Urban Issues

A Moment to Decide

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Once to ev’ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

– James Russell Lowell

So the first shots in the shooting war have been fired, to the surprise of practically no one who has been following civic matters over the last six months. Admittedly, that the first would be fired in Kenosha, of all places that’s a bit of a surprise. Although it isn’t at all startling that a Trump supporter would be gunned down on the streets of Portland by an Antifa thug shortly thereafter, to resounding cheers of approval.

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The Rolling Kristallnacht

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The rolling Kristallnacht of “mostly peaceful” protests organized and sponsored by the unholy union of Antifa and BLM continues unabated in those mostly progressive Democrat party municipalities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and New York. Give the protesters, rioters and looters credit for stamina; they’ve kept it up for nearly two months now, and look to be going strong, still. They haven’t much dared venture out and away from those progressive sanctuaries, although half a dozen did make a trip to Sturgis to provoke the bikers rallying there, which futile bit of resistance theater they did from behind a screen of local police. Which brings to mind Insty the Blogfaddah’s oft-repeated observation that the police which the Antifaites and BLM protesters wish to abolish are there to protect accused criminals from the rest of us. Frankly, it would have been laugh-out-loud comic if the bikers in Sturgis had been allowed to pants the Antifaites and run them out of town naked, but there you are. Obviously the Antifaites and BLMmers are hoping to provoke an over-the-top violent reaction and a blooming new crop of martyr Horst Wessels; they must be quite annoyed that so far, the rest of us have kept our temper.

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So, we drive on the right and our homes are our castles – or not

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Freedom is greatest within restraints and boundaries. Sure, on some slippery slope with no constraining adverbs, this seems contradictory, but we recognize daily that minimal, enforceable and enforced, laws provide predictability, enable true freedom. Would my freedom be enlarged without the first limit society imposes as I leave my house: driving on the right? Seinfeld’s Kramer attempted to “free” the lanes but caused chaos. I cheerfully accept it because it simplifies more than limits; I go over my grocery list or laugh with Limbaugh; someone more productive might create a poem or solve a physics problem. Without limits, we would be on guard, slow to a crawl, choose a tank, hoping, as my brothers put it, to be the shearer and not the shearee in an inevitable collision. I remember a homesick Iranian engineer telling us still he didn’t want to return here drivers stop at red lights, even alone at night; there, every intersection was a free for all. Too much order suffocates but with too little concentration is difficult.

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Observations on Federal Law Enforcement Actions in Portland

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Federal Lawmen arresting Portland protesters shown in recent social media video had the word “Police” on the uniforms as well as black and green “Homeland Security” shoulder patches. That the Leftist voice over says they were “not identified” is not supported by the visuals under the voice overs.

It is clear these Federal lawmen were looking for someone specific and that they were doing so in an unmarked vehicle.

Federal law men do this regularly. This tactic is seen most in drug cases and when they are hunting cop killers. A later Federal statement about this action after the person being detained was released made clear the Feds were looking for an individual who attacked federal officers at the court house, and the person picked up may have been a “known associate.”

As for the rest of the Leftist voice overs, Federal law men are required to give Miranda rights in an arrest.

They are _not_ required to do so immediately. Removing a detained individual from the scene and reading Miranda rights later has been accepted by the Federal courts for decades.

Given the tendency of Antifa/BLM groups to mob lawmen removing their members. The Feds here were simply applying the least violent tactics.

PERSONAL SPECULATION BASED ON OBSERVATIONS

If the Feds are following their organized crime template. The organizations and the people wiring money to post these individual’s bail money are now under Federal electronic surveillance. This has been how the Feds deal with large organizations of people bailing out the people the Feds arrest since the “Drug King Pin,” “asset forfeiture” and RICO additions to the racketeering laws were passed in the 1980’s.

Given the “Big Data” tools available to the Feds, every Antifa/BLM person detained in Portland is having all relevant bio-metric identification taken from them and the information is being fed into various law enforcement data bases, to include those of the Secret Service. The latter has a higher level of access to the NSA data banks than the FBI to evaluate people as threats to the President or other politicians they protect.

In so many words, if any of the Antifa/BLM people being picked up in Portland were anywhere near a Secret Service presidential detail protected Trump campaign ot Administration event, Trump family event or Presidential /V.P. visit to any city outside Portland since the summer of 2015. Any metadata in cell phones, bank, hotel, credit card, airline, or bus line records somewhere that matches these people has been pulled. If this data compared with those Secret Service “security bubble” hits has a match.   It will cause an automated threat profile to be generated. A threat profile that will show all the electronic records of their travels and electronic money transfers for the period(s) of interest.

The latter — electronic money transfers — will be used to map the money flows at lower levels of Antifa/BLM to reach up to the higher levels of money flowing from the big corporations and Soros backed front groups.

Please note, Federal standard operating procedure with organized crime means some number of those Antifa/BLM being arrested & released in Portland are now Federal informants.

One more thing,   the Feds — and the Secret Service especially — have made very extensive use of both facial recognition and visual pattern recognition technology.  I guarantee that these unmarked Federal law enforcement vans cruising in Portland Oregon have cameras with both technologies.

That Federal law men are getting out and walking a couple of blocks to their target from such vans and slow walking them back is a “poker tell” [AKA   tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)] of facial recognition technology’s use.   As everyone who turns to see the uniformed law men coming and watching them going with the detainee gives the watching camera’s enough eye-nose area data to match them up with their driver’s licence photos.

Please see:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07…

“A 2016 study by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology found that one in four US state or local police departments had access to facial recognition technology, and that nearly half of all American adults are in a police facial recognition database, in part because of agreements that provide access to repositories of drivers’ license photos.”

One of the many things that came back from Iraq   US Army surplus to American law enforcement was a visual surveillance technology called “Constant Hawk.”   The US Military pioneered artificial intelligence (A.I.) visual pattern recognition technology to beat the Iraqi road side bomb campaign, starting in 2006, with the “Constant Hawk”   camera system in MC-12 twin engine turbo props.   (A MC-12 is the Cessna King Air in olive drab and white paint job).

Strategy page -dot- com reports in 2020 that a “Constant Hawk-lite” technology has been shrunk to the point an 11 kg (22-lb) drone can carry it.   See:

Information Warfare: Son Of Hawk Sees More
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20200707.aspx

“Constant Hawk uses a special video camera system to observe a locality and find useful patterns of behavior. Some of the Constant Hawk systems are mounted on light (MC-12s, mainly) aircraft, others are mounted on ground structures. Special software compares photos from different times. When changes are noted, they are checked more closely, which has resulted in the early detection of thousands of roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes. This largely eliminated roadside bomb attacks on supply convoys in Iraq.”

Short Form:

There are Federal law enforcement light planes and unmarked Federal law enforcement vans cruising above and around Portland “mapping the Antifa  human terrain” the way that Google Earth does for roads and houses in your neighborhood.

My gut says we are going to see rounds of mass arrests based on the data these systems are gathering.

A fact to remember related to this effort is that the criminal conviction rates in Federal courts run to 98%.

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Excessive Credential-Worship Has Many Costs

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A WSJ article suggests that if the corporations which have been proclaiming their support for black communities really want to make a difference, they should change their hiring and management practices to focus on job skills, rather than continuing to privilege college degrees.  They say that “degree inflation” is rampant: as an example,  67% of postings for new production supervisors in 2015 included college-degree requirements, though only 16% of existing production supervisors had bachelor’s degrees.  (See interesting NBER paper here.)

Indeed, I’m not very comfortable with the term ‘middle skill’ which has been adopted for jobs that typically require a technical training program of some sort but do not require a college degree.  Is someone with an undergraduate sociology degree really necessarily more skilled than a CNC machinist?  The suggestion that someone with a college degree is always higher-skilled than someone without a degree has unpleasant implications of a class-bound society. The authors of the NBER paper suggest an alternative term: STARs…Skilled Through Alternative Routes, and they also suggest that many “technology” jobs shouldn’t really require a college degree.  They note that:

While some of these new occupations (e.g., data scientist) may require skills (e.g., statistical methods) which are typically acquired in advanced formal education, a large number (e.g., application developers and administrators for enterprise Software-as-a-Service platforms such as Salesforce, Workday, or ServiceNow) are learned not in formal education, but mostly on-the-job or in credentialed skill training designed by the SaaS companies themselves. While estimating STARs’ potential to fill skilled roles still emerging is beyond the scope of this paper, it would be reasonable to expect that employers’ rational ignorance or deprecation of experienced-based signals of STARs skills for existing jobs may similarly shape.

…they also suggest that there are many cases in which skills developed by an employee in a particular not-well-paid job can actually be of value to an employer in a different and better-paid job, but that the mapping of these skills sets is not generally well-understood by employers.

Back in 1969, Peter Drucker wrote:

The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the “diploma curtain” between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history…By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve…I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status…I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.

I wouldn’t favor a legal ban on such questions, but I do think public policy needs to encourage of focus on skills rather than on degrees per se, and I’m happy to see that President Trump has signed an executive order requiring Federal  agencies to increase the use of skill assessments and interviews with subject matter experts to determine an applicant’s qualifications, rather than simply looking at educational achievements.  At least one agency had already made this switch to a certain degree:  the FAA, which once required a college degree for aspiring controllers entering its specialized training program, now allows alternatively a combination of three years of progressively responsible work experience or a combination of post-secondary education and work experience that totals three years.  And some private employers are putting more emphasis on apprenticeship programs and various kinds of alternative skill demonstration.  (See for example the GE Aviation apprenticeship program; lots more North Carolina apprenticeship programs here.)

Working on the lifting of the “diploma curtain” seems particularly appropriate given the growing evidence that many college graduates today don’t really learn all that much during their college years.  In any case, if the inappropriate use of college credentials can be reduced, it should offer a significant benefit to overall economic growth and productivity, as well as to many individuals.