I saw this linked to Drudge and I had to laugh. In another post I mentioned the nuisance fraction. That’s the portion of humanity, who mostly interfere with the orderly operation of society. They are not criminals. They are merely dimwitted, reckless, careless, inconsiderate and so forth. The ghetto has a high number of these people. Go to a fast food joint near the ghetto and you find vibrant people in line not ordering off the menu. They also require a separate bag for each item and one of every free item available. You know you will be in line for a while when you see a few of these people in line.

Anyway, there’s a lot of overlap with this group, the perpetually yapping on the phone set. I’m fond of saying that 99% of cellular communications is between two competing dimwits with nothing of value to impart to the other. They just jibber-jabber at one another like simpletons all day, every day. The other morning I almost drove over a woman who was yammering on her cell. It was 8:00 AM and I was heading to the office. She was headed toward the office building, phone in her ear, and walked into traffic. What could she possibly have to say that could not wait?

The answer is nothing.

Schutta says parents spend, on average, 11 hours a day using electronic devices. All that time takes away from face to face communication, which helps kids learn behavior.

“Kids in preschool and kindergarten are no longer as able to read social cues from other human beings,” Schutta said. “That’s in part because of their own media use and it’s in part because of their parents’ media use, they’re just not getting that training.”

Too much time on technology can also leave an emotional impact on your child, if you’re missing life moments for email.

The fat woman I almost hit was willing to leave an impact on my truck just to yap about nonsense to another blockhead. Putting aside the walking into traffic stuff, that women is most likely paying $100 a month for the phone. That’s $1200 a year after taxes. Judging by her dress, that’s two weeks wages per year going to the phone company so she can gossip to and from her remunerated activity.

For most of human history, making it to adulthood was a big deal. Even into relatively docile times like the middle ages, women lost a third of their off-spring by adulthood. Into the industrial age, losing a kid or two was not unusual. therefore, the least physically fit rarely made it long enough to breed. Even then, not having some value to society was a good way to remain a bachelor. In other words, for men at least, you had to have some status in order to pass on your DNA to the next generation.

Today, the stupid fat woman wandering into the street is saved by those of us who know better. Even if she was hit, a smart team of doctors would probably patch her up. A smart lawyer would get her a big settlement from the insurance company. In a world in which labor is less necessary, increasing the supply of epsilons will have negative consequences. On the other hand, giving the state the power to murder those they deem useless is never a good idea so I don’t think there’s much to be done about it.

Regardless, we may have found a way to short-circuit a vital natural process. Spend any time on Diversity Street and you see the challenge straight away. It’s not that the stupid are breeding. It’s that a basket full of traits antithetical to human progress are celebrated in a way that turns natural selection on its head. If you are a woman adept at turning generosity into a vice by scamming the welfare system, you can have ten kids and live well. If you are a male with high violence capital and a complete lack of social intelligence, you rise in status and therefore breed like a rabbit.

If you want a glimpse of the future, head on down to Diversity Street and imagine the folks you see wandering around your town, wearing Google Glass or whatever wearable devise emerges in the next decade. That’s the future. Millions of jabbering nitwits doing nothing more than planning their next crime or their next opportunity to breed new nitwits.

In various places, where I’m inclined to take my act, I get grief for calling liberalism a religion. I get a lot of grief for calling it a cult. I get asked to leave when I start calling it a suicide cult, but no one ever said the life of a prophet was cost free. The truth is, few liberals know much about why they believe what they believe. They just do and they don’t spend a lot of time examining it. But, that’s how religion works. Few Catholics understand why they take communion. They just do. It is part of the private ritual of being a Catholic.

If you look at the most liberal states in the country, you find the lowest levels of church attendance. On the other hand, states with highest church attendance tend to be the least inclined to vote Left. For example, the last election featured six continental states where Obama won more than 60% of the vote. That’s California, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York and Vermont. Everyone of those states, except Maryland, is at the bottom of church attendance numbers according to Pew. Those numbers are a little old so church attendance is certainly much lower in the New England states where Catholics have abandoned the church following the molestation scandals.

