Tag: news

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“I would love to join Allah’s
army, but I don’t even know how to start,” Nicholas Teausant, a
20-year-old community college student in California and
failed trainee in
the National Guard, purportedly wrote on Instragram around 10
months ago.

Unfortunately for Teausant, the FBI knew exactly where to start
and exactly how it’d end.

The story goes like this: Teausant started writing on the
Internet last year about his apparent interest in making
“terrorist” his next career move. This tipped off the feds, and the
FBI paid an informant to befriend him.

The informant claims that Teausant told him that once, on a
camping trip, he came up with a plot to bomb the Los Angeles subway
system. However, “investigators never corroborated that such a
camping trip actually occurred,”
according to the Associated Press (AP). The 20-year-old talked
about other plots as well and the idea of fighting Syrian dictator
Bashar al Assad, according to a court complaint. The AP
reports:

The informant put Teausant in contact with a “mentor” — in
reality, an undercover federal agent — who could purportedly
approve his efforts to join the extremists. Early this month, the
“mentor” blessed Teausant’s travels, and he boarded a train for
Seattle on Sunday night

[…]

When the bus arrived in Blaine, just south of Vancouver, B.C.,
U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped it and questioned
Teausant about where he was headed. He responded that he was
traveling to Vancouver and was arrested

On Monday, he was charged in federal court with a single count
of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist
organization. He faces up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000
fine.

Although it’s alarming that Teausant may have wanted to harm
Americans or conduct terrorist activities abroad, the Digital
Fourth rights-advocacy group highlights the
fact that he never “provided any help whatsoever to terrorists, or
that he was in contact, ever, with any actual terrorists.”

This wouldn’t be the first time members of the FBI posed as
terrorists. Last year, they reeled in a
teenager from Chicago. In 2012, members of the Occupy movement
in Cleveland
claimed the FBI pressured them into trying to blow up a bridge.
Last year, Reason reviewed
a book with details on the pervasive practice within the FBI of
manufacturing “terrorists” like these.

What do we do about a boy who
likes pretty pastel ponies? Well, what do we do about the thousands
of boys (and men!) who like pretty pastel ponies?

It’s time to talk about bronies! For those who don’t know who
they are, bronies are male fans of the show My Little
Pony: Friendship is Magic, a reboot launched in 2010 of the
popular cartoon/toy from the 1980s. Despite ostensibly being
girl-centric, the show has garnered a significant cult following
among guys—not just boys but men. There’s even a documentary about them, and they
have their own conventions.

Bronies ended up in the news this week as 9-year-old Grayson
Bruce found himself bullied for carrying his backpack emblazoned
with flying pony Rainbow Dash at his elementary school in Buncombe
County, N.C. The school initially responded to the bullying by
banning
the kid from carrying the bag, saying it “triggered” bullying,
granting his schoolmates a heckler’s veto rather than dealing with
inappropriate behavior. His mother responded by yanking Grayson out
of school and homeschooling him.

The school got a lot of negative publicity over the decision and
now
they’re backing off. According to USA Today, the
school will let Grayson bring his bag to school and work on
initiatives to address bullying.

So why are bronies, anyway? When the phenomenon
developed, I hunted down the first two episodes of My Little
Pony: Friendship is Magic on YouTube. I didn’t find the
show compelling enough to start watching but it definitely had
decent depth, characterization, and humor. If there’s one thing I’m
envious of millennials (and the generation after them) for it’s how
much better cartoons have gotten, starting around the mid-1990s. My
god, cartoons during the Gen X-era were so awful. I think the
current animation renaissance is in part created by Gen-Xers who
didn’t want their kids to have to sit through the same mindless
crap.

But that doesn’t really answer the bronie question, does it? I
think bronies are a reflection of a show that acknowledges that
girls like girly things and objects (like ponies) but that doesn’t
mean girls aren’t interested in interesting stories, adventure,
danger, and fun. I recall watching a number of girl-oriented
cartoons and found them to be dreadful, unfunny affairs. They all
felt like they were being written by Marge
Simpson. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic presents
the idea of a show targeting girls that can also be funny, zany,
and adventurous.

The press coverage of bronies seems to suggest a generation of

young men who are just more sensitive and care more and face
criticism for it. While that may be true, I think such an argument
downplays the idea that perhaps entertainment that targets girls is
improving, and because the show treats girls like they also enjoy
adventures and fun, it’s naturally going to start drawing in guys
as well. It’s probably an important lesson for everybody working in
entertainment.

California Democrats are in a state of shock that that Asian
Americans – who voted for Obama at rates comparable to those of
blacks – handed a resounding defeat to the proposal to reinstate
racial preferences in California universities. The state Senate had
approved 27-9 a measure to scrap Prop 209 for the November ballot.
But Asian Americans, who apparently didn’t get the party memo that
they should abandon their spots in top universities to further
liberal diversity goals, went into high-gear to oppose the measure,
causing the Assembly to scuttle it and three state senators to
withdraw their support.

