other hand, accepts that people have needs and suggests how they can meet them in the least risky way.

This is a strategy that health officials and government planners should embrace: education, rather than prohibition.

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Seattle Protesters Establish ‘Autonomous Zone’ Outside Evacuated Police Precinct

Anti-police brutality demonstrations are cooling off in much of the country. Not so in Seattle, where over a week of protests and street clashes has resulted in police abandoning a precinct building, demonstrators establishing an “autonomous zone” in the surrounding streets, and a brief occupation of city hall.

The site of much of this drama has been the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) Eastern Precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Late Sunday night and early Monday morning saw police and National Guard troops push protesters away from the Eastern Precinct with tear gas and pepper spray in what local alt-weekly The Stranger describe as “the most aggressive and sustained” response to protests yet.

The use of tear gas was particularly controversial given that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and SPD Chief Carmen Best had announced a 30-day ban on the police’s use of the stuff against protestors that past Friday. The SPD, via tweet, said that its officers were being pelted with projectiles and that the presence of an armed gunman justified its use. The city of Seattle is now being sued by the protestors represented by the Washington chapter of the ACLU over its crowd control tactics.

Then on Monday afternoon, in an apparent attempt to prevent similar clashes from playing out, SPD boarded up the Eastern Precinct building and announced that it would be opening up nearby streets to demonstrators.

Later that night, Durkan said on Twitter that police had removed barricades around the precinct building “to proactively de-escalate interactions between protestors and law enforcement” while still “safely securing the facility.”

The SPD’s announcement said that the precinct would continue to be staffed. However, pictures from the scene show the building totally boarded up and heavily graffitied, and the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog—a neighborhood news website—says that the building is empty.

That Monday night, in the absence of a police presence, protestors formed what’s now being called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or (CHAZ). Reassembled barricades went up around the new zone, with some featuring signs welcoming people to “Free Capitol Hill.” The Seattle Times reports that tents have started to go up too in the CHAZ and folks are hoping to turn the boarded-up cop shop into a community center.

The first night of the autonomous zone reportedly saw some speeches from demonstrators, and an appearance by socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who sparred with some protesters about how much to cut the SPD’s budget.

A few assembled demonstrators reportedly demanded a 100 percent defunding of the police. Sawant, reports the Stranger, said that that was infeasible under capitalism, and touted her own plan to cut the department’s budget by 50 percent.

A news crew from the local Fox affiliate was reportedly chased out of the zone by some demonstrators.

Tuesday saw more activity in the zone, with more barricades going up, and some businesses in the area opening up to offer water, bathroom facilities, and food to demonstrators.

That night, Sawant led a crowd from the CHAZ to Seattle city hall for an hour-long protest inside the building, where people chanted and demanded the resignation of Durkan and the defunding of the police.

The City Hall occupation, reports Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, saw more fights between Sawant and some demonstrators wary of her coopting of their movement. The city councilmember touted her plan to tax Amazon. Another speaker countered that the focus should remain on racial justice issues.

Afterward, protesters returned to the CHAZ for a screening of the documentary 13th.

The zone has attracted national and critical attention. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) tweeted about how the situation was “endangering people’s lives.”

Yet so far the zone appears neither entirely as lawless as conservatives would fear, nor perhaps as autonomous as some of its occupants might like. The city’s Fire Department says it has committed more staff to cover the area. Other city departments have been on-site to clear away trash, and empty dumpsters. SPD says it will still answer 911 calls in the area.

With the situation on the ground in flux, it’s impossible to know where the CHAZ is headed. While the movement behind the zone can’t be described as libertarian (a Medium essay purporting to be a list demands from the Free Capitol folks includes calls for both police abolition and rent control), it is still vaguely encouraging to see people try to set up their own self-governing enclave in the vacuum left by the police’s withdrawal.

