Mind Horizon

“When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.  The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:  I am the Lord your God..” - Leviticus 19:33-34 and 24:22 A Historical Context to Trump’s America On March 24 th , 1980, the assassination of human rights advocate and Archbishop Oscar Romero plunged El Salvador into 12 dark years of civil war, costing an estimated total of 75,000 lives by 1992. However to call it a civil war fails to capture the gross asymmetry of violence committed by both sides. Almost all of the killings and human rights violations were carried out by the ruling government, defending itself against the leftist guerillas attempting to seize power and restore justice. For centuries since Spanish colonization, a long line of brutal military dictatorships enriched a small oligarchy of white elites at the expense and explo...

On February 5 th , 2019, evil dictator Nicolas Maduro blocked humanitarian aid from getting to his starving people, simply because he is such an abhorrent, horrendous despot. The Tienditas Bridge, which connects Columbia to Venezuela, has become a microcosm of the broader conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, freedom and despair. Out of pure compassion for the impoverished and disfranchised, President Trump and his administration of altruists are waiting for the bridge to reopen so they can bring food and medicine to Maduro’s victims. If nothing changes soon, then Trump will be left with no choice but to intervene militarily, depose the tyrant, and liberate the population from socialist terror. That’s the narrative coming from the U.S. mainstream media, anyway. CNN , NBC , MSNBC , CBS , MSN , CNBC , USA Today , Newsweek , and of course Fox News have all parroted more or less the same story about Tienditas Bridge for weeks. But what every damning headline forgets to ...

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...