But this is only the taste of things to come for affirmative
action Democrats, I note in my Washington Examiner column this
morning:

Trying to perform a racial balancing act in a country that was
neatly divided into two groups — the white discriminators and
the black discriminated — was one thing. But pulling it off in a
diverse country with diverse groups with diverse histories and
diverse interests is quite another. Foisting preferences on a
diverse America will pit various groups against each other — as
well as against Democrats, as the fight in California amply
demonstrates. Diversity
and racial preferences are directly antithetical — contrary to
liberal orthodoxy.

Diversity and racial preferences don’t mix.

Go
here to read the whole thing.

Hawaii’s
prostitution law includes an exemption for “any member of
a police department, a sheriff, or a law enforcement officer acting
in the course and scope of duties.” A
bill that the state legislature is considering originally
would have limited
that exemption to exclude “sexual penetration or sadomasochistic
abuse.” In response to police objections, that qualification was
eliminated; the current
version of the bill, which was unanimously approved by the
state House of Representatives earlier this month and is now before
the state Senate, leaves the exemption as it is.

That’s right: Cops insisted that they must be free not just to
receive blowjobs and handjobs from prostitutes but also to engage
in vaginal and anal intercourse with them. Evidently the police
also need permission to engage in “flagellation or torture by or
upon a person as an act of sexual stimulation or gratification”
(Hawaii’s definition
of “sadomasochistic abuse”). Just in case. Since an entire chamber
of the state legislature agreed to this request, the cops must have
had a pretty persuasive argument. Here it is, as
summed up by Jason Kawabata, captain of the Honolulu Police
Department’s Narcotics/Vice Division:

As written, this bill would nullify the exemption if the officer
agrees to pay a fee for sexual penetration or sadomasochistic
abuse. This would limit the type of violations law enforcement
officers are able to enforce. Even if the intent of the amendment
is merely to limit actual conduct by the officer, we must oppose
it. Codifying the limitations on an officer‘s conduct would greatly
assist pimps and prostitutes in their efforts to avoid
prosecution.

In other words, if it were generally known that police are not
allowed to engage in sexual penetration or sadomasochistic abuse
with prostitutes, suspicious hookers might insist that undercover
officers do so to show they are not cops. When those officers
balked, their status as agents of law enforcement would be
revealed. That scenario seems rather implausible, since a person
commits the
offense of prostitution as soon as she “agrees or offers to
engage in sexual conduct with another person for a fee.” For
Kawabata’s fear to be realized, a prostitute would need to have sex
first to make sure her customer was not a cop, then negotiate
payment afterward, which does not seem like a very good business
strategy.

Critics of the exemption
argue that it is unnecessary, that it invites abuse, and
that it could inflict additional trauma on women coerced into
prostitution. More fundamentally, the double standard demanded by
police highlights the utter absurdity of prostitution laws. Police
do not commit murder to catch killers or knock over banks to catch
robbers. Yet here they are insisting that they need the leeway to
have sex with prostitutes in order to stop people from having sex
with prostitutes. Even if cops never take advantage of that
freedom, they routinely commit the
crime of agreeing to pay for sex, except that in their case it
is not treated as a crime. That exemption is considered acceptable
only because exchanging money for sex, unlike murder and robbery,
does not violate anyone’s rights. But if so, why not broaden the
exemption to cover everyone?

In what appears to be part of a

full-fledged class warfare strategy that includes comparing
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to C. Montgomery
Burns of The Simpsons, Illinois Democrats propose a
referendum on imposing a “millionaires tax” targeted at high-income
state residents. In a state that has already enjoyed
government credit downgrades with
little expectation of improvement for poor habits, including
putting off paying its bills into the murky future and not funding
public pensions, the move could raise fears that politicians plan
to resolve their own failures by mugging anybody with assets to
speak of (not that it’s
easy to accumulate assets in Illinois). It just could send the
targets of the millionaires tax heading for the exits, as they’ve
already done in New Jersey.

Earlier this year, financial firm RegentAtlantic
reported that New Jersey is suffering a net loss of taxpayers and
adjusted gross income to lower-tax states, and that “the
average income coming into New Jersey is approximately 50 percent
less than the income that is leaving.” Overall, the company found
that the state lost taxable income of $5.5 billion in 2010 as
residents moved to relative tax havens.

Note that New Jersey ranks at 44 out of 51 jurisdictions in
WalletHub’s
recent ratings of tax burdens (1 is the least burdensome).
Illinois comes in at 47.

By contrast with New Jersey, Stanford University reports that
high tax rates
don’t drive the highest earners to flee California.
But Illinois doesn’t quite have California’s natural attractions,
for which wealthy people may be willing to pay a premium.

And California is still
hemorrhaging money and people as many seek tax relief and

opportunity, even if millionaires are willing to stick around
for the nice views. If Illinois can’t find itself some redwoods and
pretty coastline, and quick, look for a line at the exits.