At the other end of the spectrum, the states that went for Romney in the last election are Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky. These are, relatively speaking, states with high church attendance. You have to get down to 20th on the church attendance list before you find an Obama state. Even if you assume religion is simply falling out of favor, traditional culture is also a good indication of voting habits. Steve Sailer tied together marriage and voting, which tracks close with church attendance.

If that’s not compelling, then let’s look at some first hand testimony from a senior member of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Here’s a NYTimes profile of former Mayor Bloomberg’s latest crusade.

Michael R. Bloomberg, making his first major political investment since leaving office, plans to spend $50 million this year building a nationwide grass-roots network to motivate voters who feel strongly about curbing gun violence, an organization he hopes can eventually outmuscle the National Rifle Association.

Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, said gun control advocates need to learn from the N.R.A. and punish those politicians who fail to support their agenda — even Democrats whose positions otherwise align with his own.

“They say, ‘We don’t care. We’re going to go after you,’ ” he said of the N.R.A. “ ‘If you don’t vote with us we’re going to go after your kids and your grandkids and your great-grandkids. And we’re never going to stop.’ ”

He added: “We’ve got to make them afraid of us.”

That’s obviously insane. When you’re a billionaire, saying crazy things maybe makes you eccentric. If he was still hustling a sales route and was saying nutty things like this, they would lock him away. But, he is rich and he is a member in good standing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

That sounds a lot like a religious crusade. But hey, liberalism is all about maths and sciences and stuff.

Every once in a while you see a story that illustrates the madness of our times. This is a good example.

Two Long Island high school students have been suspended for allegedly bringing a Confederate flag to school.

Brother Gary Cregan, principal of St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, said the two seniors walked in with a Confederate flag draped around their shoulders during an after-hours sporting event at the school.

As CBS 2′s Kathryn Brown reported, there is outrage and disgust on Long Island.

Outrage? Disgust? Really?

“The African-American students who immediately saw it really exercised heroic restraint and fortunately a teacher immediately confiscated the flag and took the students out of the gym,” Cregan said.

I like the unintended racism at work here. Blacks, like feral animals, immediately fly into a rage upon seeing a flag?

The students were initially suspended for 10 days, but Cregan decided Tuesday they won’t be allowed back, Brown reported.

Cregan wrote a letter to parents saying the use of any symbols “designed to revive past injustices or to inflame discrimination or racial intolerance, is completely unacceptable and profoundly offensive,” Newsday reported.

Cregan said he sees the flag as a symbol of hate.

“I find it just very hard to even imagine why any student in 2014 would even consider or think that a Confederate flag would be anything other than a symbol of hate,” Cregan said.

He is right. The flag does symbolize hatred. It is the hatred of southern whites by northern whites. Up until 25years ago, displaying the Confederate flag was a non-event. I have some hand painted ties I bought in Maine that have the flag on them. But as the South began to prosper, northern whites decided that southern whites were getting too uppity so they had to put them in their place.

“It’s absolutely absurd, I don’t understand why you would bring up things from the past that are hateful,” student Jessica Flynn said.

Of course, asking the students is out of the question. They are hateful haters and must be banished from society. Ignorance is the price of freedom or something.

“It represents slavery to us. It represents racism and prejudice to us,” parent JuJu Quinnonez added. “Believe me, I am all for freedom of speech but to have someone come in to school with that flag draped around their shoulder – I’m not really sure what the intent was.”

This is hilarious on a few levels. For starters, “JuJu” does not get a say in the matter. His people clearly had no dog in the fight. The illiteracy of the sentence is what gets me. He is for freedom of speech, but not if he does not understand it. In other words, his ignorance is a veto on speech. That’s probably not what he meant, but that’s what he is saying. I think we know what he meant. He’s all for free speech as long as it agrees with the official dogma.

“I certainly think this particular symbol of hate falls in the category of something that should be excised from our culture,” Cregan said.

Like maybe Catholic collaboration with the Nazis? Should that result in banning the Catholic Church? How about Father Coughlin’s lurch into Fascism?

The students haven’t explained why they did it. St. Anthony’s is a private Catholic school and isn’t bound by the First Amendment right to free speech.

Still, the New York Civil Liberties Union said all people should be able to express their views freely, even the offensive ones.

