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Homeland Security: The Sworn Duty of Public Officials

Homeland Security: The Sworn Duty of Public Officials     The United States has a unique position amongst the countries of the world;...

Sunday, May 21, 2017

"Revenge and Retribution" - A science/crime short story


I am sitting here in the apartment of the man who didn't kill my wife, waiting to kill him.

The lights are out, and he's due back in about five minutes, just enough time for me to explain about three coincidences.

A little background...
After 9/11, I joined the Marine Corps. I've always felt a little bored by the pace of life, and the Corps suited me. I did one tour as an 0311, or infantry. I re-enlisted for a second tour as an MP, or military policeman (5811). I got out and went to college to get a degree in criminal justice; I went to a school with a large military community, a large officer presence, and I went there with the support of a few officers from my MP unit. It was expected that I would return to the Corps as an MP officer.

I messed things up with an old cliche...I knocked up an Admiral's daughter, and I didn't do the "right thing" by her. She was a fine woman to rattle the headboards with, but she was a whimpering and insipid fool; I could not see spending the rest of my life belting her in the mouth. She got an abortion, and I was out of that career.

But I had found I liked academics, so first I finished the bach, and then I got my doctorate. I also met and married my wife during this period.

The first two coincidences are intertwined. My dissertation was about the work I did in setting up a gang intelligence unit for my hometown's police department; this is my main area of research. My other primary research areas are the ethics of retributive justice, and the biological bases of psychopathy - mostly coming from the work of Robert Hare and Adrian Raines.

On May 23, 2022, a thrilling breakthrough in the treatment of psychopathic criminals was announced, a microchip that compensated for problems in the frontal lobe; these problems are the cause for a lack of human empathy that is the reason for psychopathic behavior. By installing these microchips into the subject's brains, a psychopath could be instantly "rehabilitated", and could function as a normal human. I spent all day in the office reading on on this thrilling discovery. Since I was supposed to pick up my wife at work, she ended up borrowing her boss's work Lexus to drive home.

On May 23, 2022, three juvenile gang members carjacked a Lexus, raping and murdering my wife in the process. The carjacking was the the primary goal of the the gang members, raping and killing my wife was an afterthought.

The gang members were tried as adults; two of them ended up going to prison, but the third, Ramon, was diagnosed as a psychopath. He was selected for microchip therapy. Ramon had been the one to escalate the carjacking into the terror my wife suffered. On December 14th of that year, the microchip was installed.

I followed up on the case. Ramon spent a lot of time in treatment for depression. The microchip did not erase the memory of what he had done, simply created the ability for him to feel remorse. Since he had no emotional experience in tamping down these feelings, Ramon became a sad mess. I understood all too well that psychopaths are able to manipulate their therapists for early release by reading and manipulating those therapists' feelings. The private eye that I hired to mark Ramon's movements reported that he spent all his time, other than headshrinker appointments, drinking and crying. Ramon was not the same man that murdered my wife.

Essentially, the retributive mode is revenge on the part of society AND the victim for the transgressor's violation. At it's most basic, it is "an eye for an eye" justice. It satisfies the justice needs of society, not the criminal.

Any given method of justice (retributive, incapacitative, deterrent, rehabilitative) can fit within multiple nodes. A prison term is incapacitative, or in other words keeps the criminal away from possible victims and prevents additional crime: while at the same time, prison is supposedly deterrent at the same time, or in other words gives the offender a reason not to do it again, or "scared straight".
Rehabilitation has great press but only really works on juveniles, who may be "aging out" of delinquency in the first place.

Raines, at an ASC (American Society of Criminology) meeting long ago, had a great discussion about how the leading academics refused to consider that biology played a part in the origination of crime. Of course, those guys were the ones claiming that "poverty causes crime". That view of crime is espoused by "academics" like Cloward and Piven.

Now the people that don't like to punish criminals will tell you that the deterrent and the rehabilitative modes are the only..."efficient"...or moral...modes of preventing additional crime. These people are known as do-gooders.

I studied the retributive mode for several reasons, but the biggest reason is that I feel it is the most just.

Now I'm sitting here on Ramon's couch, waiting for him to get back from his shrink appointment, and I've got a shotgun loaded with PDX1, or what is known as "buck and ball". It's really just one big chunk of metal and three smaller chunks of metal, all waiting to explode out of the end of the gun.

And there is time to tell you about that third coincidence, The psychopathy expert I spoke of, Hare? He came up with a system of diagnosing psychopaths called the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL. It's a 40 point test. If you get a score of 26, that indicates your subject is a psychopath.

On some suspicion of my own personality, I took the test at a seminar some time ago; I feigned that I was mimicking a psychopath, but I was really answering truthfully.

My score was a 27.

Now I can hear the key jiggling in the lock...looks like Ramon is home. Let me just raise the barrel to face level...

First published at:
Steemit

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Minor Updates to "Homeland Security: The Sworn Duty of Public Officials"

I have included some minor updates to this post on the social media site, Steemit.

https://steemit.com/politics/@stevescoins/74u9xg-homeland-security-the-sworn-duty-of-public-officials

These changes include some pictures of extremist groups and some personal notes that weren't applicable to the school assignment which formed the basis of the post.

Also included, a pic of H. Clinton being led off in handcuffs by an FBI agent, an arrest that should have been made long ago.  The FBI simply did not adhere to their sworn oath.

Monday, January 9, 2017

A fictional break from study

I took some time off to complete a story I started long ago.  My Western adventure (adult themes)






I have been working on fiction more than on study lately, but I will be releasing an updated version of my thesis, The Effects Of Hoover's Bureaucratic Tactics On COINTELPRO Operations: A Comparison Between NEW LEFT and WHITE HATE, on Amazon in the next two weeks.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Steemit Verification

This post is meant to verify my identity as @stevescoins on Steemit.com
https://steemit.com/@stevescoins

I have reprised or updated several articles form this site there, and also provide samples of my fictional work in sci-fi, horror, and fantasy

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

So what happens when security needs are valued over the needs of liberty?

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
 Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” -- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Quotes (Author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

Monday, July 11, 2016

Removing Some Data from Zotero

I will be removing some data from my Zotero database regarding privacy methods that can be used for criminal activity.

On one hand, I included the material for the sake of completeness.  However, at the same time, the misfeasance (if not malfeasance) of the security community in ignoring identified terror threats (Tsarnaevs, Mateen, Hasan, etc) while using illegal and ineffective bulk collection methods against the public at large led me to include the methods in place for privacy's sake.

I have long believed that the privacy versus security balance in this country is far out of whack.

I have been reexamining the relationship between cybercrime and terror financing, and have decided to go ahead and remove some of the material I consider to be the most dangerous.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Break, with some rent-seeking reading.

Sorry for the delay in posting; I have been working on a book, and I keep digressing down research paths.

Here is some reading to keep you busy in the meantime, focusing on the concept of rent-seeking. The major issue with this research is that it doesn't focus on the government movers that facilitate rent-seeking, but rather on the businesses that benefit from it. Understanding this phenomena requires that the participation of politicians and bureaucrats be fully explored.

An another issue is that rent-seeking isn't studied in the context of the welfare-bureaucracy-NGO complex, or rent-seeking in terms of government services in themselves. 

Finally, the material is a bit short on the "Baptists and bootleggers" aspect of rent-seeking. When my attention span drifts back this way, I hope to add more literature dealing with these deficiencies.

And away we go:

Calderón, & Chong. (n.d.). Do Democracies Breed Rent-Seeking Behavior? Chowdhury, F. L. (2006). Corrupt bureaucracy and privatization of tax enforcement in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Pathak Shamabesh.

Congleton, R. D., Hillman, A. L., & Konrad, K. A. (2008). Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview. The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research, 1, 1–42. Cowen, T., & Tabarrok, A. (1999). The opportunity costs of rent seeking. Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, 17, 121–127.

Hillman, A. L., & Ursprung, H. W. (2015). The political economy of an idea: The case of rent seeking. Retrieved from http://rdc1.net/Tullock%20Memorial%20Conference/Hillman%20rent%20seeking%20Tullock%20memorial%20conference%20(3).pdf Hillman, A., &

Ursprung, H. (n.d.). Rent seeking: The idea, the reality, and the ideological resistance. Hillman.Rent seeking.2015.pdf. (n.d.). Khan. (n.d.). Chapter 2. Rent-Seeking as Process. Krueger, A. O. (1974). The political economy of the rent-seeking society. The American Economic Review, 64(3), 291–303.

Mbaku, J. M. (1998). Corruption and rent-seeking. In The political dimension of economic growth (pp. 193–211). Springer. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-26284-7_10

McPhail, E., & Farrant, A. (2012). The Servants of Obama’s Machinery: F.A. Hayek’s the Road to Serfdom Revisited? (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2139285). Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2139285

Pasour Jr, E. C. (1987). Rent seeking: Some conceptual problems and implications. The Review of Austrian Economics, 1(1), 123–143.