Former college professor accused of serial arson is denied bail in California
npr.org
npr.org
Dr. Gary Maynard For President 2020 Exectutive Committee and PAC
"My First and NOT the last Run for the Presidency of the United States of America - this is my PAC and you can donate to my cause once you have seen who I am and why I am running! I am Dr. Gary Maynard - Social Scientist and Nearly Unmatched Understander of ALL Human behavior. I am running to wrest total, complete and permanent control of the world from the ever expanding Oblivion Arms of the Vampire Squid I call, as do many others, THE CONSORTIUM! They have names, addresses, family and people they call friends. They are not apparitions and are immortal demonic creations! They breathe air, eat food, drink the poisons they put in our water and they bleed and Die when God comes to harvest their rotting souls!! Who are they? Where are they?"
Looks like a pretty severe mental health crisis.
[0]https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dr.+Gary+Maynard+For+Presi...
This is a phrase I have seen numerous times before on the internet, always in contexts which make clear this is a call to violence.
Education and voting are all that have been found ever to help much. Public libraries do their share.
- It's interesting how his academic background in criminology is in an area tangentially related to his own alleged social deviance -- maybe a "call of the void" type deal, in the sense that (anecdotally) some people who have a lifetime academic fixation on particular subject matter eventually reveal that it is somehow linked to their own deviant obsessions with it.
- It's also interesting how many law enforcement agencies there are embedded in the federal government, and how they basically have the same powers as one another. I recall surprise upon learning for the first time that the USPS has its own law enforcement agency back when Steve Bannon was arrested by postal inspectors last year, and am newly surprised to learn that the USFS has an equally well-equipped (in terms of warrant powers) police force.
The only situations I can really think of is more of like "stare long enough into the void and it stares back" where people fight an injustice long enough that they start to justify extreme measures to fight it. For example, like assuming all people accused of a crime are likely guilty so suspending privacy or searching people without cause is fine.
Seems there's a rash of that going on recently.
The United States Postal Inspection Service is actually the oldest of all federal law enforcement agencies. It's as old as this country is.
As someone put it to me a while ago, "the US military is so big that not only does its navy have its own army, but its navy's army's air force is the 8th largest in the world."[1]
[1] US Navy's army = US Marine corps; navy's army's air force = USMC Aviation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Avi... .
My understanding is that lack of wild and controlled burns can be attributed to two factors:
1) Emotion driven environmentalism trumping environmental scientists
2) Political deferral due to the risk of blowback from out of control burns.
3) The urban public likes purty forests to go vacation in.
EDIT: I also feel like you're (believe it or not) politicizing this as conservatives and libertarians in favor of controlled burns and arson (yes, that is exactly what you sound like), and hippie dippie out of touch leftist urbanites being the real root cause of all this because of their supposed intolerance of controlled burns.
Afterwards everybody could get together, drink a cold beer, tell stories, bitch about how hard it is to be an arsonist and the lousy pay, and argue about who is the best arsonist!
Heck, CA needs so many controlled burns that they could create jobs for arsonists, thus preventing them from initiating disasters b/c of their failed "theatre arts" attempts. "Hello, Thompson, Department of Arson. Burn, Baby, Burn! How can I help you?"
This would also alleviate other states' problems as most arsonists would move to CA to get a steady job.
How's that strategy working out for deterring murderers and drug dealers?
How many deterred murderers do you think need to exist for it to be worth prosecuting and harshly punishing murder?
Though even after knowing your answer to that question... I'm not eager to live in your experiment's "murder is fine" group...
Drug dealers on the other hand will never go away no matter how many you arrest. There will always be more people willing to buy drugs and a new dealer ready to step up and make a profit.
Singapore and Saudi Arabia might object. Punishments always have some marginal effect; the question is how severe they need to be to achieve the desired effect magnitude, and whether the direct and indirect costs are acceptable.
But seriously, where does it say he has a theatre arts degree?
[1] See also: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-25/californ...
> [1] See also: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-25/californ...
Your link is regarding unemployment benefits fraud, EBT is something entirely different.
Drug dealing or murder often have selfish or monetary gains; but what is gained from burning the wildlands? Is it a power thing?
Calling all armchair psychologists
Interestingly enough, arson was one of the original capital offenses in many traditions of justice systems as the building techniques of primitive cultures are often not terribly resilient in the face of malicious fire starting.
A quick skim indicates that arsons all share the common property that they are generally AFU'ed:
To secure a conviction based on just that, you'd want to answer "around 0.01 people" to that second question as well as prove that all of these fires were in fact arson. It would mean you get the wrong guy only every one hundred (set of) fires on average.
Quoting the alleged arsonist himself:
“Donald Trump’s lack of or unwillingness to self-reflect in order to self-improve, and his lack of empathy while being threatened with his first major, public, political and personal defeat, might activate a sense of the need for the use of violence, violent protests by his supporters or outright sabotage of the nation by locking down the economy or some other major act to damage the nation before he is forced to leave office, if he loses,”
TDS to the max and not remotely rational at all. Free rent in his brain to this day,
It seems like this would be the most difficult crime to prove.
Not against throwing the book at him if there is substantial proof.
It's in the article.
"A Forest Service fire investigator determined the Cascade Fire was likely the result of arson. He also noticed that on a dirt road 150 to 200 yards from the fire, a man was struggling to free his car, a black Kia Soul, after the vehicle's rear had failed to clear a partially buried boulder."
If you're going to be a wildlands arsonist, best to find the proper vehicle.
That's linking his car to the fire. That's from the article, I'm sure the affidavit itself has more.
Now that they have a warrant and can track his movements, he is coincident with several other fire origins.
Once he became a suspect to the level, a court order to get phone records would be easy.
The moment your phone is on, it is constantly keeping a full data handshake and connection to any base station nearby and to phone company switching computers. You are constantly "under surveillance" in a geographic sense if you have a cell phone turned on (with or without a valid SIM card - the phones serial number gets logged even if an account isn't validated). Having it this way is the only way an in-coming call could ever be routed to you!
Remember phone switches are all Unix based and they have log files constantly filling just like any desktop system. Literally just "grep" the files. The most amusing experience related to this I ever had was being able to talk to my uncle who was blue-collar AT&T technician. But he knew his Unix.