“Our motto is more speech, not censorship or punishment,” NYCLU director Donna Lieberman told Brown. “Helping children understand the impact of this patently offensive expressive activity.”

Tensions are so high among students at St. Anthony’s that the principal said he has security concerns once the suspension is over. He’s made the decision that the students involved aren’t coming back at all.

This is where the madness of these adults is dangerous. In some weird attempt to take a silly prank and make it into a public act of piety, they are encouraging very bad behavior amongst their students. If these adults had any sense of self-respect and cared about their students, they would stop this nonsense. You take the flag from the kids and carry on like it was no big deal. Later you bring in the parents and address it with them. These are high school boys and high school boys do dumb stuff like this all the time.

Instead, it is used as a chance for the adults to publicly display their piety and obedience.

One of the stranger things about modern times is the war on the language. In English speaking countries it is close to tipping into insanity. In other countries with more reverence for their language, it is not as far along. The French have always been an odd exception to this part of Cultural Marxism. They jealously hang onto their language and resist the importation of foreign words. They even have a government department working to keep English out of their language.

But, that does not mean their Cultural Marxists cannot make war on the language too. Consider this story about recent labor rules.

According to The Australian, a new French labor deal — which is a legally binding deal signed by employers’ federations and unions representing workers in the digital and consultancy sectors — says that employees are to shut off work devices and avoid work emails after going home for the day.The ruling applies to all companies in the technology and consultancy sectors. It was brought forth after a study found that 39 percent of workers and 77 percent of managers used their smartphones, tablets and computers for work purposes in the evenings, during weekends and even on holidays.

That’s fascism. The counter argument is that the French ruling elite eschew nationalism so that inoculates them against the charge. Perhaps so, but it does not change the facts on the ground. Further, the French may talk about world government and the end of nationalism, but they act like traditional Frenchmen. The Euro project, after all, is just a continuation of the polices set forth by Richelieu.

I know a number of bright people who read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog. Everyone once in a while someone with some credibility will make mention of him. The Atlantic is a respected publication, even though its quality varies greatly. There have been years when it is unreadable, but also years when it is great. It is predictable liberal pap most of the time, but aimed at the PBS tote bag crowd, so it is generally well behaved.

Putting it all together and I’ve tried to check in on his blog from time to time. I figure if respectable people think he is worth a few minutes on occasion, I can learn something about them by reading what they read and who they read.

The thing I’ve been puzzle by from the start is he appears to be a gold plated phony. If I were to describe his style, I’d start with conventional black whining about whitey with a heavy dose of references intended to imply erudition. He likes to mention how he can order food in French (and how the always white waiter is shockrf to see a black speak such great French!), but there’s never a reason for it.

Similarly, he drops references to writers we’re expected to think he has read, but he never actually writes anything that says he learned anything but the book title. It is the type of name dropping you get from college sophomores who are on their way to becoming posers. In my day, these were the types who smoked clove cigarettes and wore a lot of black, even in summer.

I think what we have here is simply a hustle. Coates is the house black guy at the Atlantic, performing the rituals expected from the position.  This post is a good example.

If you haven’t yet, it’s work checking out Barack Obama’s address before the National Action Network, last week. I think it’s one of the most significant and morally grounded speeches of his presidency. I think we will eventually regard this current effort to suppress the vote through voter-ID laws, ending early voting, restricting voting hours, etc., in the same way we regard literacy tests and poll taxes. (It’s worth recalling this piece for the magazine by Mariah Blake which helps historicize voter suppression.)

There are two assertions here. One is that this speech, that has been ignored by everyone, is his most significant as president. That’s not a very high bar for a president who has exactly zero memorable speeches according to his fans. Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard anyone quote an Obama speech? When have you heard anyone talk about one of his speeches a month after it was given?

As far as “morally grounded” is concerned, that’s simply emotive gibberish the Left uses to signal. The signal is this issue is not debatable. The people pushing voting reform are evil and those opposed are good. There can be no compromise. The fact that Coates misses this entirely suggests he is not the thinking man he would like us to believe.

The second claim is that cleaning up voter fraud, a well documented problem in every state, is voter suppression. He is correct in so far as requiring positive identification suppresses the dead vote and other methods for stuffing the ballot box. Otherwise, comparing these measures to Democratic efforts to keep blacks from voting is the sort of thing very stupid people repeat because they heard a flak on TV say it. For a guy who claims to be so erudite, Coates seems to like repeating a lot of very silly things.

I believe in judging Barack Obama’s rhetoric and policies not as though he were the president of black America, but of the United States of America. On that count his speech soared. There aren’t many topics more important than the security of our democracy. The president did not attack that topic gingerly, but forcefully, directly and without hedge.

I’m fond of saying that economists are the the priestly class of the modern West. The Congressional Budget Office is the Oracle at Delphi for Washington. The factions jostle with one another to please the gods and get the correct prophesy from the Oracle. Monks and scribes across the nation toil away at their spreadsheets, looking for ways to make every bit of human existence more “efficient.” Alternatively, they look to divine from statistics the truth about the unobserved from the observed. If X correlates to Y then the we must pretend that Y exists, even it doesn’t and fashion policy accordingly. That’s why I have a forty dollar light bulb that will be part of my estate.

That’s the problem with this religion. It is inhuman. Because enough people in Washington think it is more efficient to use LED bulbs, I have to sit in a weird blueish light typing this. I was perfectly happy with the old incandescent, I mean Edison, but what I want does not count. In fact, what anyone wants is entirely irrelevant. You can see what I mean in this post over at MR. Our scribes and monks are completely baffled by Russia. For some bizarre reason, the Russians keep doing things that are not efficient. Instead, they appear to be clinging to those old crazy ideas about language, history and culture. The best comment is from Jan.

Russia is in a population death spiral. For all the apparent xenophobia, they really need immigrants. Thing is, they already have ton of Central Asians working there illegally or temporarily. Something like half of Tajikistan’s income is from laborers who spend most of their year in Russia. Lots of this thing happening with Kyrgyz and Uzbeks as well.

Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt wants baseball to implement his science fiction idea that would replace umpires calling baseball games with a force field. Following up yesterday’s idea to shorten MLB games to seven innings, Schmidt thinks that using a force field would speed up games.

The idea from the retired Philadelphia Phillie is that a Star Trek like force field over the plate would shorten the game by taking the human element out of the game. Replacing an umpire with this force field would make every strike zone the same and force batters to swing.

Schmidt idea is that if a ball crosses the force field a little bell could sound indicating a strike. The idea of a force field, while interesting, is just a continuation of the silliness that seems to be coming out from people who feel that baseball needs to be fixed. The suggestions so far have been enough to make many baseball fans roll their eyes.

Umpires replaced in baseball with science fiction force fields as Mike Schmidt wants could open up the game for a lot more issues and complaints. The first thing baseball would need to figure out is how to get the force field to actually work with the strike zone rule. The strike zone differs from batter to batter based on a point near the middle of the batters chest and their knees. So a six-foot six-inch tall player normally would have a different strike zone than a five-foot seven-inch tall player.

I saw this on Drudge and reading it, I could not help but laugh at the outraged reporter. The breathless reporting of the “gay slur” like it is a violation of a sacred taboo is what gets me. That and the reportette’s unwillingness to actually report what it is the guy put on the sign. That’s how nutty this religion of liberalism is now. They put being rude to homosexuals up at the top of the list of taboos.

Of course, the ridiculous reporter is probably easily outraged. That’s what happens when you live your life isolated from large swaths of reality. According to her biography, she popped out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and she has a JD from Yale. Smart gal, who does not have a lick of useful experience in the world in which most of us live. She may as well be a space alien covering earth as an anthropologist for the home planet.

Up until the 1960’s or so, reporters were plucked from the ranks of the working class. A boy with something on the ball, but lacking the resources or interest in academics could become a reporter. That typically involved a long apprenticeship working with experienced men. It also meant living amongst the people they often reported on for their papers. Then the job of reporter became a profession and a dumping ground for upper middle-class kids, who could not cut it in professions like finance or law. The result is a media full of precious sissies.

Now there’s something for the economist to ponder. This young gal has a million dollars worth of training at elite universities. What’s her marginal utility?

