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It seems like every discussion of SOPA/PIPA includes a phrase like “Everyone agrees that piracy is huge problem,” but in fact, the “huge problem” they’re agreeing on has been inflated to farcical proportions through the most transparent financial funny business.

Yeah this has been bugging me. Even at Wednesday’s protest in midtown we were patronized with speakers assuring the Powers that we all agree that “something must be done” about “piracy”. That simply isn’t true. We don’t agree on the definition of the problem, or the scope of it, or much less that the federal government should take further legislative action concerning it.

We have stacks of law, already, imposing incongruous jail times for the violation of copyright. It’s is far from clear that anything else the government does will be more effective, and in any case I as a citizen am not ashamed to say I just don’t want it. We are not to be told, in a representative democracy, what is right and wrong and then given a few shitty options for combating supposed wrongs. It is in fact up to us to decide what is ethical, and what wrongs are worth government attention at all. Everyone I’ve talked to likes the internet as it is, (or better yet without the ill conceived DMCA, the one we failed to stop).

You have to wonder who exactly Schumer and Gillibrand are serving, when you can’t find a soul in this state who has remotely similar priorities.

There is a tiny city agency responsible for monitoring the Internal Affairs Bureau: the Mayor’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption. But it has no subpoena power — it must rely on the department’s good will, and its modest budget and staff of five are spread thin.

We should appoint a czar to watch the agency which watches the bureau which watches the department which watches the city. That should do the trick.

Particularly disturbing, the official said, was a news report that said some officers chanted “E.B.T.” at people lined up at a benefits center across the street, referring to electronic benefit transfer, the method by which welfare checks are distributed. The people had apparently chanted “Fix our tickets” to the officers.

And how do our tax dollars end up in the bank accounts of 35,000 NYPD employees—a sacred fiscal transfusion?

Moreover, they just happened to begin firing tear gas into the crowd, the third time, right after the two major media outlets that were covering it with live feeds turned off their cameras (as I can verify because I was watching those feeds from the safety of my living room while following the twitter feeds of people like @garonsen and @susie_c). And that coincidence was quite a coincidence. ABC and CBS later claimed their helicopters had to refuel, and they did show footage from later. But what a coincidence that they happened to both turn off their cameras just before the police attacked? That their helicopters ran out of gas at precisely the same time, that time?

Because anytime I or virtually anyone I ever worked with engaged in losing a summons, I got nothing in return. It was, in my mind, an extended courtesy, as is adamantly professed in numerous press releases by the sergeants union president, Ed Mullins.

— Ernie Naspretto, retired NYPD captain

What a tricky philosophical question. Is it unethical for police to short-circuit the judicial process, to hand out favors to friends and family—to subject only The Unconnected to expensive tickets and insurance increases? Is it bad to have a separate, softer judicial system for a privileged class of people, to proudly disclaim of that libtard constitution’s ideal of “equal protection under the law”?

Ethics aside—as they certainly are for the NYPD—Naspretto confirms that higher-ups in the department and its union have no regard for traffic law in the practical sense, as a necessary measure to reduce the death, injury, and damage caused by autos on the streets. Insurance companies know otherwise; that’s why they raise rates of reckless drivers (they are not just bein’ mean, or “discourteous”, for fun). But perhaps this admission helps explain why the baseline auto insurance rates in our region are so much higher than everywhere else: it includes scores of reckless drivers protected from any consequence flaunting traffic laws.