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California Ammunition Raids Put Innocent People at Risk of Police Violence

Last month, California’s attorney general publicly patted himself on the back over raids and arrests resulting from failed background checks for people attempting to purchase ammunition. The multiple police operations and inevitable press release were likely a slap at a federal judge who ruled against such background checks in April. The raids were also dangerous, given the unreliability of state records and the resulting frequency with which innocent Californians are wrongly tagged as prohibited persons. Political posturing and bureaucratic incompetence put people at risk of potentially deadly police raids just as law enforcement once again comes under national scrutiny.

On May 19, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office breathlessly announced “12 operations throughout the state where special agents with the California Department of Justice seized dozens of firearms, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, ghost guns, assault weapons, and drugs over the last month. In all of the operations, investigators obtained critical information as a result of ammunition background checks. Ammunition background checks are the result of Proposition 63, which was passed by an overwhelming majority of Californians in 2016 in order to keep ammunition out of the hands of violent criminals and other prohibited persons. As a result of the law, more than 750 prohibited individuals were stopped from illegally purchasing ammunition largely over the second half of last year alone.”

Background checks may have stopped “more than 750 prohibited individuals” from purchasing ammunition at legal outlets, but that was almost incidental to its real impact. “Unfortunately, the Standard background check also rejected 101,047 other law-abiding citizen residents that the laws were not designed to stop,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez wrote in an April 23 decision blocking enforcement of the law for several reasons, including constitutional concerns. “The standard background check rejected citizen-residents who are not prohibited persons approximately 16.4% of the time.”

Judge Benitez wasn’t first to note the mess California made of background checks. In December of last year, the Sacramento Bee led a story on the issue with the case of Zachary Berg, a Sutter County sheriff’s deputy who was unable to purchase shotgun shells “because his personal information didn’t match what state officials had in their database.” For Berg and the tens of thousands of other Californians wrongly turned away, “the rejections appear to have occurred because of errors and omissions in the Department of Justice’s own gun-registration database,” the story noted.

Shoddy implementation of the law is no surprise given that ammunition background checks and raids on supposedly forbidden would-be purchasers are extensions of an earlier policy regarding firearms. The state has applied its heavy hand to such dubious targets as Lynette Phillips, who was listed as “prohibited” because she checked herself into a hospital after adjusting poorly to a psychiatric medication change (seized guns were subsequently returned). It also went after Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann, who made a good-faith effort to register a gun but was unable to keep current with the state’s ever-shifting restrictions on just what features are and aren’t permissible on rifles (charges were dismissed after state agents seemingly misread the paperwork).

The potential for not just injustice, but tragedy, in such cases is apparent, since news reports describe the raids as being carried out by contingents of armed and armored California Justice Department agents. Anybody who needs a refresher course in the potential dangers of police enforcement of laws great and small need only take a peek at current headlines regarding the killing of George Floyd over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill and the resulting protests and unrest. Or they could consider the killing of Breonna Taylor during a misfired drug raid. And then there’s the killing of Duncan Lemp during a raid for alleged illegal firearms possession.

Those headlines should also be a reminder that the government enforces its will unevenly, coming down hardest on individuals and communities who enforcers dislike.

Unfortunately, Judge Benitez’s order blocking the background-check law was itself blocked in May by a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, while the case against the law makes its way through the courts. That cleared the way for Becerra’s publicity-stunt raids on suspects who attempted to purchase ammunition and were turned away.

We know that no mayhem ensued and that the people on the receiving end of the raids really were prohibited from purchasing ammunition because Becerra issued a press release after the fact rather than cover up a fiasco. Having been warned by Judge Benitez that the law too frequently ensnared innocent people, the California Justice Department seems to have put a little more care than usual into its high-profile stunt so that officials could issue boasts rather than apologies.

But what was accomplished? Given the drugs and (illegal in California) ghost guns seized in the raids, it’s obvious that the targets had access to black market sources but tried to make legal purchases. Judge Benitez may have slightly overstated the case when he wrote that “criminals, tyrants, and terrorists don’t do background checks” (people do stupid things all the time) but it’s probable that some raid subjects had no idea they had done anything to put their names on the naughty list. They may have been non-violent offenders of one of the laws—drug prohibition comes to mind—that carry nasty legal consequences for minimal reason (Becerra’s office didn’t say).

Just weeks later, it’s difficult to consider those raids without envisioning what could have gone wrong. To contrast the “754 persons with felony convictions, mental health holds, certain misdemeanor convictions, or illegally present in the United States, prevented from buying new ammunition” documented by the federal court with the “101,047 residents who are not prohibited persons but who still failed a background check” is to see the potential for wrongful arrests, violated civil liberties, and unjustified deaths of innocent people at the hands of law enforcement agents.

Now, amidst a national discussion about policing and law enforcement, the California attorney general’s eagerness to stage publicity-seeking raids to enforce an easily bypassed restriction that is incompetently administered and constitutionally suspect should give everybody pause. As is so often the case when it comes to multitudes of laws and armies of law enforcers, Becerra falsely claims to be “protecting Californians” even as he puts state residents at risk of violence from government agents.

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Rory Sutherland on How Red Bull Explains Why Capitalism Is Great

With unemployment around 13 percent and talk of recession—or even depression—in the air, libertarian ideals of free minds and free markets need champions now more than ever.

Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of the legendary global advertising agency Ogilvy UK, may seem like an unlikely defender of capitalism, but he is one of its most persuasive and engaging.

Sutherland calls the stentorian Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises his hero and celebrates not capitalism’s ruthless efficiency and capacity to outproduce a command economy but its ability to create seemingly trivial products such as Red Bull and to transform the disgusting-sounding Patagonian toothfish into the delicacy known as Chilean sea bass.

Fittingly enough, Sutherland’s latest book is called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. It explains why the real genius of capitalism isn’t maximizing output but the ways in which creative destruction fulfills desires we never knew we had, allowing us to become whatever we want to be. He’s a critic of economistic thinking on the right and the left that reduces all human activity to mere utility and material considerations.

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Seattle Protesters Establish ‘Autonomous Zone’ Outside Evacuated Police Precinct

Anti-police brutality demonstrations are cooling off in much of the country. Not so in Seattle, where over a week of protests and street clashes has resulted in police abandoning a precinct building, demonstrators establishing an “autonomous zone” in the surrounding streets, and a brief occupation of city hall.

The site of much of this drama has been the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) Eastern Precinct in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Late Sunday night and early Monday morning saw police and National Guard troops push protesters away from the Eastern Precinct with tear gas and pepper spray in what local alt-weekly The Stranger describe as “the most aggressive and sustained” response to protests yet.

The use of tear gas was particularly controversial given that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and SPD Chief Carmen Best had announced a 30-day ban on the police’s use of the stuff against protestors that past Friday. The SPD, via tweet, said that its officers were being pelted with projectiles and that the presence of an armed gunman justified its use. The city of Seattle is now being sued by the protestors represented by the Washington chapter of the ACLU over its crowd control tactics.

Then on Monday afternoon, in an apparent attempt to prevent similar clashes from playing out, SPD boarded up the Eastern Precinct building and announced that it would be opening up nearby streets to demonstrators.

Later that night, Durkan said on Twitter that police had removed barricades around the precinct building “to proactively de-escalate interactions between protestors and law enforcement” while still “safely securing the facility.”

The SPD’s announcement said that the precinct would continue to be staffed. However, pictures from the scene show the building totally boarded up and heavily graffitied, and the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog—a neighborhood news website—says that the building is empty.

That Monday night, in the absence of a police presence, protestors formed what’s now being called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or (CHAZ). Reassembled barricades went up around the new zone, with some featuring signs welcoming people to “Free Capitol Hill.” The Seattle Times reports that tents have started to go up too in the CHAZ and folks are hoping to turn the boarded-up cop shop into a community center.

The first night of the autonomous zone reportedly saw some speeches from demonstrators, and an appearance by socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who sparred with some protesters about how much to cut the SPD’s budget.

A few assembled demonstrators reportedly demanded a 100 percent defunding of the police. Sawant, reports the Stranger, said that that was infeasible under capitalism, and touted her own plan to cut the department’s budget by 50 percent.

A news crew from the local Fox affiliate was reportedly chased out of the zone by some demonstrators.

Tuesday saw more activity in the zone, with more barricades going up, and some businesses in the area opening up to offer water, bathroom facilities, and food to demonstrators.

That night, Sawant led a crowd from the CHAZ to Seattle city hall for an hour-long protest inside the building, where people chanted and demanded the resignation of Durkan and the defunding of the police.

The City Hall occupation, reports Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, saw more fights between Sawant and some demonstrators wary of her coopting of their movement. The city councilmember touted her plan to tax Amazon. Another speaker countered that the focus should remain on racial justice issues.

Afterward, protesters returned to the CHAZ for a screening of the documentary 13th.

The zone has attracted national and critical attention. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) tweeted about how the situation was “endangering people’s lives.”

Yet so far the zone appears neither entirely as lawless as conservatives would fear, nor perhaps as autonomous as some of its occupants might like. The city’s Fire Department says it has committed more staff to cover the area. Other city departments have been on-site to clear away trash, and empty dumpsters. SPD says it will still answer 911 calls in the area.

With the situation on the ground in flux, it’s impossible to know where the CHAZ is headed. While the movement behind the zone can’t be described as libertarian (a Medium essay purporting to be a list demands from the Free Capitol folks includes calls for both police abolition and rent control), it is still vaguely encouraging to see people try to set up their own self-governing enclave in the vacuum left by the police’s withdrawal.

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California Ammunition Raids Put Innocent People at Risk of Police Violence

Last month, California’s attorney general publicly patted himself on the back over raids and arrests resulting from failed background checks for people attempting to purchase ammunition. The multiple police operations and inevitable press release were likely a slap at a federal judge who ruled against such background checks in April. The raids were also dangerous, given the unreliability of state records and the resulting frequency with which innocent Californians are wrongly tagged as prohibited persons. Political posturing and bureaucratic incompetence put people at risk of potentially deadly police raids just as law enforcement once again comes under national scrutiny.

On May 19, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office breathlessly announced “12 operations throughout the state where special agents with the California Department of Justice seized dozens of firearms, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, ghost guns, assault weapons, and drugs over the last month. In all of the operations, investigators obtained critical information as a result of ammunition background checks. Ammunition background checks are the result of Proposition 63, which was passed by an overwhelming majority of Californians in 2016 in order to keep ammunition out of the hands of violent criminals and other prohibited persons. As a result of the law, more than 750 prohibited individuals were stopped from illegally purchasing ammunition largely over the second half of last year alone.”

Background checks may have stopped “more than 750 prohibited individuals” from purchasing ammunition at legal outlets, but that was almost incidental to its real impact. “Unfortunately, the Standard background check also rejected 101,047 other law-abiding citizen residents that the laws were not designed to stop,” U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez wrote in an April 23 decision blocking enforcement of the law for several reasons, including constitutional concerns. “The standard background check rejected citizen-residents who are not prohibited persons approximately 16.4% of the time.”

Judge Benitez wasn’t first to note the mess California made of background checks. In December of last year, the Sacramento Bee led a story on the issue with the case of Zachary Berg, a Sutter County sheriff’s deputy who was unable to purchase shotgun shells “because his personal information didn’t match what state officials had in their database.” For Berg and the tens of thousands of other Californians wrongly turned away, “the rejections appear to have occurred because of errors and omissions in the Department of Justice’s own gun-registration database,” the story noted.

