Mind Horizon

In part one, I introduced and explained the practice of civil forfeiture. We examined the extent to which it has been abused, and how bad incentives have led to corruption in law enforcement. We also analyzed the disproportionate effect it has on the poor and minorities. Once police departments get their hands on a load of cash from some poor minorities, they have an unusual degree of freedom to spend it. The money must go towards things within the scope of the department’s needs, and it typically does. However, the largely unsupervised budget sometimes funds the further militarization of the police, buying armored personnel carriers, mobile command buses, and helicopters. Whether some of those purchases are necessary is debatable, but others are definitely unjustified, such as excessively expensive sports cars used as police cruisers or undercover vehicles. Here is a short list of wasteful spending by some departments. Albany, New York, Police Department: $7,711 on photogra...

In 2013 , George Reby was traveling through Tennessee when he was stopped by law enforcement for speeding. The officer asked Reby for permission to search his vehicle, and upon receiving it, seized $22,000 in cash belonging to the driver. The officer suspected the money was being used to buy drugs, as he later confirmed in an affidavit, saying,“common people do not carry this much U.S. currency.” But Reby protested that he was intending to purchase a car in Nashville, and even pulled out his computer with the eBay listing, which the officer omitted from his report. All of the money was whisked away by the police, and no criminal charges or investigations were ever carried out against Reby. In the interviews that followed, he stated, “If somebody told me this happened to them, I absolutely would not believe this could happen in America…You live in the United States. You think you have rights, and apparently, you don’t.” This is not an isolated incident, however. Similar cases h...

In part one, we looked at the rise of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, and how the two have done tremendously important work to create transparency and hold powerful governments accountable for their lies and atrocities. But Assange has not only set his sights on criminal governments; he has also dragged massive corporations into the sunlight to expose them for their crimes against humanity. A 2009 Minton report examining the waste dumping practices of Trafigura, a multinational oil trading firm, was initially suppressed but then leaked to Assange. The report detailed how the firm was dumping its toxic waste on the Ivory Coast in violation of EU regulations. As a result, approximately 109,000 Africans were affected by the chemical constituents, the harms of which include nausea, breathing problems, diarrhea, vomiting, skin burns, eyesight damage, and sometimes death.             The firm did this because they knew...

Vampires Exist They occupy some of the most powerful positions in society, infiltrating the ranks of CEOs, executives, commanders, legislators, bankers, etc. Like Kurt Barlow from Stephen King’s, “Salem’s Lot,” they send out their emissaries to find unknowing victims ripe for subjugation. Whether it’s deceiving the public, slaughtering people for fun or profit, or stealing trillions of dollars from those who already have less than them, they always find some way to sink their teeth into the throats of innocent people and look good doing it. When our newspapers fail, or the vampires evade the law, a vigilante is needed. A vampire hunter is needed.             Julian Assange is one such vampire hunter and is now possibly one of the single most important figures in the world. Born in Townsville, Australia in 1971, he moved around to 37 different schools with his mother, and naturally developed...