2 Cent Friday

Just a few news stories that caught my attention

Happy Friday everyone! Lots of news and events going on around the world. Extreme weather, terrorism and the risk of World War 3 to throw into the mix. Here are a few stories and opinions that caught my interest…

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Judge decides the 4th Amendment ceases to exist. In March 2021 the FBI executed a search warrant at the U.S. Private Vault store in Beverly Hills. This happened due to suspicion of money laundering and drug dealing at the business. Fair enough. What is not fair (or constitutional) was the confiscation of the contents of the 700 safety deposit boxes located at the property. These boxes were rented individually, and contained valuables such as cash, gold, or jewelry. This asset forfeiture without evidence of crimes on the customers part who were using the safety deposit services at the business is outrageous. From the article:

In their warrant request, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim for permission to seize the store’s racks of safe-deposit boxes for forfeiture, but “not their contents.”

They assured Kim that agents would follow the FBI’s written policies for taking inventory of the box contents to protect against theft allegations, and then notify owners they could retrieve their property.

The warrant request omitted a central part of the FBI’s plan: permanent confiscation of everything inside any box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.

The FBI’s justification for the undisclosed wholesale forfeiture was its assumption that all the customers, who rented their boxes anonymously, were storing assets somehow tied to unknown crimes, court records show.

U.S District Judge R. Gary Klausner went to say there was no question that the government “expected, or even hoped, to find criminal evidence during its inventory.”

This ruling basically approves a government agency the power to execute a dragnet search to peruse what they find without cause or criminal charges. Imagine a squad of FBI cars surrounding an apartment complex and begin to systematically ransack all the occupant’s homes due to evidence or suspicion of criminal activity in one residence. Then, they keep anything of value until the resident it was taken from can prove THEIR innocence. Not a good look today for Lady Liberty, but she has been on life support for a while now.

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This story popped earlier this morning announcing a request from Ukraine to accelerate the NATO membership process. I read an article months ago that had a great line about “Small wars are preferable to World Wars.” That has stuck with me and helped shape my viewpoint on the conflict that has affected so many interlocking processes of the world. The big picture includes global stability regarding food supplies, energy, and overall balance. This isn’t about being pro-whoever, it is about what steps need to be taken to ensure a resolution to this conflict. It feels like we hear once a week that another multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine has been approved. Ukraine is not the 51st state of the US, and the EU appears to simply go along with whatever our foreign policy apparatus deems important. Too many moving pieces are involved, and the chance for misjudgment is high. Two articles, one from the beginning of the conflict, the other from a few days ago should be required reading to expand one’s scope of the situation.

Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble - Tablet Magazine

American Pipe Dreams in Ukraine

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Finally, this is a horrific story out of Kabul, Afghanistan where a suicide bomber decided that women having access to books and knowledge are an abomination. From CNN:

Kabul, Afghanistan CNN — 

A suicide bomb attack on an education center in Kabul has killed at least 25 people, most of whom are believed to be young women, in the latest sign of the deteriorating security situation in the Afghan capital. (Bold Italics added.)

The explosion took place on Friday at the Kaaj education center, in a predominantly Hazara neighborhood – an ethnic minority group that has long faced oppression.

Students were taking a practice university entrance exam at 7:30 a.m., local time (11 p.m. ET) when the blast first took place, Kabul Police Spokesman Khalid Zadran told CNN. In addition to those killed, at least 56 people were injured, according to reports from hospitals.

Mostly women in the death toll. At an education center we probably built and encouraged these women to attend. After 20 years of strife and sacrifice this is the result. A regression to the mean that the country was at before the US occupation.

20 years. Over 2 trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan. That number is almost too hard to comprehend. A better way to visualize that is to know that equals 300 million a day…for 20 years. According to research from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the final tally could top well over 8 trillion dollars. This considers the costs associated with veteran care, counterterrorism efforts, and interests payments incurred for borrowing funds we didn’t even have to conduct the War on Tara’, as President George W. Bush would say.

So. This is the result after all the capital spent, bloodshed, useless waste of our nation’s most important asset, our young men, and women. A country most Americans only knew from a distant 1980s movie that starred Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, coming in to save the day against the Russian onslaught. The irony that another Superpower had tried to corral and change this country before we did is almost poetic.

Many historians point to the 1980s Afghan-Russian war as the tipping point that helped collapse the USSR due to the massive budget deficits it caused. Let us hope our misadventures in that part of the world do not lead to the same conclusion.

On that bright note I wish everyone a nice weekend, and I will strive to bring the number of postings up per week.

Respectfully,

ArthurinCali