I’m listening to the The British History Podcast as time permits. One of the things that jumps out to me about first millennium Britain is the role of cleverness in maintaining the family line. The shrewd rulers had to be both cunning and powerful. We have romanticized this era, layering on our notions of chivalry and Norseman culture. The reality was something much different. The ruling clans were always fighting amongst themselves and plotting against the other families. Much like the Old West, getting killed by treachery was more common than getting killed in single combat.

That came to mind when reading this story about that odious toad, Al Sharpton.

A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.

“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.

Sharpton has said he showed interest in the drug deal only because he feared the undercover agent was armed. He also claimed that he snitched for the feds — as first reported by The Smoking Gun this week — because the mob was threatening him.

Curington called all of that a tall tale.

He instead provided a detailed account of how Sharpton wined and dined a man he thought was a South American drug lord — and said Sharpton met him not just once, but three times.

Sharpton’s saga began in the Manhattan offices of boisterous boxing big shot Don King in 1983, Curington said.

An unnamed felon trying to duck a 30-year prison sentence promised the feds he could help them nail King on coke-dealing charges.

An undercover FBI agent, using the name Victor Quintana, set up a meeting with King to discuss a boxing match in the Bahamas — but King had a bad feeling about the potential business partner and pawned him off on Sharpton.

Don King is an exceptionally clever and cunning person. In fact, I’d put him in the 1% category. You will meet few men as cunning and sly as King. It is how he avoided the clutches of the FBI for five decades, despite being in a business known for criminality. It is how he maneuvered the Mafia out of boxing and largely ran the sport for decades – without killing anyone or going to prison. That’s an amazing accomplishment. Few mobsters ever die of old age and outside of prison. King is in a very small club.

The multidimensional thinking at work here is impressive. If Quintana was legitimate, King would get his piece as Sharpton was his guy. If the guys was just a crook, then Sharpton would get fleeced, not King. If the guy was a cop, then King avoids the FBI trap and Sharpton is out of the way without King getting his hands dirty. Intuitively, King saw the probabilities and charted the course most likely to benefit him. Sharpton, a first rate grifter in his own right, was a piker compared to King.

That brings me to this story. The casinos do more to guard against cheating than any organization on earth. They bring all the toys to the party. They use surveillance, facial recognition, statistics, behavior sciences, you name it. If it can be used to catch cheaters, they have it. Talk to anyone working at the higher levels of casino security and you are talking to someone operating at a level only found in the upper reaches of the NSA and MI6. They are that good.

Despite this, exceptionally clever men find a way to beat the house. It is the old saying. The cheat has to be right once, while the house has to be right every time. A small mistake like a defect in the playing cards can cost the house millions. I learned this as a kid working a part-time job at a rental company. The scammers had a million tricks to get the edge on the rental company. Fake licenses, fake credit cards, bad checks, you name it, they had a way to beat the system. I was always amazed by the amount of brainpower invested in stealing a rented car.

There’s a lesson there that undermines all of the “isms.” Whether it is socialism, Marxism or libertarianism, they depend on people voluntarily going along with the spirit of the program. It is why socialism and Marxism always end in a blood bath. The clever fraction can’t stop gaming the system, It is their nature. Once the socialists or Marxists get this, they start killing the uncooperative. If libertarians ever gained control of a country, I suspect it would end the same way.

Here’s a fascinating look at how the imperial ruling class lives. We like to think we vote for our representatives and they toil away in Washington doing the people’s business. In reality, a semi-permanent ruling class runs the country. It is why a neo-con like Victoria Nuland can work for a Liberal Democrat administration. Whatever Obama thinks about foreign affairs, no one important gives a crap. His opinion does not matter as he is not in charge of foreign policy. The same is true across the board.

“I see lobbying,” Tony Podesta has said, “as getting information in the hands of people who are making decisions so they can make more informed decisions.” Last week the information Tony Podesta was giving was the divorce complaint he had filed in D.C. Court against his wife Heather. The hands receiving that information belonged to a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who made the “informed decision” to report on it. Later in the day Heather, who is also a lobbyist, informed the Post the text of her counter-suit. It published a follow-up.

The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May-December romance gone sour, but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce, but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulates, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.

That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade—the phone-call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign—against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse.

