August 2011 – Page 6 – A Geek With Guns

I Know the Mainstream Media Hates Ron Paul, Still This is a Bit Much

OK mainstream media I get it, you absolutely hate Ron Paul. You hate him so much that you’re willing to simply ignore his existence and pretend that he’s not in the presidential race. But even with your hatred taken into consideration giving Rick Perry credit for bringing the Federal Reserve into political conversation is a bit much:

Perry has proven himself to very quotable early into his entrance into the campaign. His most notable quote was a not-so-guised criticism of the Federal Reserve and Chairman Ben Bernanke. Actually, forget guised critique, the cowboy from Paint Creek, Texas took a double barreled shotgun to the Fed with the following statement at a campaign event in Iowa:

“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”

Perry could have chosen his words more carefully, but the interesting takeaway is that he is currently the front runner in the Republican field, could realistically become President, and has in one of his earliest campaign appearances taken a direct shot at the Federal Reserve. Historically, a critique of the Federal Reserve has been left to the devices of more fringe candidates (enter Ron Paul), as the Fed has become an accepted institution in America. Not so anymore.

Whether the nature and organization of the Federal Reserve truly becomes a central campaign issue over the next 18+ months is yet to be seen, but if it does Americans should welcome it. With the proliferation of Keynesian economists in America over the last eighty years, the majority of Americans have largely accepted the role of the Federal Reserve in their economy despite the contra voices of economists such as Milton Friedman.

Apparently crazy uncle Ron doesn’t count because he’s a fringe candidate that nobody’s ever heard of. I bet that belief would go away if Paul did well in a major straw poll somewhere… man that would shut them all up.

Honestly I don’t know what else I can possibly say about this that the mere existence of this article hasn’t. The media is literally conspiring to completely ignore Ron Paul in every way, shape, and form. They’re even giving credit to other candidates for work that Ron Paul’s been doing for decades. The Federal Reserve has been Ron Paul’s major issue, that’s what he does. This article is like giving credit for the theory of relativity to Steven Hawkings simply because the author didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of Albert Einstein (this analogy does fail a bit since Steven Hawkings is fucking awesome and Rick Perry isn’t).

These New FDA Warning Label Requirements Make Me Want to Start Smoking

Rockwell’s Law (named after Lew Rockwell who created it) states, “Always believe the opposite of what state officials tell you, and the corollary, always do the opposite of what they advise you.” I subscribe to this which is why the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cigarette warning label requirements make me want to start smoking*. I’ve never had a desire to start smoking in my life, nor have I ever smoked a cigarette but when the government puts so much effort into making people think something is bad it instantly raises red flags in my book.

I’m guessing the cigarette companies forgot to pay their yearly extortion fee because they’re now having to resort to filing a lawsuit against the FDA to prevent themselves from having to put the new warning labels on cigarette cartons:

In their 41-page complaint, the five companies say the new labels would illegally force them to make consumers “depressed, discouraged and afraid” to buy their products.

“The government can require warnings which are straightforward and essentially uncontroversial, but they can’t require a cigarette pack to serve as a mini-billboard for the government’s anti-smoking campaign,” Floyd Abrams, a lawyer representing the cigarette makers, said in a statement.

How naive those cigarette companies are. The government can make you do anything because they have enough capacity for violence to force you obedience.

Let’s talk about the FDA’s new requirements for a second. Frankly I find the requirements absurd to the n^th degree. As I said I don’t smoke and never have because I know it’s not good for you, in fact almost everybody knows it’s not good for you. You’re told throughout your entire public school career how dangerous smoking is (which is why so many kids start in all likelihood), you’re blasted with messages on television that tell you how bad smoking is, and there are billboard advertisements telling you how bad smoking is. If you haven’t figured out that smoking is bad by the time you’re old enough to legally buy cigarettes you should be smoking 10 packs a day to help Darwin get you out of the gene pool (note, I’m not saying people who smoke should be removed from the gene pool, just those who do it and don’t realize there are negative health side-effects involved).

By the time somebody walks into a store and makes a conscious decision to buy a pack of cigarettes they’re beyond the point where a simple warning label with a picture will dissuade them. This entire effort is a waste of taxpayer time and money as these laws need to be enforced (enforcement isn’t cheap) and now lawyers need to be paid by the FDA to fight this lawsuit. All this for what is effectively nothing more than the government not liking cigarette companies anymore.

* Before somebody tells me to not start smoking, I’m being somewhat facetious. Although I do have a desire to do the opposite of what the state tells me I don’t actually have a desire to start smoking.

Things Not Looking Good for the HP TouchPad

Things keep looking more and more glum for Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) TouchPad. Best Buy has had such a hard time selling the poor devices that they’re apparently requesting that HP take them back:

According to one source who has seen internal HP reports, Best Buy has taken delivery of 270,000 TouchPads and has so far managed to sell only 25,000, or less than 10 percent of the units in its inventory.

[…]

Best Buy, sources tell us, is so unhappy that it has told HP it is unwilling to pay for all the TouchPads taking up expensive space in its stores and warehouses, and wants HP to take them back. HP, for its part, is pleading with Best Buy to be patient. We’re also told that a senior HP executive, possibly executive VP Todd Bradley, is slated to travel to Minneapolis soon to discuss the matter with Best Buy executives.

Sadly, I’m not surprised. WebOS seems destined to be the operating system that has many great features but is doomed to failure by poor hardware and lack of polish. I managed to handle a TouchPad some time back at Best Buy and I wasn’t impressed. HP is coming into the tablet game late meaning they need to find some way of persuading customers into buying their new tablet instead of the already established devices released by their competitors.

The TouchPad was originally released with the same price tag as the iPad, a move which I said was rather stupid. Apple is able to sell their iPad at that price because they already have market recognition (people want them) and their devices generally are very well built and polished to an almost mirror shine. Companies releasing Android tablets are able to sell their devices because many people dislike iOS and/or Apple causing them to look elsewhere. On top of that Android has a lot of great features that separate it from iOS (it’s open source nature being a big boon for those who like to tinker and hack). As Android is free manufacturers can also create some very reasonably priced devices.

The TouchPad on the other hand lacks polish in many regards. First the device feels cheaply built with everything being made of plastic. Second WebOS 3.0 is buggy and includes some rather glaring problems that any quality assurance team should have caught before release. Battery life on the TouchPad isn’t great, coming in at roughly half the battery life of the iPad. Another problem is WebOS isn’t open which doesn’t help attract attention to the hacker crowd who are always looking for an OS they can add functionality to and improve (although there is a strong hacker community around WebOS, it’s not nearly as strong as Android’s). Thus the only other factor HP could hope to compete on is price, which they failed miserably at by setting the price at the same level as the iPad.

HP flubbed the TouchPad in every way, shape, and form so it’s not surprising to see that it’s not selling well. I would go so far as to say the TouchPad is a great lesson for other manufacturers to learn from, how not to release a new device.

The Answer to High Fructose Corn Syrup isn’t Taxation

It is often said that the difference between a good economist (also known as an Austrian economist) and a bad economist is that a good economist is capable of seeing the actual complexity of economic decisions and all of the different affects such decisions had. People who advocate government programs and taxes are bad economists because they can’t wrap their heads around the actual root of most problems, government.

A friend of mine send me a link to a petition that is trying to urge Congress to place a tax on high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). To many people this idea sounds grand because HFCS has been linked to an increase in obesity in the United States. What these same people don’t understand is why HFCS was every created in the first place. A bunch of companies didn’t get together one day with an agenda of trying to create an evil product that would harm customers (this seems to be what many people think), they got together because the price of sugar was much greater than the price of corn. Why was sugar so much more expensive than corn? Because there are taxes and quotas placed on imported sugar as well as governemnt subsidies for corn producers.

The combination of these two elements has create an ecosystem where it’s much cheaper to produce HFCS than to use natural sugar. Once again we find that the government is the root of a problem yet people want that very same government to fix it. If you want to stop the use of HFCS don’t demand the government tax it, demand the government remove taxes and quotes on imported sugar and eliminate corn subsidies. Once those two things are done the price of corn will increase and the price of sugar will decrease making the use of natural sugar more attractive.

11 More Violent Crimes Linked to ATF Operation Fast and Furious

Remember the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’s (ATF) fiasco with Operation Fast and Furious? Probably not if you only follow major media outlets as they seem to be more than happy to help the Department of Justice (DOJ) sweep the entire fiasco under the rug (I say this, ironically, as a point out an Fast and Furious article on a major media site). But for those of you who are outraged that your government provided guns to violent Mexican drug cartels we have some more bad news; firearms linked to Fast and Furious have been linked to 11 more violent crimes:

Firearms from the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious weapons trafficking investigation turned up at the scenes of at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., as well as at a Border Patrol agent’s slaying in southern Arizona last year, the Justice Department has acknowledged to Congress.

The department did not provide details about the crimes. But The Times has learned that they occurred in several Arizona cities, including Phoenix, where Fast and Furious was managed, as well as in El Paso, where a total of 42 weapons from the operation were seized at two crime scenes.

The government is in a unique position as they are able to pass laws, enforce laws, and disregard laws as they see fit. Even though the owners of various gun stores were going to refuse sales to people they thought seemed sketchy (i.e. they were going to obey the law) the ATF said they had to allow the sale (because the ATF suspect the buyers were linked to illegal activity which made the sale illegal, meaning the ATF knowingly broke the law).

Double standards, another service provided by the government.

Galt’s Gulch

It looks like crazy uncle Peter is off of his meds again. That’s what the mass media and statists (but I repeat myself) have been saying about Peter Thiel’s (you may have heard of him, he founded that shitty service called Pay Pal) newest endeavor which is the creation of a libertarian island out in international waters:

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

Sounds great, sign me up! As nice as this idea sounds it’ll never fly (I was going to say float but alas that was just to easy of a pun to make). Why? Because the primary failure is relying on the law of the sea treaties. Like it or not the United Nations (UN) administers the current rules regarding international waters through their Convention on the Law of the Sea. The UN is basically the biggest big government advocate group on the planet. According to the UN you’re not a sovereign nations unless they recognize you as such and if you’re not a sovereign nation they don’t recognize you as having any rights. On top of that the UN doesn’t exactly recognize private property rights which is needed in order to use homesteading.

You’re probably saying to yourself right now, “But Chris you hate the UN! Why are you concerned with what they want?” My concern stems from the same source as my hatred, the UN is more than willing to use guns to stomp down anybody they don’t like. Do you think the UN will be thrilled with the idea of a group of libertarian staring their own nations on the UN’s “property” (they view the oceans as their property)? Probably not. If construction started on this hypothetical island I wouldn’t be surprised if the UN showed up and arrested everybody for violating some stupid treaty that the islanders never signed.

With that said I would like nothing more than this project to get off of the ground. Having an island of liberty in a sea of tyranny would at least give those of us who care about freedom a place to run to. Currently the closest thing we have to that is the Free State Project (which I think has far better odds of success) but they’re still in the process of getting a critical number of liberty minded people to New Hampshire.

There is an interesting observation I have made in regards to libertarian projects like the Free State Project and the Seasteading Institute. Almost every libertarian project involves liberty oriented people running away from the statist societies that have developed all over the globe. This says a lot about libertarians, we’re willing to pick up everything and get the fuck out of your hair but the only thing that stands in our way are people who want to control our actions. Libertarian philosophy leaves no room for any person to have control over any other which means our tactics are restricted, we won’t use coercion and force to achieve our goals. So ask yourself who the selfish people really are; those willing to pick up and leave letting everybody to continue their existence as they see fit or those who will use violence to force others to obey their desires?

Penn Jillette Sums Up Wealth Redistribution Perfectly

CNN has an opinion piece written by none other than Penn Jillette. In the piece he explains his reasoning for being an atheist and libertarian. I’m ignoring the first part because I’ve made it a point on this site to not discuss religious topics (it’s not because I’m worried about offending anybody, it’s simply because I don’t care to argue about it and religious topics always lead to arguments), but I wanted to point out a piece in the article that perfectly explains why most libertarians are against the idea of wealth redistribution (social security, welfare, Medicare, and every other government social welfare program):

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

People try to argue that government isn’t really force. You believe that? Try not paying your taxes. (This is only a thought experiment — suggesting on CNN.com that someone not pay his or her taxes is probably a federal offense, and I’m a nut, but I’m not crazy.). When they come to get you for not paying your taxes, try not going to court. Guns will be drawn. Government is force — literally, not figuratively.

