FBI

Many campus activists have lashed out in frustration at “free speech purism,” which they regard as misplaced in the context of institutionalized oppression. But it is extremely short-sighted to sacrifice universal principle on the altar of identity politics for the sake of marginalized groups.

The Western world consists of a tyranny in which brainwashed nonentities live in a constructed reality. Can enough of these people be rescued to make a difference? That is the question.

Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. By 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year. Now, according to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.

The allure of ill-gotten oil money remains strong. The lull in drilling has given oil companies more time to scrutinize their operations -- and their losses. As Bloomberg reports, during booms "they are moving at such a rapid pace there’s not a lot of auditing and inventorying going on," said Gary Painter, sheriff in Midland County, Texas, in the oil-rich Permian Basin; but "whenever it slows down, they start looking for stuff and find out it never got delivered or it got delivered and it’s gone." From raw crude sucked from wells to expensive machinery that disappears out the back door, drillers from Texas to Colorado are struggling to stop theft that has only worsened amid tens of thousands of lost roughneck jobs.

"Thieves snuck in through the roof and stole weapons from a building that’s full of locked doors." The haul: "six semi-automatic rifles and 10 pistols."

The incentive structure throughout government, Wall Street, and big business generally is that “crime pays,” which is exactly why we’re seeing more and more of it. It will only get worse, until we grow up as a culture and demand accountability.

"All. Bets. Are. Off"...

The self-inflicted wounds of Hillary Rodham Clinton just keep manifesting themselves. She has two serious issues that have arisen in the past week; one is political and the other is legal. Both have deception at their root.

Today the FBI released its latest background check data - a proxy for total gun sales in the United States as most gun purchases require a background check - in which we find that, as expected, Obama's latest threat to implement stricter gun controls backfried once more, and the month of October saw a record number of background checks. The same was true for September, August, and so on: in fact, October the sixth consecutive month to see a record number of checks. 

The story behind Malaysia PM Najib Razak's Goldman-backed slush fund just got even stranger as it now appears some $2.3 billion in mystery money tied to an ill-fated investment with the Saudis ended up being managed by an Australian penny stock pusher via a shady Cayman Islands account. 

The real interesting part of the latest Quinnipiac University National Poll, is not the fact that 60% of Americans think Hillary Clinton is dishonest, but that 40% of Americans don’t.

iPhone maker Apple claimed last month that their latest iteration of the wildly popular handheld device was unhackable. But as we already know from recent hacks of Department of Defense computers, essential domestic grid infrastructure computers, and even NASA’s in-orbit spacecraft, in the digital age nothing is ever really secure. After offering a $1 million bounty, cyber security firm Zerodium confirms a hacker group has successfully compromised Apple's iOS 9. Here’s the kicker: the exploit is remote, so it can be launched on your phone without you even knowing about it.

The desire to take the American public out of the “of the people, by the people, for the people” business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen’s army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field.  It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army. From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow.