Ah yeah, the NYC metro area and especially its trailer-trash cousin, Newark. Where hospitality means leaning on the horn and flipping you the bird — if you’re lucky.

Adam Urbano, 23, of Valparaiso, IN, was not lucky. He was trying to transit to Chicago on his way home, when the TSA mongs alerted to a rifle in his checked luggage. The TSA, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police, and Adam Messing, a TSA-level-IQ reporter for the New York Post (and his “layers and layers of editors”) all misidentified the firearm as (cue horror-movie music) an AK-47, and Urbano was duly thrown in jail.

(The weapon, as you can clearly see, is actually a semi-auto clone of the Czech VZ-58, which shares a caliber and a superficial resemblance with the famous Russian assault rifle).

The incident unfolded at about 6:40 p.m., when Adam Urbano, of Valparaiso, was arrested by Port Authority cops after TSA agents found the weapon during a routine screening of his luggage prior to his boarding a Southwest Airlines flight for Chicago, sources said.

Under Federal law, you can travel with your firearms. Under New York and New Jersey law, you can’t. Good luck appealing to this Justice Department for your rights. Other jurisdictions where they take glee in busting people transiting under their supposedly guaranteed McClure-Volkmer Act rights are Chicago (where Urbano was passing through on his way home, so he could have been jailed at that end, too) and Boston.

A further check revealed the weapon, manufactured by Ohio Ordinance Work, with a folding stock, inside a soft gun case. There were also three magazines with the gun, two containing a maximum of 30 rounds and the third containing 10 more rounds.

What were we just saying about Mr Messing and his layers and layers of editors? To state it in the elegant symbology of the C computer language, Ordinance != Ordinance. It’s a common error. At least by dumb-asses. That makes us suspect Messing just copied something the mouth-breathers of the TSA or the Port Authority Police handed him.

Thou shalt not copy, and if one does copy, though shalt not copy from people dumber than oneself.

Urbano had no paperwork for the rifle and had not declared it to airline officials and claimed he had purchased the gun for “recreational purposes.”

This would probably shock and terrify most in the Greater New York metro area, but in all but a handful of coastal states, nobody expects you to have any “paperwork for the rifle.” Places like New York and New Jersey, where all guns are registered, let alone places like Illinois and Massachusetts where you need a government permit to buy a .22 rifle or a box of shells, are exceptions. (MA seems determined to become the worst of these. They are making the rifle-permit may-issue, and in many towns that will be no-issue. In others it will be “no issue, except to the connected and maybe white people”).

On the other hand, when you travel with a gun it (1) must be in checked luggage, (2) must be unloaded (most airlines would not accept ammo in the mags, although their policies differ), and (3) you must declare it at check-in. Of course, if you do that in Newark, you’re going to jail, because civil rights don’t apply there. But they can do that to the hapless Urbano, who will now spend a long time in New Jersey’s hellhole prisons, because he enabled them by not following the rules.

Of course, it’s one more good reason not to fly.

He was charged with the illegal possession of an assault rifle and prohibited possession of large capacity ammunition magazines and was facing arraignment today.

It’s kind of amazing that they defined 30 as “large capacity.” It’s been the standard capacity rifle magazine in the US since 1969, in Russia since 1947, and in most of the rest of the world since they replaced their FALs in the 1990s.

 His arrest follows similar arrests at JFK and LaGuardia Airports earlier this month.

What did we tell you? The Greater New York Area, where just passing through gets you thrown in jail. But hey, Law Enforcement people there are better than you. But the policy of pursuing tourists and travelers instead of gangbangers seems to be bearing fruit. Yep, they sure have things under control.

via Flier busted at Newark airport with Soviet-style AK-47, ammo | New York Post.

Indra Nooyi hates America, the military, and you. But she sure loves your money.

Indra Nooyi is the anti-American and anti-military 1%er who’s headed Pepsi since 2006. The stock is up currently due to the same market bubble that has the Dow flirting with 17,000 (because where else can capital go, except to stocks, in the never-ending recession?) But the supposed finance expert has tanked two business fundamentals: return on capital has been halved on her watch, and return on equity dropped by one-third (scroll down to the historical data, and note that the peaks coincide with her appointment). But she’s the sort of celebrity CEO that chases the reporters and cameras, rather than the kind that grows the company. (She has, instead, laid off thousands while banking around $20 million a year). Meanehile, Pepsi isn’t even the #2 soft drink to Coke any more: it’s #3, after Coke and Diet Coke. Diet Pepsi fell to 7th Place. She led a logo redesign that turned into an “own goal,” where over a million was spent to make the logo look more like the Obama “O-Stika” logo she admired; ran suicide-themed ads for a new product, which predictably failed; redesigned its premium-priced Tropicana orange juice to look like a house brand, and rebranded Gatorate as “G” for the “world market,” leading to the evaporation of much of its US market. Asking what was going wrong at Pepsi, CBS concluded: “Everything.” Yet they blamed an underling, Massimo D’Amore, because the Iron Law of Reportage is “it’s never the affirmative-action hire.”

So now there’s a marshmallow-tough interview by some marshmallow of a reporter in the Atlantic, in which Nooyi complains about work-life balance and how, even with her mother, her secretary, and multiple servants assigned to raise her kids for her, the teenagers have the audacity to demand some of their parents’ time.

Let us explain why we do not give to farts in a Force Five blow for Mrs Nooyi, for her imported caste-conscious Indian contempt for the lower orders, and for her kids, who will doubtless be worthless parasites like their mom.

She first came to public attention in 2005, already a senior PepsiCo executive (Chief Financial Officer). Giving a commencement speech to the throngs graduating from Columbia University’s business school (it was held in Madison Square Garden), she disparaged the USA and Americans, suggesting that our very existence “gave the finger” to the rest of the world, and that we ought to be more like the majority of Third World hellholes in the UN. This was a nine-days’ wonder in the blogosphere at the time.

Paul Mirengoff of PowerLine then noted, while “drinking a Diet Pepsi”:

I’m wondering, why should I drink something that tastes this bad after PepsiCo president Indra Nooyi’s speech at Columbia. Americans are dying every day bringing freedom to Iraq and Afghanistan, and killing terrorists who target much of the world to which Nooyi thinks we are giving “the finger.”

Nooyi’s subsequent comments went through the Kubler-Ross stages of deception: Denial, Lying, Misdirection, Claiming to Be Misunderstood, Non-Apologetic Apology, Disparagement of Questioners, and finally, Referring It To A Corporate Flack. The flack in question, some soulless, amoral oxygen thief named Christine Jones, then ran exactly the same playbook, in exactly the same order, under the direction of PepsiCo director of PR, a soulless, amoral oxygen thief named Ellen Palmer, who dishonestly distributed a bowdlerized, edited version of Nooyi’s speech that reversed Nooyi’s anti-American diatribe.

Trying to get Nooyi, let alone those wastes of sperm and egg Jones and Palmer, to answer questions gave some entertainment to Major Eric Egdahl, who was serving in the activity that would grow into JIEDDO at the time.  Egdahl never got a straight answer, because Nooyi (and Jones) hate him but fear the consequences of saying so. The whole thing was covered in a long column at the Weekly Standard, and extensively in many posts by Powerline, although ignored by the New York Times (after all, the speech took place in Madison Square Garden, and most reporters from the paper that disdains having a sports section probably couldn’t find it without help from a Boy Scout, whom they’d lecture about his duty to be gay).

Pepsi is also, by any measure nasty stuff, even if the corporation wasn’t headed by the Spawn of Satan herself. We have used it in the past when naval jelly was not available to strip corrosion off neglected parts, but we don’t drink the stuff and will not have it in Hog Manor.

As far as Indra Nooyi? We’ll see her in hell.

In Britain, the definition of “witness protection” is a little different from the way it’s done in the USA, even in fictional TV series like The Sopranos or Lillyhammer. We begin with a former private eye who’s done time for phone hacking, looking at another stay in the nick, says the Beeb:

News of the World hacker Glenn Mulcaire may now face prosecution for obtaining the identities of people under witness protection, Panorama has learned.

OK, so what witnesses did he unprotect, then? What brave snitches that ratted out stone-cold killers? None, actually. In Britain, “Witness Protection” is for the killers, so that the new people they interact with aren’t prejudiced against them.

He had discovered the new identities of four notorious offenders, including one of toddler James Bulger’s killers, by hacking phones, the Met Police said. The newspaper printed several stories about Robert Thompson’s new life.

via BBC News – NoW hacker Glenn Mulcaire ‘breached witness protection’. The press’s focus has been on the corruption of the police, but by any measure the corruption of the press was far worse (the final tally of arrests for phone hacking was 26 coppers and 101 ink-stained wretches, although “final” seems like the wrong word, with Mulcaire liable to rearrest and a second ride through the Old Bailey fun house, and unnamed other journos likely to join him. But let’s dwell a time on the “witnesses” whose privacy has been worth, so far, a £60 million investigation. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables are two soulless monsters who at age ten committed their first killing, two-year-old James Patrick Bulger. But it wasn’t just a murder. They lured the toddler away from his mother, kidnapped him,  and led him away. The trusting boy, a month short of his third birthday, seemed to like one of the killers, Venables; he took his hand, and from time to time, Venables says, he picked him up and carried him. The murderers were caught by a camera as they led the boy away; that picture would ultimately lead to their arrest and conviction. No camera caught what happened next, but the soulless pair had no problem admitting it, when they were finally asked. They began to beat and injure the boy as they led him across town to a remote railyard, where they tortured him. Motive? None evident. Just cruelty let to run free. Here’s what happened to the poor kid: this is what the “witnesses” they’re so anxious to “protect” did:

1. They had already dropped him on his head and beaten him in the face.
2. They poured or threw oil-based laquer in his eye.
3. They kicked and stomped on him.
4. They threw bricks and stones at him.
5. They pulled off his shoes, socks, pants and underpants.
6. They sexually molested him. (The details of this are mercifully unclear).
7. They shoved batteries up his anus, causing internal injuries.
8. They then stuffed the batteries in his mouth. All the time they were laughing and egging each other on — by their own statements.
9. Tiring of torturing the toddler, they then raised up a railway fishplate (the 20+ pound iron plate that sits under the rail on each tie, and holds the spikes in position) and smashed his small skull with it. Repeatedly. He ultimately had 10 skull fractures, and dozens of other injuries. If their previous abuses did not kill him, this did.
10. They then lay his dead body across the tracks and buried his head under trash and scrap (including the fishplate). They later explained, quite cold-bloodedly and remorselessly, that they did this to make it look like the child was a victim of a train accident.
11. They then left, completely carefree.
12. Two days later, Bulger’s body was found. It had been crushed and severed by passing trains. The pathologists determined that all the train injuries were postmortem, but he couldn;t determine which of the many other injuries was fatal to poor Bulger.

The only regret one of these monsters, Venables, ever expressed was regret that he got caught, and Thompson, who took the lead in these appalling crimes, has never expressed even that much. But they walk free today (despite, in the case of Venables, subsequent felonies).

A woman who saw the grainy security footage was able to ID one of the killers, and knew that he and the other had played hooky that day. After the boys were arrested , a mountain of physical evidence condemned them. One left an identifiable shoeprint on Bulger’s face; their shoes still were bloody, with Bulger’s blood. They’d gotten the paint the put in his eye on themselves and their clothes. And they denied nothing.

At the trial, it came out that Bulger was the second toddler they’d tried to kidnap and murder that day, but in the first case they were stopped by an alert mother.

By any measure, these two human-shaped creatures are a complete waste of protoplasm, and in a better world they would have been recycled already. Even the British judge recognized that he was dealing with two lost souls of “unparalleled evil and barbarity… cunning and very wicked.” 

Due to quirks in Britain’s laws, and the extreme laxity of British justice, they could not be imprisoned for long. The Home Secretary tried to have them imprisoned for fifteen years (!) but British liberals and lawyers protested with anguish the “cruelty” of the sentence. Prime Minister John Major countered that it would be good to “condemn a little more, and understand a little less.” But he didn’t do anything concrete about it (and would soon be swept away by an election of his own).

While imprisoned, the murderers received a cash allowance, outings to recreational areas, education to A-Levels, and new identities, as part of the ill-named “witness protection” program, which in Britain is primarily used to give cover to murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other monsters. Now, many of the 8,500 participants in US WitSec are not nice people, but they’re not in the program because they were murderers; they’re in the program because they have given up worse murderers or other criminals. That is a distinction that our British cousins appear to have lost sight of, in pursuit of some daft idea that crime should be as free as possible of consequences. Some unknown number of the 3,000 people in the British equivalent program are actually criminals who made no contribution to criminal justice, except as the men of the hour.

Returning to our heroes’ conduct whilst in nick, Venables regularly had sex with a woman who worked in his prison; when it was discovered, she was transferred and the incident covered up. Nothing was allowed to interfere with HM Prison Service’s prime goal, the comfort and convenience of these monsters. A psychiatrist’s report identifying Thompson as a psychopath (for one thing, he has never shown remorse, or any affect at all, relative to the Bulger murder) was dismissed by the authorities, who were determined to demonstrate rehab success with these two unlikely candidates.

Even the weak-as-water 15-year sentence didn’t stand. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the murderers had been ill done by and must be released sooner. The same Court dismissed the entreaties of Bulger’s parents as unworthy of the notice of such distinguished jurists as themselves; by extension, ruling that Bulger, unlike Thompson and Venables, had no “human right” to life. Lawyers!

After they were released from prison in 2001, the new false identities of the two murderers have been one of Britain’s most expensively and thoroughly guarded state secrets. That hasn’t prevented them from returning to crime; character always runs true.

Venables, in particular, remains a threat to children and the public. He was arrested in 2008 for affray (assault), and later for cocaine possession. He even was returned to prison briefly in 2010 after being caught possessing and distributing explicit child porn — including images of two-year-olds being raped by adults. (You may recall, if you had the stomach to read the list above, that his original offense was the molestation and rape of a two-year old. Character runs true).

In the USA, even a first offense of child porn of that nature would get a long sentence, but in Britain, it’s only good for two years. Venables was released in 2013, after being given a second new identity, when the first one wound up posted on a website that tracks pedophiles. Under his “clean” new identity, he is not required to register as a pedophile, although he remains on supervised release; Britain places a higher value on the privacy of Venables than the safety of any children this lifelong pervert may encounter.

But the villain, say the British authorities? It’s not Venables, or Thompson, but Mulcaire: the guy who would identify these ticking time bombs for the defenseless public. Several public-spirited Britons who have tried to “out” the new identities of these perverts and murderers have been dragged into the criminal courts handled considerably more roughly than the monsters themselves.

When your system of laws elevates the comfort of Venables and Thompson above the life of poor, doomed Bulger, it has long ceased to be a system of justice.