(Warning: Some videos are graphic and depict actual death)

Off Duty Air Force Security Officer Killed while trying to comply with Police Officer’s Instructions

Man killed by plain clothes cop who didn’t identify himself.
Article here.

UCLA Student Tasered repeatedly in Library.

The point I am trying to make is that Police routinely abuse their ability to use force. Yes, in some of these videos the suspects (for lack of a better word) were not complying with officers repeated orders. However, this does not give police officers a blank check to painfully punish a suspect on the spot. We remove ourselves from the effects of tasers because they lack the savagery of a physical attack, but using a taser, which can be deadly if the suspect has a pre-existing heart condition, is just another way of inflicting pain similar to beating a suspect to force him or her to comply with your orders.

Consider this: Before the proliferation of tasers in law enforcement, if a suspect was not complying with an officers orders and was no threat to the safety of the public or other officers, the suspect would simply be restrained and carried to a squad car to be hauled off to jail. At the worst if the suspect was posing a threat to public safety or other police officers the suspect would be most likely sprayed with mace or pepper spray, a non lethal use of force, then restrained and hauled to jail. Once the threat was neutralized the officer would not be permitted to keep spraying the suspect, or beat the suspect in order to ensure compliance with officers orders. Why is it then ok for a police officer to keep tasing someone once the threat to public or officer safety has been neutralized.

In the video involving the student from the University of Florida, it is clear that there are more than enough officers to physically restrain the disruptive student without the use of a taser. And especially in the video involving the UCLA student, were it appears that the student is docilely laying in the hallway while five or six officers surround him, the police would have had no problem putting him in hand cuffs and caring him off. Police carry weapons to ensure public safety and defend themselves in dangerous situations not as a means of coercion in otherwise controllable situations.

What is more shocking are the other two incidents here. Both of these videos demonstrate a clear disregard for human life on the part of the Officer’s. The way in which both so casually and maliciously fire their weapons send chills down my spine like ice water. To me there can be no clearer evidence that Police are not AUTOMATICALLY the benevolent presence in our community that we take for granted. They are capable as being as awful as anyone and have the capability to do a lot more damage. This is not to say that police are all this way, just that the assumption that police always act in the best interests of the community is false.

There is no doubt that unlocking the iPhone in the short term brings more choice to a locked down system and gives consumers at least a limited choice between using AT&T and T-Mobile. For the international market, unlocking the iPhone even has the potential to substantially increase Apples revenue from hardware sales by creating many potential hardware costumers in a place devoid of AT&T. While on its face this makes unlocking the iPhone look good, this is not the end of the our analysis. The story of bringing the iPhone to market has been a careful dance between the hardware development and partnering with AT&T for service. Apple has been careful to do something that no other hardware manufacturer has done in that it has carved out a share of revenue from service contracts sold through AT&T. Thus, Apple has a substantial amount of revenue to be lost by the iPhone becoming unlocked and consumers choosing other providers. Furthermore, with apple negotiating with overseas providers, an unlocked iPhone could represent the circumvention of a similar deal to its deal with AT&T from getting done in Europe and the loss of revenue from contracts for service in those markets.

So, in the immortal words of the Matrix: “The problem is chioce.” If consumers choose other providers does this hurt Apple so much that it doesn’t want to develop new technology? In our traditional American economic model the protections of intellectual property with patents and copyrights is a corner stone of encouraging innovation. Creating a new technology creates a competitive advantage for the company that creates it over another. If a rival company were able to immediately usurp that competitive advantage by just copying that technology, there would be no incentive for the first to spend money on developing new technology. Applying this to our current situation with the iPhone, we must ask is there any competitive advantage lost by apple, the technology developer, by the unlocking of the platform? This answer seems to me to be NO. In this case where the advantage has been lost is in bargaining power over service not technology. When Apple was able to ensure that the iPhone could only be used on one network it had considerable negotiating power with AT&T. Apple said to AT&T: because we are bringing you guaranteed business we expect something in return. But, that’s not what makes the technology so ground breaking or desirable both of which give the iPhone its advantage as a phone over other hardware manufacturers. The market is still protecting Apples competitive advantage and perhaps even increasing it by luring other consumers away from hardware on the T-Mobile network that they might otherwise have chosen.

Ultimately this is the freeing of a market. This is where laissez faire actualy helps the consumer, something that is often a hidden benefit of free markets. By unlocking the iPhone hackers have created a market where consumption decisions can be based on which company provides the best service for each consumer. While unlocking the iPhone will hardly shift the entire service provider market, it might perhaps highlight the benefits that choice can bring to a market.

Great post on the Daily Kos this morning letting us know. Here.

As it seems to me that this presidential election cycle, the primary season has started earlier than ever. With three debates already having occurred and another set for later this week, it seems as though Presidential Politics is already in full swing. The media seemed to have swarmed all over this blossoming season running up to the the start of the presidential primaries partly because of the landmark campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Primaries are an incredibly important part of our political process bringing some semblance of order to a system that hardly any Americans actually understand to begin with. The staggered primary system that we use, allows candidates to build momentum and gain support and money or conversely provides front runners the opportunity to fall from grace. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the staggered primary is its direct link to fundraising.

