Month: June 2011

Arizona ATF Documents

Lulz Security recently started going after the Arizona Department of Public Safety (AZDPS) which has lead to their releasing a large amount of confidential information related to the AZDPS. A torrent of the release can be found here but note that the download comes in at 446MB.

I haven’t had any real time to sift through the information but there were some documents that were obviously related tot he Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that I’ve singled out and uploaded for your viewing pleasure. There are four documents which include an ATF intelligence summary [PDF], a document dealing with drug cartels buying grenades from Central American countries [Microsoft Word Document], a document dealing with outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) [PDF], and a document related directly to project Gunrunner [PDF].

When I get time to sift through these I’ll post up any relevant information but in the meantime you’re more than welcome to download and view the files. There are probably some juicy details to be discovered.

More Anti-Gunner Whining About Wisconsin’s Imminent Passing of Carry Legislation

The hysterics presented by anti-gunners would be funny if they weren’t so pathetic (by they I mean both the anti-gunners and their hysterics). Take for instance this article warning that Wisconsin’s (hopefully) soon to be enacted carry legislation will allow people to carry in parks and at the Milwaukee County Zoo:

“Milwaukee will be like the wild wild west,” Said State Rep. Elizabeth Coggs. “To think that you can take a gun to a park, a bar, a daycare center, the zoo … it’s ridiculous.”

Coggs is correct in that the bill could turn Wisconsin into the Wild West, but it would be like the real Wild West [PDF] not the Hollywood portrayal most anti-gunners seem to have. Of course the anti-gunners are panicking because law abiding citizens will be able to carry at several venues that they like to frequent:

Under the bill, any free outdoor festival without gates does not have the ability to prohibit concealed weapons. That means guns could be present at events like Bastille Days, South Shore Frolics and the Locust Street Festival.

The inability to prohibit concealed weapons would also affect lakefront fireworks displays.

I’m sure Wisconsin will have the same trouble with people being able to legally carry concealed weapons at their open air festivals as the other 48 states who allow some form of carry have. That is to say Wisconsin won’t have any trouble at all.

Here’s the thing Wisconsin, you’re the late comer to the party. Although it has sucked for your citizens it does offer one advantage; you get to see the affects of enacting carry legislation in other states. When you look at each state that has continued to liberalize (the classical definition of the word) their carry laws you’ll notice a pattern of zero increase in violent crime and in many cases a decrease. You will also notice that there have been no apparent cases of arguments between somebody legally carrying a firearm and a third party that escalated to a shooting fight (at least if there has been such a case the anti-gunners haven’t reported on it).

I’m just glad that fewer and fewer people listen to whining anti-gunners. They’ve been crying wolf so long that people no longer take their prophecies of gloom and doom with and amount of seriousness. The difference though is unlike the kid who cried wolf the anti-gunners’ prophecies won’t come true.

A Series of Tragic Events and Malarkey

Wizardpc over at has a nice writeup about the Jose Guerena murder after reading the Pima County Sheriff’s Department interview of the SWAT supervisor. All in all it appears as through a combination of unfortunate events and bullshit lead to the state murdering an innocent man.

The SWAT team claims that they were using this raid as a training session which is why it appeared to be disorganized on the released video (that’s what people claim, I don’t know enough about SWAT team operations to know a disorganized raid from an organized one). At the same time the SWAT team viewed Mr. Guerena as some kind of epic killing machine for the drug cartels. Mr. Guerena on the other hand had suspicions that drug cartel members were targeting him so he suspected a potential for home invasion.

Reading that it seems to me that the SWAT team is either lying about the potential threat they thought Mr. Guerena posed or that this raid was viewed as a good training exercise. It would seem to me that you shouldn’t send an inexperienced team to deal with somebody who you assumed would be an extremely dangerous man.

Although some would view this interview as shedding light on the situation it I feel is created more questions than answers. Why did the SWAT team members put so much fire down towards Mr. Guerena without him so much as firing a shot? Why was a no knock raid even authorized in the first place (why are they ever authorized really)? Who thought it was a good idea to use a coordinated raid as training? Why is every other word out of their mouths during the interview either “um” or “uh?” OK that last question really isn’t valid to the topic at hand it just bothered me as I read through it.