Shoddy implementation of the law is no surprise given that ammunition background checks and raids on supposedly forbidden would-be purchasers are extensions of an earlier policy regarding firearms. The state has applied its heavy hand to such dubious targets as Lynette Phillips, who was listed as “prohibited” because she checked herself into a hospital after adjusting poorly to a psychiatric medication change (seized guns were subsequently returned). It also went after Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann, who made a good-faith effort to register a gun but was unable to keep current with the state’s ever-shifting restrictions on just what features are and aren’t permissible on rifles (charges were dismissed after state agents seemingly misread the paperwork).

The potential for not just injustice, but tragedy, in such cases is apparent, since news reports describe the raids as being carried out by contingents of armed and armored California Justice Department agents. Anybody who needs a refresher course in the potential dangers of police enforcement of laws great and small need only take a peek at current headlines regarding the killing of George Floyd over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill and the resulting protests and unrest. Or they could consider the killing of Breonna Taylor during a misfired drug raid. And then there’s the killing of Duncan Lemp during a raid for alleged illegal firearms possession.

Those headlines should also be a reminder that the government enforces its will unevenly, coming down hardest on individuals and communities who enforcers dislike.

Unfortunately, Judge Benitez’s order blocking the background-check law was itself blocked in May by a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, while the case against the law makes its way through the courts. That cleared the way for Becerra’s publicity-stunt raids on suspects who attempted to purchase ammunition and were turned away.

We know that no mayhem ensued and that the people on the receiving end of the raids really were prohibited from purchasing ammunition because Becerra issued a press release after the fact rather than cover up a fiasco. Having been warned by Judge Benitez that the law too frequently ensnared innocent people, the California Justice Department seems to have put a little more care than usual into its high-profile stunt so that officials could issue boasts rather than apologies.

But what was accomplished? Given the drugs and (illegal in California) ghost guns seized in the raids, it’s obvious that the targets had access to black market sources but tried to make legal purchases. Judge Benitez may have slightly overstated the case when he wrote that “criminals, tyrants, and terrorists don’t do background checks” (people do stupid things all the time) but it’s probable that some raid subjects had no idea they had done anything to put their names on the naughty list. They may have been non-violent offenders of one of the laws—drug prohibition comes to mind—that carry nasty legal consequences for minimal reason (Becerra’s office didn’t say).

Just weeks later, it’s difficult to consider those raids without envisioning what could have gone wrong. To contrast the “754 persons with felony convictions, mental health holds, certain misdemeanor convictions, or illegally present in the United States, prevented from buying new ammunition” documented by the federal court with the “101,047 residents who are not prohibited persons but who still failed a background check” is to see the potential for wrongful arrests, violated civil liberties, and unjustified deaths of innocent people at the hands of law enforcement agents.

Now, amidst a national discussion about policing and law enforcement, the California attorney general’s eagerness to stage publicity-seeking raids to enforce an easily bypassed restriction that is incompetently administered and constitutionally suspect should give everybody pause. As is so often the case when it comes to multitudes of laws and armies of law enforcers, Becerra falsely claims to be “protecting Californians” even as he puts state residents at risk of violence from government agents.

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Rory Sutherland on How Red Bull Explains Why Capitalism Is Great

With unemployment around 13 percent and talk of recession—or even depression—in the air, libertarian ideals of free minds and free markets need champions now more than ever.

Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of the legendary global advertising agency Ogilvy UK, may seem like an unlikely defender of capitalism, but he is one of its most persuasive and engaging.

Sutherland calls the stentorian Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises his hero and celebrates not capitalism’s ruthless efficiency and capacity to outproduce a command economy but its ability to create seemingly trivial products such as Red Bull and to transform the disgusting-sounding Patagonian toothfish into the delicacy known as Chilean sea bass.

Fittingly enough, Sutherland’s latest book is called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. It explains why the real genius of capitalism isn’t maximizing output but the ways in which creative destruction fulfills desires we never knew we had, allowing us to become whatever we want to be. He’s a critic of economistic thinking on the right and the left that reduces all human activity to mere utility and material considerations.

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