Anyone unfortunate enough to be found guilty of “contempt of cop” can expect swift and brutal “justice” at the hands of the criminal, militarized Denver Police Department.
Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg
Afterwards, discuss it below.
Article: “Criminals With Badges”: Denver’s Militarized Police Read Post »
“This guy … just tried to run my husband over!” exclaimed Arkansas resident Cindy Nelson in a frantic 911 call on July 21. “Oh, my God — he’s shooting at us! Oh, my God!”
A few minutes later, Fred Ensminger — the deranged assailant — placed a 911 call of his own.
“This is Diamondhead 1106…. I have been shot and I need medical at my front gate ASAP.”
Ensminger, as we will see anon, is a recidivist criminal, but he is no run-of-the-mill psychotic. He is employed by the Police Department of Diamondhead Arkansas, a gated community located south of Hot Springs.
A few minutes before Cindy Nelson told a 911 dispatcher that a “guy with a badge” was trying to murder her husband, she had passed Ensminger’s pickup truck, which was parked by the side of the road.
As Nelson started to go around the truck, Ensminger pulled out in front of her. According to an eyewitness, Ensminger “stopped suddenly,” causing Nelson to slam on her brakes to avoid a collision.
According to the witness, Ensminger climbed out of his pickup truck and began to harangue Nelson. She reacted by pulling around him and proceeding down the road. An infuriated Ensminger followed in close pursuit.
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Badge-Toting Psycho Shoots Up Home, Goes Free Read Post »
In a recent post, Akiva claimed that people (in general) get the government they deserve. The US is an imperial-warfare state and a growing surveillance-police state, not to mention a nanny-welfare state. Boston Legal’s left-liberal attorney Alan Shore echoes Akiva’s sentiments in a closing argument in defense of, oddly enough, a tax protester (video below). He points out many of the evils of the US governments and their infringements on our liberties and concludes that Americans must be okay with it all.
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Boston Legal’s Alan Shore on Americans Read Post »
But cops armed with Tasers sure as hell do:
The Denver coroner has ruled that the July 9 death of an inmate at the new jail was the result of homicide.
Marvin Booker was being processed on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia when he got into a scuffle with jail deputies. He was shocked with a Taser device, placed in a chokehold and held to the floor as jail deputies piled on top.
Other inmates said Booker, 56, who was listed as 175 pounds in Denver court records but was actually 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, was then carried to the holding cell at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Facility and dropped face fir5 st. He never recovered.
The coroner’s finding means simply that another human being caused Booker’s death, rather than from natural causes, suicide or an accident. It is not the coroner’s role to determine who might have caused the death or whether the homicide was justifiable.
The Denver district attorney’s office is investigating Booker’s death to determine if criminal charges should be filed against the deputies involved, who are on paid vacations until the matter is settled. I would like to believe that someone will be held responsible for this man’s senseless death, but I’m not holding my breath. If it had been private citizens who dog-piled a homeless person and caused him to suffocate, they’d already be in jail and facing murder charges. But when it’s five deputies who are caught on video smothering a small man who had been arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia (itself a non-crime), suddenly it’s more important to “review policy.” And maybe they’ll, you know, be disciplined.
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Tasers don’t kill people Read Post »
In How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown by the US government.
Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.
Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.
In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.
Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.
The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.
But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.
The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.
Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.
WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.
We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.
Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.
Pundits: Play Whack-A-Mole with WikiLeaks. Oh wait… Read Post »