In the modern political era of the 24 hours news network and 2 million channels nothing has become more important to presidential hopefuls than fund raising. In the two most recent presidential elections, the candidate who has won has also raised the most money: Bush over Gore in 2000 with $192.7 mil and $132.8 mil respectively and Bush over Kerry in 2004 with $367.2 mil and $300.0 mil. The money that the candidates receive represents Ad Buys, radio time, print media, events, plane travel, staff, and God only knows what else. There are many different determinate on how well a candidate can fundraise but probably one of the biggest is the primaries.

Everybody wants to bet on the winning horse, especially corporations and special interests. Those groups want to put their money where their money is going to do the most good. In their view, which is quite logical, there is no sense in spending money on a candidate who isn’t going to be in office to help them. The special interests then have to formulate some way of determining who is the right horse to back, and like all of us, they pay attention to who is doing well in the primaries. As each of the primaries approach, expectations are are set by the public, news media, campaign staff, and the like. How a candidate does compared to those expectations can be more important than even a win or a lose.

For instance, Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential primary had great expectations placed upon him during the run up to the start of the Democratic primary season. But less than stellar (and by no means could they be considered awful) performances in both Iowa and New Hampshire left Dean on the defensive about the illegitimacy of his campaign. The once raising star of the Dean campaign had started to fall and donors took notice, leaving dean to stand alone and focusing on the rising star of both John Kerry and John Edwards. Dean continued to stagnate and the funds moved elsewhere and since there is only a finite amount of money available his campaign effectively ended.

Staggered primaries allow one event to roll into another to roll into another effectively creating momentum that can be almost impossible to overcome. Instead of basing our decisions on policy positions or a candidates ability to effectively govern, we tend to buy into whoever is feeding us the most convincing TV
Commercial. Since doing well begets more money and more money gets more TV time to feed to the masses the system becomes a self fulfilling prophecy once 3-4 primary elections are over.

This is why we need a national primary, just like we have a national election. A national primary who eliminate the rolling momentum that candidates receive when they start doing better than expected. A national primary would make people This way, donors will be forced to select who they would like to give money to not on the building of momentum from gaining delegates, but on the merits of their candidacy. Instead of basing our election decisions on what amounts to past performance in previous primaries we might be able to get Candidates to communicate more openly about real issues and expand on the 20 Sec sound bites that they give to every state.

One need not look any farther than the recent events of the past couple weeks to see how civil liberties has devolved to cold war eara levels. Two weeks ago, in a move that was reminiscent of the rush to pass the Patriot Act, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Protect Americans Act of 2007. Quite a catchy title, considering it authorizes the very thing that congress was so up in arms about the administration doing in the first place. This bill basicially gave Attorney General the abiliy to by-pass the FISA courts and conduct warrentless surveillance on American Citizens. The Administration has done a wonderful job of fear mongering and in a great examples of what the fog of war can accomplish, the administration successfully beat back two bills that had reasonable allowances for the administration to perform surveillance on American Citizens. The New York Times writes a wonderful editorial on Bush’s strategy.

Furthermore, today, in the Washington Post, we are given new insights into the level of suspicious and scrupulous behavior of our current Attorney General.

Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was “feeble,” “barely articulate” and “stressed” moments after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday.

I don’t understand how American’s can continue to put blind trust in our own government when it continues to erode away at the very securities and freedoms that our founders sought to instill permanently in our Country. Aren’t we in Iraq in order to export democracy and give the Iraqi’s some of the very things that we hold dear about our country? Isn’t President Bush always talking about the defense of Freedom and Liberty? Or is he just speaking about protecting those things for the people that agree with him? There is no doubt that attacks on the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and Flight 93 were great American travesties, and there is no doubt that a greater effort was needed in foreign intelligence and national defense. But, when the FBI starts monitoring an Anti-War rally at UC Santa Cruz, and the NSA can conduct what amount to searches and seizures of American conversations with out probable cause or a warrant, haven’t the terrorists won!?!

Apparently Dick Cheney has gotten dumber as he has gotten older. The profound nature of his own ability to fool himself into believing the bull shit that comes out of his mouth is incredible.

It is hard to see in the short term how CARE’s refusal of this indirect aid will benefit anyone. CARE will be loosing out on valuable funds and could potentially be shutting down an easy avenue to infuse undeveloped nations with a larger food supply. But, Ultimately, the shift of resources from buying food from the U.S., which re-enforces bad food subsidies and over production, to the development of technology and the implementation of better farming techniques, will allow farmers in developing nations to produce food for themselves and redistribute income into their own economy. Instead of providing money to foreign based non-profit groups, the income generated by the increased domestic yields could be reinvested into domestic economies which ultimately is key for these nations to get their food on the first rung of ladder of development.

It is time for Americans to remove our sole focus on our well being and focus on the global fight on poverty.

Due process is what keeps our system just. While Rodger Goodell may have a duty to protect the integrity of Football, we as Americans, have a duty to protect our system of Laws. It does a dis-service to our society when sports commentators raise there voices and scream at the top of their lungs for Michael Vick’s head on a pike.