Policing a Feeding Frenzy

On this day:
1500
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot on Brazil.
1531
Lisbon, Portugal is hit by an earthquake--thousands die.
1564
The Council of Trent issues its conclusions in the Tridentinum, establishing a distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
1565
Battle of Talikota, fought between the Vijayanagara Empire and the Islamic sultanates of the Deccan, leads to the subjugation, and eventual destruction of the last Hindu kingdom in India, and the consolidation of Islamic rule over much of the Indian subcontinent.
1885
Troops loyal to The Mahdi conquer Khartoum.
1949
The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory sees first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope (until BTA-6 is built in 1976).
1978
The Great Blizzard of 1978, a rare severe blizzard with the lowest non-tropical atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the US, strikes the Ohio – Great Lakes region with heavy snow and winds up to 100 mph (161 km/h).
1998
Lewinsky scandal: On American television, U.S. President Bill Clinton denies having had “sexual relations” with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

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When Theodore Roosevelt asked Attorney General Philander Knox to concoct a legal justification for the unsavory U.S. measures that enabled construction of the Panama Canal, Knox replied, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

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I looked over old records of the Kent State shootings. While I found interviews in which the students thought the Guard's weapons had blanks, I found nothing to show the Guard thought so.

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Why is the Minnesota fraud case a partisan investigation?

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Spot prices of silver cracked past $103, while gold ran to as high as $4,988, just $12 shy of $5,000.

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There was a dramatic selloff in the Japanese bond market last week, accompanied by wild swings in the yen. Inflation, long dormant in Japan, has taken hold, and, moreover, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is pushing fiscal stimulus plans that would swell a government debt pile that is already uncomfortably large. As a result, investors have been frantically sending bond yields up to levels once unthinkable — more than 4% on the longest-dated JGBs. That’s exerting upward pressure on interest rates from the US to Britain and Germany.
Higher Japanese yields will prompt domestic investors to bring much more of their money back home. Some $5 trillion of the country's capital is deployed overseas.

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Policing a Feeding Frenzy

So the residents of Minnesota have organized into helpful little volunteer groups to monitor whether the Immigration Police are operating within the law. They are trying to make these encounters more difficult but more safe, a bit contradictory. Re the safety part, isn't that what the cops are supposed to do? Why do they need these standins? Apparently, the most recent shooting involved the victim intervening between ICE and an observer. They've been complaining that ICE is undertrained; are the self-appointed observers well-trained?

And the 'making the police action more difficult' part, how exactly does that fit in? Does that make things safer?

What's really happening is that amateurs are interfering with the cops. They are intervening in police actions against illegal immigrants. Dangerous stuff. Combustible. And unpredictable. Why would amateurs expose themselves to such risk? To pacify? Maybe they plan a religious conversion? Do they even know there is a risk? Do they think the good guys can shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand? Do they think that in a fight with the cops and someone yells "Gun!", that there will be several calm moments to debate if the cry is accurate or not?

We are seeing a growing number of militant busybodies who are trying to influence behavior in a shark tank. Why would any sensible person do such a thing? There may be some recent insight. A congressional representative recently said in an interview that ICE was not in Minnesota to enforce immigration law; they were there for 'intimidation.' The crack interviewer did not ask any clarifying follow-up questions, so we were not told who was being intimidated or why.

This is the opinion of an elected official. We can't explain what the thought process was here or its relationship to the militant observers. But we can accept the innuendo: the bell-shaped curve is a hell of a lot flatter and broader in this country than we thought.