The rest of the article reads like a Hollywood comedy-drama about middle-aged divorce. One of things I think about is what comes next. The current arrangements in America seem to be about near their end. The entrenched interests are feverishly trying to keep the plates spinning, but that cannot last forever. Reform appears to be impossible so some sort of crackup is inevitable. What comes next is worth considering.

The Founders had a pretty good understanding of the bandits, highwaymen, con-men, the clever fraction and the parasites present in every human population. They also understood how easily the smart and successful could tip into corruption. Their project was designed to make it tough for these elements to gain power of their neighbors. They may have imagined a tribe of Podestas, but they never imagined a class of coat holders and fixers, who existed outside the power of the king. The next Constitution, if there is one, will have to address this type of vermin that runs the Imperial Capital.

Term limits sounds good, but it addresses a very small part of the problem. The Podesta clan does not make it’s money from the elected officials. No, they make their money by knowing all of the staffers, the lobbyists and most important, the permanent bureaucracy that implements and enforces Federal law. It seems to me the way to address this is to term limit government employment. You get ten years to collect a government check. After that, you rejoin the dreaded private sector. The exception would be military service and pension checks. Otherwise, you can be on welfare for ten years or work at the post office for ten years, but not both.

The way the parasite class will attempt to get around this is outsourcing. Instead of having HUD staffed with thousands of people, a contractor like Blackwater will spring up that does all of the functions, but avoids the limit on government service. The term limit, therefore, would have to be extended to government contractors. If Delloite, for example, cannot get along without government work, maybe they need to go away. This would require registering government contractors and publicizing employee lists, butt hat’s done now anyway.

We have a very serious problem with the paramilitary units we have installed around the country.

A spring break vacation turned into a nightmare for a Columbus family visiting the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force when four police officers in three cruisers drew guns and forced a grandmother and a mother to the ground as two young children screamed in fear from what authorities thought was a “stolen” vehicle.

Alice Hill, 65, her daughter-in-law Wendy Hill, 31, and Hill’s two children, Aaron, 8, and Brooke, 5, were pulling out of the museum parking lot after Aaron and Alice had counted the number of out-of-state cars on the way to their family minivan, WKRC-TV reports.

Unbeknownst to the family, an anonymous onlooker had called 911 and reported that the family was burglarizing vehicles in the parking lot.

On their way out of the lot, police pulled the vehicle over as one officer stood behind his door and drew his gun on Alice Hill, who was driving.

“I’m looking in my side view mirror and I see him step out of his vehicle,” Hill described to WKRC. “(He’s) behind his door with his gun drawn pointing it at me. I’m looking at my 8-year-old grandson, his eyes are full of tears and he says, ‘This is the worst day of my life.’”

Hill said she and her daughter-in-law were taken from the car at gunpoint, ordered to their knees, handcuffed, and detained in the back of a police cruiser, Dayton Daily News reports. Meanwhile, the two children screamed in fear in the backseat.

“My grandchildren are screaming,” Alice Hill recalled. “I mean they are hysterical, they saw the gun.”

“My 5-year-old daughter is asking, ‘Is grandma going to get shot?’” Wendy Hill told WKRC.

Alice Hill said that while they were detained the officer told them the license plates on their van were stolen. It was not until hours later that the Hill family was informed about the 911 call reporting them for burglary and the allegedly suspicious behavior of peering into car windows and looking at license plates.

WPAFB security officials said the incident turned out to be a misunderstanding, and that the authorities had followed protocol given the information reported through the 911 call.

“Our security force, based on limited information, made a high-risk traffic stop and believed that this vehicle was stolen based on the information they received,” CC Cassie Barlow, 88th Airbase Wing Commander at Wright-Patterson AFB, told the Daily News.

“An initial check of the vehicle plates with the National Law Enforcement Terminal System reported the vehicle as stolen,” according to a statement from the base Tuesday to the Daily News.

Cassie Barlow is a liar. The vehicle was never listed as stolen. Even if they mistakenly thought it was a stolen vehicle, there’s no need to put lives at risk over a stolen vehicle. Further, only a a complete moron would think a granny and mother with two small children is a risk. These “security officials” should be removed from their positions and possibly prosecuted. But, that’s never going to happen. There are no consequences when agents of the state are at fault.