I don’t have to even add commentary to that, the argument is already perfectly stated.

Obama Came to Cannon Falls

So Obama came to the small Minnesota town of Cannon Falls a couple of days ago on his Tour of Economic Destruction. I would have reported on it earlier but there were far more important and interesting things to write about such as my distaste for new trends in the first person shooter genre of games. Either way he came, he saw, and he accomplished nothing (his tour is turning into his presidency already). The Red Star has a small piece on the President’s visit and one of the shittiest live blogs I’ve ever seen about anything (if anybody from the Red Star is reading this please hire some people at Engadget to consult you on doing proper live blogs in the future).

As this is the Red Star the article and live blog both tout the President as the man who will deliver us from evil and vanquish all that may harm us. In reality Obama is a moron who, like almost every other politician out there, doesn’t have a clue on how to actually fix the economy. Instead of discussing the economy (which is the supposed purpose of this tour) and how he’s going to “fix” it the President’s visit seems to be nothing more than the beginning of his taxpayer funded campaign for the next presidential race. One of my favorite quotes from the article was the following:

Responding to a question about the legal challenges to his health care reform bill, Obama noted that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “instituted the exact same” individual mandate in Massachusetts.

“This used to be a Republican idea by the way, this whole idea of the individual mandate,” Obama said. “And suddenly it’s like they got amnesia. ‘Oh this is terrible. This is going to take away freedom for Americans all over the world, all over the country.'”

OK Obama I get it, you get your rocks off but forcing people to do your bidding. Because this masturbatory pleasure ends when people start calling you on your tyrannical activities you feel the need to justify why you did what you did so the serfs will shut up. But claiming that something was a Republican ideal isn’t a valid justification for anything. On top of that most Republicans wouldn’t consider Romney one of them in any real sense thus saying, “But Romney did it so that means the Republicans support it!” is stupid and meaningless. Further demonstrating his tyrannical tendencies Obama had this to say:

Noting that it was “not election season yet,” Obama said he had to mention a recent Republican presidential debate in which candidates said they would not take a deal that offered $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases.

“Think about that,” Obama said. “I mean, that’s just not common sense.”

Although I don’t agree with the Republican’s justification for not raising taxes (their justification being that the Democrats oppose it therefore they support it) when you look at taxation for what it really is the refusal to raise taxes is common sense. Raising taxes increase the amount of money the government steals for its ~~citizens~~ victims (might as well call us what we really are). Increasing taxes increases the criminal activity of theft and therefore should be avoided at any and all costs. On top of that taxes aren’t revenue, so stop claiming otherwise.

Jon Stewart Calls The Media Our on Ignoring Ron Paul

Although I don’t agree with many of Jon Stewart’s political beliefs I’ve always given him credit for being willing to rip on the Republicans and Democrats with equal vigor. Thus I wasn’t surprised when he called the media out on blatantly ignoring Ron Paul. Kudos to you Stewart for being one of the few people on television to actually bring this up.

Warren Buffett Should Put His Money Where His Mouth Is

I know several people who constantly claim that they would be more than happy to pay more taxes. Every time I hear somebody state this I tell them that they can write a check Bureau of Public Debt anytime they feel the amount of taxes they’re paying is too low. You know what? To this day I’ve not had one person take up the offer and thus I consider them all a bunch of hypocrites.

Warren Buffett has been receiving heavy media coverage after stating that he wants Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy (in Buffett’s case wealthy means anybody making more than $1 million). Well I’m pleased to say that I’m not the only one calling people on their hypocritical bullshit as another person has made the information available for Buffett to donate a few billion to the Treasury.

Once again if you say that you’d gladly pay higher taxes shut up and actually do it. Cut a check to the Bureau of Public Debt and send it to the following address:

Bureau of the Public Debt
Department G
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

Until you’ve actually done that shut the fuck up about raising taxes. If you have actually done that then congratulations you’re no longer a hypocrite and I’m willing to listen to your arguments.