Tax resistance and evasion often is linked to intentional fight against transparency in “business” practices.

This played out recently when Italian “tax police” investigated a national security vendor and pulled a thread that went all the way to China.

The alarm was prompted by a raid last year by Italian tax police on Alpi Aviation, a firm in Pordenone in northern Italy which produces the Strix UAV.

Weighing 10kg with a three meter wingspan, the Strix can relay video and infrared imagery in real time and was used by Italy’s special forces in Afghanistan.

Investigators said a 75% share in the firm was purchased in 2018 at an inflated price by a Hong Kong-based company in turn controlled by Chinese state firms, which planned to transfer production to China.

The sale allegedly violated Italy’s “Golden Power” law, under which defense firms, as well as strategic companies, can only be sold outside Italy with specific permission from the government.

The tax police said the firm failed to notify the Italian government of the change in ownership, then also broke Italian law on defense exports by failing to inform the government when it temporarily exported a drone for display at a 2019 Shanghai trade fair.

A 75% share in the company at inflated prices… it must have smelled so bad that financial crimes enforcement had to act.

The Strix has the interesting design criteria to fit in a backpack and use an easily recognizable yet low-signature profile, obviously meant for combat or at least “non-recreational” objectives.

A fascinating new book shines a new light on an old contradiction in physics.

Prescod-Weinstein imagined dedicating herself to pure physics in [a new observatory atop Maunakea⁠ in Hawaii], with “beaches, amazing tans, and an opportunity to start over.” But no physics is pure, no place such an idyll. Astronomers had started building their telescopes on Maunakea during the 1960s against the protests of native Hawaiians, for whom the summit is sacred. Her living wages, she realized, would have underwritten the erasure of another peoples’ cosmology. “I promised myself that I would make more room in my life for my dreams of being a physicist,” she wrote. “But not like this.” She now supports the native Hawaiians who have vowed to protect their unceded lands against the impending construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which might yet become the world’s largest.⁠

The part of the book review that really jumped out at me was this:

Prescod-Weinstein not only narrates her struggle to become a cosmologist, she advocates for all peoples whom physicists have undervalued. She praises the assistants and janitors, mostly people of color, whose labor permits theorists to ponder the universe daily, because “part of science is emptying the garbage.”

Related:

This arrest news in Pomona, California is pretty straightforward.

“Chen provided the (undercover agent) with instructions regarding how to install an auto sear on the Glock handgun, and demonstrated how…the handgun would operate as a fully automatic firearm.”

The interesting details come next, about a lack of maturity (insecurity/fear coupled with a lack of concern for others) in the American gun fetish cult known as Boogaloo.

Brian Levin, the director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, said the Boogaloo movement is particularly dangerous because its only central ideology is violence as a means to destroy, most often, the U.S. government, but also any kind of authority its members oppose.

Levin said Boogaloo adherents typically fetishize weapons and oppose gun laws of any kind. While the overwhelmingly majority of Boogaloo members have hung around hard right groups for years, they don’t fall neatly along mainstream political lines.

And while they can come from any background, Levin said Boogaloo members have typically had aggression issues for years that sent them down social media rabbit holes of violent ideologies, most often on Facebook.

What separates Boogaloo from other movements, however, is an edge of internet savvy humor, using jokes to promote hatefulness.

Calling hate a joke is a widespread tactic used to avoid accountability and point of comparison, not really a separation from other groups. It is what most toddlers might be expected to do, for example, revealing the mental state of Boogaloo members.

Here’s a similar story from Pomona, California, showing how this sometimes plays out earlier in life.

A middle school student who was arrested this week after allegedly threatening violence against two Pomona campuses in a social media post told police it was intended as a joke, authorities said.

The online post contained a threat to “shoot up” Marshall Middle School and Ganesha High School on Wednesday, according to a Pomona Police Department news release.

Remember the “aggression issues for years” in the Levin analysis above?

Children often don’t fall neatly along mainstream political lines because they haven’t developed their sense of place. Likewise they often claim to be just playing or joking. Maturation doesn’t have to mean mainstreaming, but such false claims to be joking end where responsibility and accountability grow.

A gun worshiping cult of violent undeveloped minds in America is not something to take lightly, given it’s a serious regression to primitive thinking driven by feeling (fear) instead of logic (justice).

Related:

1) “In 1946, his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist, after examination, both concluded [violent gangster Al] Capone then had the mentality of a 12-year-old child.”
2) Lord of the Flies, the 1954 debut novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding.