Month: January 2012

The Ultimate Shut Up Slave Legislation

Listen up slaves, you’re government has now decreed that you are to shut up while traveling overseas. HR313, the Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011, will make it illegal for American citizens to discuss acts that are verboten under the Controlled Substances Act:

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out. H.R. 313, the “Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011,” is sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication.

Nice huh? What’s even better is the fact this has already passed a House vote. This is a wonderfully verbose and yet horrible piece of legislations:

‘(b) Whoever, within the United States, conspires with one or more persons, or aids or abets one or more persons, regardless of where such other persons are located, to engage in conduct at any place outside the United States that would constitute a violation of this title, other than a violation of section 404(a), if committed within the United States, shall be subject to the same penalties that would apply to such conduct if it were to occur within the United States.’.

The government’s fingers spread far and wide in an attempt to control the actions of the people it claims to rule over. Even fleeing to another country is no longer a safe harbor.

NYPD Working on to Further Expand Their Personal Police State

While the police state is expanding throughout the United States it’s expanding at a faster pace in some places. States like New York, Massachusetts, and California are expanding at an incredibly rapid pace as are the cities of Chicago and New York. Not only has New York all but disarmed the law-abiding citizenry they’re working on ensuring those individuals remain disarmed. Because of the recent cases involving law-abiding citizens being dumb enough to attempt compliance with posted “No Guns Allowed” signs the police force in New York is looking for new technology to detect those who are carrying concealed weapons:

The NYPD is stepping up their war against illegal guns, with a new tool that could detect weapons on someone as they walk down the street.

But is it violating your right to privacy?

Police, along with the U.S. Department of Defense, are researching new technology in a scanner placed on police vehicles that can detect concealed weapons.

“You could use it at a specific event. You could use it at a shooting-prone location,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS 2′s Hazel Sanchez on Tuesday.

It’s called Terahertz Imaging Detection. It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.

With the recent introduction of body scanners at airports I’m sure you’ve heard of terahertz imagine. Most airport body scanners use millimeter waves as terahertz imagine is still a relatively new technology with a rather disturbing side-effect:

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.

So the New York Police Department (NYPD) is using a technology that can damage DNA to detect concealed firearms. First of all it’s none of NYPD’s business who is and isn’t carrying a firearm because, regardless of what city officials believe, the right to keep and bear arms is still codified in the Constitution (and even if it wasn’t the right to self-defense is a natural one that can’t be rightfully overridden by some assholes in a government building).

If this technology gets off of the ground the denizens of New York City may find themselves exposed to dangerous terahertz waves just so some piece of shit working in NYPD can get his jollies off disarming a peaceful individual (or outright shooting the poor schmuck because “he had a gun”). I’m still waiting for New York City to setup checkpoints at every point of entry where people and their vehicles are thoroughly searched before being granted entrance into the prison city.

Public Domain is Effectively Dead

We’re all aware of the fact that copyrighted works eventually go into public domain. Well that’s how it used to work, now the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can re-copyright public domain works:

Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.” (PDF)

The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods.

This ruling has farther implications that some may realize. There is a huge amount of public domain works out there, many of which are made freely available by sites like Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately if Congress were to renew the copyright on some of these public domain works these sites would find themselves in violation of copyright law and therefore be subject to arrest.

Another possible problem with this ruling is the fact Congress may have the ability to copyright works that were never copyrighted previously. Many authors put out material as public domain from the start, allowing people to download these works and use them in any way they see fit.

When you combine this ruling with legislation like SOPA or PROTECT-IP things get very frightening indeed. For example we will take a hypothetical piece of dissenting literature made freely available under public domain. For the sake of this discussion let’s say somebody within Congress finds this piece of literature extremely unsavory and wants it removed. In order to get it removed he works with other members of Congress to re-copyright the work. Shortly after the work is re-copyrighted the domains of every provider are seized in an effort to enact censorship of the work.

While some will claim such thing couldn’t happen in the United States the truth is it can. We live in a police state where our government is working around the clock to eliminate the rights of free speech, trial by jury, and to be secure in our belongings. Legislation like the PATRIOT Act and the new section in the National Defense Authorization Act have ensured the latter two are entirely gone but the government still has work to do on eliminating the freedom of speech. This ruling combined with legislation like SOPA and PROTECT-IP are the endgame.

United States Federal Government Reneges on Promise to Allow an Evicted 101 Year-Old Woman to Return Home

A 101 year-old woman was evicted from her home but later promised she could reenter the premisses by the federal government. Of course a requirement to become a government busybody is the ability to lie and that’s exactly what the federal government did to this woman:

The federal government now says a 101-year-old Detroit woman it promised could move back into her foreclosed home four months ago can’t return because the building’s unsanitary and unsafe.

Texana Hollis was evicted Sept. 12 and her belongings placed outside after her 65-year-old son failed to pay property taxes linked to a reverse mortgage, The Detroit News reported Sunday. Two days later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said she could return.

But now, HUD said it won’t let Hollis move back in because of the house’s condition. She had lived there about 60 years.

“Here I am, 100 years old, and don’t have a home,” Hollis said, rounding off her age. “Oh Lord, help me.”

The reason this woman was evicted is entirely irrelevant, the federal government promised her she could return home and reneged on that promise. If you are a resident of Detroit or know somebody who is that may help I’m sure it would be greatly appreciated if you contacted them to see if they could provide any assistance or contacts of people who could help. When our government works against the people it is up to the people to help one another. Mutual aid is the only option we truly to have to help one another.

Monday Metal: Världsherravälde by Raubtier

This week we’re going a little Swedish industrial with Raubtier. Världsherravälde, which translations into world domination, is a bad ass video full of people smashing things. While I’m not sure what exactly they’re singing about I have looked up some translations and in general the song is about the metalheads rising up and destroying hip-hop and MTV, a theme I can get entirely behind:

I Wish Statists Would Just Cut Straight to the Point

All I ask for is a little intellectual honesty from my philosophical opponents. I wish anti-gunners would just come out and say they want to ban all firearms and be done with the pussy footing around. While I’m making a list I also wish the other statists would just come out and say they want people who do the “wrong” thing murdered.

I came across this wonderful piece of statist propaganda :

Kathy Baylis, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics, studied the ban on junk-food advertising imposed in the Canadian province of Quebec from 1984 to 1992 and its effect on fast-food purchases.

By comparing English-speaking households, who were less likely to be affected by the ban, to French-speaking households, Baylis and co-author Tirtha Dhar, of the University of British Columbia, found evidence that the ban reduced fast-food expenditures by 13 percent per week in French-speaking households, leading to between 11 million and 22 million fewer fast-food meals eaten per year, or 2.2 billion to 4.4 billion fewer calories consumed by children.

Combine this statist propaganda with some actual statists and you have a recipe for advocating violence. We go from comments like this:

And that is why anyone who bases policies and ideologies around the premise that people are rational and independent is full of shit.

People can be, but most of the time they are not, because it is hard and takes conscious effort.

There are two views one should really have when it comes to government. The first view is the assumption that the above commenter is right and people are irrational being. In such a case the last thing you want to do is hand irrational being power over other irrational being because you’ll just double your irrationality. The section view is that people are, in general, rational and good beings. In such a case there is no need for government to rule over the already generally good and rational beings.

Seriously though I wish the above commenter would flat out state what he really things, people should be told what is the right course of action and be killed if they decide to take a different course. After all wouldn’t the world be a better place if we just killed everybody we disagree with? Think about it for a minute, you’d have a world of like-minded individuals being obedient to the state. Why if we just round up all the people who are wrong and shoot them we’ll have a perfect world!

That’s the ultimate end to a plan that revolves around stupid notions such as people needing to be managed by other people. Laws must be enforced with violence so passing laws that attempt to instill “proper” or “rational” must result in “improper” and “irrational” people being physically harmed until they either submit or die.

Let’s look at fast food for a minute. The general consensus of society is that fast food is bad for people. Therefore wouldn’t it make the most sense to round up everybody who eats fast food and put them in prison? That would solve the problem because the lack of customers would force fast food joints into bankruptcy. Obviously if consumers of fast food resist arrest we’ll have to kill them but really they’re only bring death upon themselves for if they simply submit to the man with the gun all will be fine (in 10 years when they finally get out of prison).

What I just typed sounds absurd to any rational being but that is ultimately what statist want. Statists really are the lowest of the low. When they advocate a new law what they’re really saying is, “I know what’s best for people.” Libertarianism doesn’t based its philosophy on the idea that people are rational being, it bases its ideas on the idea that initiated force and coercion are undesirable and therefore should be eliminated.

Somebody spending all of their money on lottery tickets isn’t being rational consider the chances of winning are somewhere near the chances of gravity reversing itself in the next fifteen minutes. Yet I do not wish people to force me into action by using violence so I must not force others into action using violence. While I don’t agree with the actions of somebody who spends all of their money on lottery tickets I have no right to force them into stopping.

Instead of claiming new laws need to be put into place to curb “irrational” behavior statists need to cut to the point and state that they believe they know what is best for society and also believe anybody who disagrees with them should be physically harmed or killed.

Investigation into Google’s Relationship with the NSA Requested

Some people are finally finding Google’s relationship with the United States government a bit creepy and have asked “representative” Issa (the man who’s investigating Fast and Furious)to perform an investigation:

Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group largely focused in recent years on Google’s privacy practices, has called on a congressional investigation into the Internet giant’s “cozy” relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.

In a letter sent Monday, Consumer Watchdog asked Representative Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to investigate the relationship between Google and several government agencies.

The group asked Issa to investigate contracts at several U.S. agencies for Google technology and services, the “secretive” relationship between Google and the U.S. National Security Agency, and the company’s use of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration airfield in California.

While such an investigation may be interesting it really won’t help people learn the lesson that your data is never private if it’s on a server you don’t entirely control. If the likes of Facebook, Google, and Yahoo don’t have your personal information they can’t give it away to anybody. With Facebook receiving money from the CIA’s venture capitalist fund and Google’s CEO being so tightly tied to the Obama administration there should be no belief any information stored with either service will not fall into the hands of Big Brother.

I really do hope Issa starts an investigation because I want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. More importantly I want to see what maneuvers will be used to keep information about the rabbit hole away from the prying eyes of concerned citizens.

SOPA and PROTECT-IP Were Irrelevant

The Internet blackout did a good job of raising awareness of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT-IP, PIPA, or entirely absurd acronym). In fact so much awareness was raised and so many calls were made to “representatives” that both bills lost a great number of co-sponsors. People are cheering this as proof that democracy works and that we only need to bring attention of erroneous legislation to our “representatives” to stop the advance of the police state.

Unfortunately I have some bad news to report. You know all of those calls and e-mails made to “representatives” in Washington DC? They accomplished nothing. How can I say that? Simple, since passing either SOPA or PROTECT-IP became too difficult the government simply gave the middle finger to us serfs and decided to proceed as though either bill was passed. The popular file-sharing website MegaUpload was shutdown by the federal government*:

One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.

A federal indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.

Here’s a copy of the indictment [PDF] for those who are curious. When those assholes in Washington can’t get what they want in the form of legislation they just go ahead and do what they want anyways. In their eyes passing legislation is just a formality.

Many people were chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” as “representatives” repealed their sponsorship of SOPA and PROTECT-IP. What they should have been saying is, “This is what a police state looks like.” The United States isn’t a republic or a democracy, it’s a fascist empire.

* As of this writing MegaUpload can be accessed using the IP address 109.236.83.66.