No matter how you look at it this situation blows. An innocent man was killed all in the name of our stupid war on drugs.

Just When I Thought the State Couldn’t Get Anymore Depraved

I’ve ran across enough stories demonstrating the depravity of the state that I could probably write a several volume set on the subject. Sadly as I continue to get older I keep getting reminded that giving power over others to an entity with a “legitimate” monopoly on the initiation of force is the worst idea humans have ever come up with. Very recently I was introduced to North Carolina’s eugenics program:

The Eugenics Board of North Carolina (EBNC) was an agency of the U.S. state of North Carolina created in 1933 after the state legislature authorized the practice of eugenics by state officials four years earlier.

In 1971, an act of the legislature transferred the EBNC to the newly created Department of Human Resources (DHR), and the secretary of that department was given managerial and executive authority over the board. Under a 1973 law, the Eugenics Board was transformed into the Eugenics Commission. Members of the commission were appointed by the governor and included the director of the Division of Social and Rehabilitative Services of the DHR, the director of Health Services, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane, the chief medical officer of the DHR in the area of mental health services, and the state attorney general. In 1974 the legislature transferred to the judicial system the responsibility for any sterilization proceedings against persons suffering from mental illness or mental retardation.

The Eugenics Commission was formally abolished by the legislature in 1977.

The board sterilized about 7,600 people, many of them against their will, between 1929 and 1974, in an attempt to remove mental illness and “social misbehaviour” from the gene pool. Among the victims were 2000 young people, some as young as ten years old.

North Carolina wasn’t the only state to practice eugenics but they were one of the few to continue the practice late after World War II and they had some of the loosest criteria for determining who would be sterilized and who wouldn’t. The justifications for sterilization ranged from mental retardation to simply not getting along with classmates:

People as young as 10 in North Carolina were sterilized for not getting along with schoolmates, being promiscuous or running afoul of local social workers or doctors. The state’s law, which allowed such professionals to refer people to the state Eugenics Board for sterilization, was more open-ended than similar statutes in other states, where people had to be jailed or institutionalized before they could be sterilized.

Just stop and think about this for a minute. Several states enacted laws that allowed them to sterilize people they deemed unfit to breed. Such laws gave some government bureaucrat the authority to make a permanent change to the life of another human being against their consent.

I honestly can’t fathom how such a system was ever considered acceptable by anybody. But programs like this and others that were even worse were implemented not just by some tyrannical dictator in fascist countries but also by states right here.

Many victims of North Carolina’s eugenics programs are currently fighting to get compensation from the state. Compensation from the state is really a slap in the face because the state is just returning money that they first stole from you in the form of taxes. Basically you get to pay yourself for wrongs enacted upon your person by the government. Likewise monetary compensation will never allow the victims of sterilization to have children so ultimately no justice will prevail.

Slate Doesn’t Know Shit About Libertarianism

Slate magazine demonstrated a few days ago that they don’t know jack shit about libertarianism. The article is a long diatribe build almost entirely on made up “facts.” Instead of going through the article piece by piece and pointing out each of Slate’s numerous errors I’m going to stand on the shoulder of giants and let others who have gone before me point out the flaws in Slate’s article.

First we have a nice piece that explains the fact that libertarianism didn’t start in the 1970s as claimed by Slate but was alive and well before that under the name liberalism. The same article points to the fact that Ayn Rand did more to bring people to libertarianism than the supposed father of libertarian (according to Slate) Robert Nozick (whom I never actually heard of until I read Slates article strangely enough).

The following links were obtained from the previous so a heartfelt thanks goes out to the author, V.A. Luttrell. First the Cato institute has a nice piece destroying Slate’s claim that Nozick disavowed libertarianism.

Slate then went ahead and made a claim that Keynes (you know an article is worthless when it’s citing Keynes as an authoritative source on anything) said a rather nasty thing about Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. What Slate got wrong was that Keynes made the comment about Hayek’s Prices and Productions but actually wrote that he found himself in agreement with The Road to Serfdom. Oops.

Slate’s article then claimed that two of the fathers of libertarianism (you know besides the apparent father Nozick), von Mises and Hayek, were nothing but corporate shills. Unfortunately for Slate that isn’t true. Whoops again.

Although I feel the fact is self-evident apparently others do not. Slate wrote the usual and completely false claim that Libertarianism is composed of nothing but greedy individuals who care nothing for others. Once again this claim is false. The fact of the matter is the libertarian movement is an attempt to make all interactions between people voluntary instead of done at the point of a gun. Libertarianism is the abhorrence of violence and coercion which is made clear by the fact the foundation of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle.

Slate would do well to actually research libertarianism before making such blatant and false claims. Of course writing a factual critique wasn’t the point, I firmly believe the author knew damned well that he was printing false information and wanted nothing more than to slander the movement he hates so much. Too bad for the author that people who do follow libertarian philosophy don’t let such falsities go without challenge.

I Have a Cheaper Solution

Hillary Clinton has gone ahead and promised more American dollars to Central American countries to help them fight our drug war:

Mrs Clinton told a regional security conference in Guatemala that the US would increase its aid by more than 10% to nearly $300m (£187m).

Analysts say the figure is still small, given that more than two-thirds of cocaine sent from South America to the US now passes through Central America.

In total, some $1.8bn was promised to support the region’s security.

That’s a lot of taxpayer money just to enforce a prohibition on what people put into their own bodies. Instead of spending billions fighting this needless war, keeping non-violent people imprisoned, and getting people killed enforcing anti-drug laws let’s try something better, let’s just end the prohibition on currently illegal drugs.

Ron Paul and Barney Frank understand this and rumor has it that they’ll introduce a bill to legalize marijuana very soon. This would be the first step in ending the pointless war on drugs and would likely slash the number of people we put into prison every year.

We should have learned our lesson about prohibition during Prohibition. All the war on drugs has accomplished is the waste of untold billions (maybe trillions) of dollars, increase the rate of violent crime, lead to drug cartels gaining enough power to basically overthrow several states (and replace them with even more violence which is the negative part), and swelled our prison population to the highest in the world.

We can’t control what people put into their bodies because simply making something illegal doesn’t stop it from happening (which is why we have criminals by the way).

Happy Birthday Alan Turing

Today is June 23rd, 2011 which makes it the 99th birthday of the man usually called the father of computer science, Alan Turing. The article gives a good overview of his life, which ended up being quite tragic. Turing was a genius who’s research helped win World War II:

His work, however, was advanced enough to get him noticed by the powers that be and, in World War II, Turing became an integral part of the effort at Bletchley Park to break German ciphers and decode military transmissions.

The work carried out by Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park was of critical importance to the war effort. General Dwight D. Eisenhower stated at the time that intelligence received as a result of the codebreaking activities at the Park, “has been of priceless value. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender.”

Most people who were of value in winning that war were held up as heros and presented metals. Unfortunately for Turing he was also a homosexual which was not acceptable back in that era:

An inherently honest man, Turing reported a break-in at his home in 1952 and admitted to police that he had been engaged in a sexual relationship with one of the suspects, Arnold Murray. At the time, same-sex relationships between men were illegal in England and Turing was promptly arrested on charges of ‘gross indecency’.

Found guilty, Turing had his security clearance revoked – preventing him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy work for the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ – and was forced to undergo hormonal castration via oestrogen injections to curb his ‘unnatural’ urges, under threat of imprisonment.

“Hey man, thanks for helping us win the war against the Nazis but your sexual deviance is unacceptable so we’re going to use our monopoly on the initiation of force and subject you to experimental treatments that will most likely kill you.” At least that’s what I image the conversation ended up sounding like.

Although crucial to the war effort and a brilliant man in general being the subject of state aggression takes a toll on most people. After being the victim of state violence Turing was unable to cope with existence anymore and sadly ended his own life:

The strain of being excluded from his beloved work and branded a pervert proved too much for Turing, who was found on the 8th of June 1954 having taken a lethal dose of cyanide to end his own life.

Many soldiers owe their lives to the work this man performed and everybody in this era owes him for computers as we know them. Happy birthday Alan Turing!

You Keep Saying These Things

Wisconsin is on the verge of passing right to carry legislation into law which means the anti-gunners are out screaming that blood will flow through the streets and other such nonsense. As I said before these people are harmless and will lose interest quickly as people stop listening to their prophesies that never come to fruition. Until they lose interest though we’re going to have to listen to the ramblings of crazy people such as this dumb ass:

After the bill was approved by most Republicans and some Democrats, the Assembly will send the bill to Walker to become the law of the land. The move is being hailed as a major victory by those who believe concealed carry provides a much-needed safety net for law-abiding citizens who can now feel free to summon up their inner Clint Eastwood on demand to defend their loved ones.

Of course, that’s a crock.

Many law enforcement officers will tell you how difficult it would be for a regular citizen – even with the required training – to use a handgun in a confrontation with a criminal. No matter how many action movies you may have watched, it’s just not that simple.

More often than not, people would face more danger of having the weapon taken and used against them during an unexpected encounter with a criminal.

The anti-gunners toss around so many lies that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them all. One of them is the myth that you’re more likely to have your gun taken from you and used against your person than to use it to successfully defend yourself. He’s the thing though, every time the anti-gunners make this claim that are unable to back it up with any examples. It’s basically a non-issue. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but the frequency is so rare that the anti-gunners can’t even pull out examples of it happening.

Also I like how he states that law enforcement officers like to tell people how difficult it is to defend yourself with a firearm. You know what’s even more difficult? Getting raped in a back alley while waiting 15 minutes for the police to not arrive because they have no legal obligation to protect you. Anybody who has participated in a shooting sport knows how difficult it become to property utilize a firearm when your adrenaline begins pumping but that’s why we advocate training so strongly. On top of that having a gun, regardless of your capability with the device during a self-defense situation, is still going to increase your odds of surviving much more than not being armed at all.

The bottom line though is the simple fact that none of the claims made by anti-gunners have been proven true. No blood has been flowing through the streets because every street corner turned into a Hollywood version of the Wild West (because the real Wild West wasn’t so wild [PDF]). Violent crime hasn’t gone up, in fact just the opposite has happened. This is why nobody really pays much attention to what the anti-gunners are saying, none of their boogeymen have come out from under their beds to reign terror down upon us.

Overreaction Defined

Let us pretend that you’re in charge of a reservoir that contains treated drinking water. Now let’s pretend that the owner of the reservoir is an idiot and doesn’t have some kind of cover to protect that treated water. One day while you’re happy at work doing nothing you learn that some bozo came by last night and pissed in the reservoir. In this scenario would you just shrug it off since there are some eight million gallons of water in the reservoir and thus the piss is so diluted as to be irrelevant or do you drain the entire fucking reservoir? If you answered the latter you to could work in Oregon’s waterworks:

Some eight million gallons of treated drinking water have been flushed down the drain in the US state of Oregon after a man urinated into a reservoir. Did such a vast amount of water have to be dumped?

So what you ask? Well this reservoir isn’t a privately held facility so draining the entire thing is getting it refilled is going to cost $36,000. Ouch! I wonder if they also drain the entire reservoir if they find a dead animal in it. Maybe they should look into covering that reservoir in the future, it can’t cost $36,000 for a tarp to toss over that giant pool.

I’m Truly Shocked, California Did Something Right

Holy shit I’m actually surprised by something that happened in California, and it’s a pleasant surprise. I never thought I would actually have something nice to say about that forsaken state but it sounds as though they’re going to stop paying their “representatives” until the state budget is balanced:

It is often said if the state of California was a country it would be the eighth biggest economy in the world.

But with a $10bn deficit to match, and residents fed up of legislators missing the annual budget deadline by months, they voted for a new law.

It is the first time Proposition 25 has been put into effect – and it means all 120 elected members of the State Assembly and Senate will not be paid their wages, or their living allowances, until they pass a balanced budget.

Hell. Fucking. Yes. Obviously the “representatives” are complaining but they have no ground to stand on. Those people were hired to do a job and have failed to do it. As they have failed to do their job it’s only right that they don’t get paid (I’d fire them frankly but alas that’s not an option when government is involved). California should expand on this and refuse to pay their “representatives” until the state debt is paid off as well. Imagine how quickly such a program would accomplish turning California from a the most debt-ridden state into a debt-free state.

For once I can say there is something other states can learn from California, don’t pay the legislature until the budget is balanced.