Month: February 2012

Nullification Alive and Well in Virginia

I’ve talked about jury nullification several times on this blog but I don’t believe I’m talked about the ability of states of nullify federal laws. Through state legislation federal laws can be rendered unenforceable, or nullified. This has been done numerous times throughout American history with my favorite example of Wisconsin’s nullification of the Fugitive Slaves Act. Various states also nullified the REAL ID Act by passing legislation prohibiting the act from being implemented in those states.

The passed of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was not a happy moment in American history as it granted the United States government the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. While Ron Paul introduced legislation to repeal the erroneous provision Virginia has decided to simply nullify the provision:

On Tuesday, February 14th, the Virginia House of Delegates voted in favor of House Bill 1160 (HB1160). The final vote was 96-4.

The legislative goal of HB1160 is to codify in Virginia law noncompliance with what many are referring to as the “kidnapping provisions” of section 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA). The official summary of 1160:

“A BILL to prevent any agency, political subdivision, employee, or member of the military of Virginia from assisting an agency of the armed forces of the United States in the conduct of the investigation, prosecution, or detention of a citizen in violation of the United States Constitution, the Constitution of Virginia, or any Virginia law or regulation.”

I hope other states will follow Virginia’s fine example.

Congress Setting Itself Up to Take Undue Credit

There was a minor controversy in the iOS world last week as it was discovered an application called Path uploaded the entire contents of the user’s Address Book to their servers. I call this a minor controversy because anybody familiar with the iOS Address Book API could have told you this is entirely possible (and hard to avoid because removing these APIs would make it impossible for any application to access Address Book data). Some are angry because Apple’s review process didn’t catch this and others are pointing out the fact that applications should require permission to access the Address Book (of course if the application is supposed to work with the Address Book this becomes an entirely moot point as users will give permission anyways).

What’s more interesting to me is how quickly Congress positioned itself to take credit for the fix Apple was going to present anyways:

The Path debacle just took another turn for the worse with House Energy & Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman and Commerce Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee Chair G.K. Butterfield issuing a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook (via The Next Web). In it, the legislators seek to find out whether Apple is doing enough to protect personal data on users’ iPhones, including their contacts. Specifically, the letter asserts there have been claims that the practice of collecting address book data without users’ consent is “common and accepted among iOS app developers.”

Now when Apple releases their iOS update that requires users to give applications permission to access their Address Book database Congress can point and say, “See! We protected the consumers from Apple’s bad practices! Unless we acted Apple wouldn’t have changed anything!” Of course the truth is Apple would have taken corrective actions whether or not Congress sent a letter or not.

Users were pissed about Path getting through the App Store approval process even though it literally stole the entire contents of the user’s Address Book database. Apple, wanting repeat customers, obviously noticed that angry customers are not good to have so they started working on a fix. This is how the market works: consumers provide feedback to producers and if those producers fail to act on that feedback consumers take their money elsewhere. Members of Congress understand this, which is why they always swoop in to “investigate” anything that has angered consumers (unless the entity that angered consumers gave Congress enough money, then it gets ignored). Those bastards in Washington DC realize the problem will get fixed without their action so making a token “investigation” guarantees free publicity for the next election cycle.

Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by this charlatans. The actions of Congress have no weight on whether or not Apple fixes the problem, consumers do. Congress just tries to exploit these situations to make it appear as though we need them.

Welcome to Fourth Generation Warfare

The United States has the best military equipment available. In the government’s arsenal lies battle ships, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, bombers, tanks, spy satellites, guided missiles, and unmanned drones. All these things are sophisticated, expensive, and practically useless in fourth generation warfare. For those who are unaware fourth generation warfare is the new paradigm being used and can be summarized by the following tactics:

  • Are complex and long term
  • Terrorism (tactic)
  • A non-national or transnational base—highly decentralized
  • A direct attack on the enemy’s culture
  • Highly sophisticated psychological warfare, especially through media manipulation and lawfare
  • All available pressures are used – political, economic, social and military
  • Occurs in low intensity conflict, involving actors from all networks
  • Non-combatants are tactical dilemmas
  • Lack of hierarchy
  • Small in size, spread out network of communication and financial support
  • Use of Insurgency and guerrilla tactics

Instead of massive armies equipped with the most powerful and sophisticated weapons available, fighting forces today are using tactics that can be done very cheaply and are brutally effective. Using such tactics a $4.5 billion aircraft carrier can be legitimately threatened by a man with a small boat, a warhead, and no desire to continue living:

“They have increased the number of submarines … they increased the number of fast attack craft,” Vice Admiral Mark Fox told reporters. “Some of the small boats have been outfitted with a large warhead that could be used as a suicide explosive device. The Iranians have a large mine inventory.”

“We have watched with interest their development of long range rockets and short, medium and long range ballistic missiles and of course … the development of their nuclear programme,” Fox, who heads the U.S. Fifth Fleet, said at a briefing on the fleet’s base in the Gulf state of Bahrain.

Some may laugh but this tactic was successfully deployed by Japan in World War II and against the USS Cole in 2000. An Iranian mine also caused severe damage the USS Samuel B. Roberts in 1988. Big powerful ships are sitting ducks to small maneuverable weapon systems.

The days of a militarily superior force being guaranteed to obliterate another force are gone. Vietnam demonstrated what a determined but militarily inferior force can do. Many people believe that a war with Iran would be an almost guaranteed victory for the United States but that is far from the truth. While we have more powerful ships, they have people willing to do for their cause. People who are willing to die for a cause are more powerful than the largest warships because they can use suicidal tactics. What is an aircraft carrier going to do if 50 small speedboats equipped with warheads comes hurtling towards her?

A war with Iran will be costly and an entirely pointless act as opposed to peaceful coexistence this is possible so long as we give up our desire to create an ever-expanding empire.

Chasing His Tail

Talk about some top notch police work:

The junior officer, who has not been named, was monitoring an area hit by a series of burglaries in an unnamed market town in the country’s south.

As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone “acting suspiciously” in the area.

But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed officer he was watching on the screen, according to details leaked to an industry magazine.

The operator directed the officer, who was on foot patrol, as he followed the “suspect” on camera last month, telling his colleague on the ground that he was “hot on his heels”.

The officer spent around 20 minutes giving chase before a sergeant came into the CCTV control room, recognised the “suspect” and laughed hysterically at the mistake.

There’s nothing like chasing yourself around for 20 minutes to give you a sense of accomplishment.

More Proof that Fast and Furious was About Gun Control

Uncle has more proof that Fast and Furious was about gun control, not curbing the supply of weapons to Mexican drug cartels:

In the Fronteras interview, Coulson also claimed ATF knew that what has come to be known as the “90% lie” was a myth. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others had been pushing the line that 90% of guns seized in Mexico came from the U.S.

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“Among federal law enforcement, that became somewhat of a joke,” Coulson said. “We all knew that was whatever weapons the Mexican government decided to follow or trace back to the U.S. and never took into account the weapons that came in from Central America, from other countries around the world.”

This myth was behind the Justice Department announcement last April 25 that it was making 8,500 gun stores in Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico report individual purchases of multiple rifles of greater than .22 caliber by law-abiding American citizens to the ATF because — get this — such guns are “frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest border.”

This corroborates previous evidence demonstrating that Fast and Furious was nothing more than a sham operation meant to create an excuse to enact more gun control in this country.

Americans seem to believe that they can hold the government responsible through voting, protesting, petitioning, and writing their “representatives.” These beliefs are false because if the populace make too much of a fuss about something the government simple goes from using overt tactics to covert tactics. Passing gun control laws in this country has become far more difficult today than it was back in the heydays of the 1990s. Members of the government, still wanting to disarm the populace, know passing gun control laws is akin to political suicide so they’ve changed their tactics. Instead of passing bills that decree further restrictions on gun ownership they are using their already possessed regulatory power and creating false flag incidents to justify the new regulations.

I realize many people will simply label me a conspiracy theorist (something I’m not, in general I’m very skeptical) for the claims I’ve just made but the proof supports Fast and Furious being a false flag operation so, at the very least, I’m vindicated on this issue.

The Stasi in School Lunchrooms

Parents who send their children to public schools have two options when it comes to food; have the kid eat the school provided lunches or pack lunches for the kid. Well it appears as through the latter option is going away as the Stasi are inspecting lunches and confiscating those that aren’t approved by the state:

The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a U.S. Department of Agriculture agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet USDA guidelines,” the Journal reports.

The decision was made under consideration of a regulation put in place by the the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs to meet USDA guidelines.

In other words the state makes the requirements. If you don’t agree with those requirements that’s just too fucking bad. Do you believe your child needs turkey and cheese instead of the pink goo used to make chicken nuggest? Too bad, the state has deemed that you believe wrong and will steal your child’s lunch just like it steals your money.

This is no longer the land of the free, it is a police state where every action is controlled by the state at the point of a gun.

EDIT: 2012-02-16 13:20: The link posted by Nicole calls several aspects of this story into question. Namely the situation has become a bit of a he said, she said situatation:

Additionally, citing the above-linked statement, a local TV news outlet which had jumped on the bandwagon claims that “the agency says it gave the little girl milk to offset a missing dairy item.” However, this claim does not appear to be in the cited statement.

The TV station’s update further quotes the school district’s superintendent as saying that the child was simply instructed (it is unclear by whom, and it is unclear whether the child was first asked whether she wanted milk) to go through the lunch line to get some milk, and that the superintendent thinks “that the child became confused about what she had to do. I think the child, instead of going over and picking up the milk, I think the child, for whatever reason, thought she had to go through the line and get a school meal which, that’s not our policy.”

In other words one of two possibilities exist; either an overzealous employee, given legitimacy by the state, ordered the girl to get a school provided lunch or the child was simply order to get milk but became confused. It does sound as though the lunch was not confiscated, which is a relief to know. What becomes far more interesting though is the following:

Notably, as the second-linked story above suggests, the mother’s main gripe here does not even appear to be with this “state agent,” but instead with the school’s teachers, who continue to give the girl milk and vegetables despite letters from the mother asking them not to.

What is not made clear is why the mother desired her child not to be provided milk and vegetables. This is of importance because it is very possible that the child has allergies that must be avoided or the family has religious reasons (for example if they’re strict Orthodox Jews they may require food to be kosher). Regardless the mother’s wishes were ignore. The following claim is then made:

The mother apparently objects to this option being provided to her daughter, not because of any health concerns or the like, but because she incorrectly believes that she will be charged additional money for her child being provided this option.

Of course this statement is in question because we do not know if there is a health concern regarding the child or not, that is never made clear. It seems to me that the mother had some kind of reason for wishing her child not be provided certain foodstuffs and that reasoning is important to know. The author is also unaware of how the state only expands its powers:

Since this is also an opt-in program, there is no chance of this becoming some sort of generally applicable concern even to the extent there is some sort of nanny state concern here. If the mother has some sort of ethical problem with her child being provided with the option of drinking milk or eating vegetables at school, then she is surely free to send her child to an unsubsidized day care program.

Emphasis mine. The state often uses opt-in programs to field test new powers and authorities before making them mandatory elsewhere. Saying there is no chance of this situation becoming generally applicable shows a gross lack of understanding in how governmental powers expand. I also find the second claim interesting because it’s a play on the statist’s usual rebuttal of, “If you don’t like it leave.” Apparently the state should provided these subsidized services, make everybody pay for them at the point of a gun, but if you partake in one of these programs that you’re forced to pay for you should have no say in how it’s run. That sounds like a typical statist to me.

At most, the only actual concern here, hinted at by the second-linked article, is the expense to the taxpayer of providing the extra food free of charge. Then again, since we are definitionally dealing with children whose parents will often lack the resources to provide a consistently balanced lunch, and since the whole point of the program is to provide those children with a pre-K experience that their parents’ income would otherwise prevent, this would not seem to be a tremendously important concern.

Again, emphasis mine. So we’re definitely dealing with a maybe here.

I’m going to toss this story into the he said, she said pile. Evidence exists that both sides of the story are exaggerated and contain misunderstandings and conjecture. It is my belief that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes although we’re unlikely to ever find out what the truth is.

Abuse of Body Scanner Technology by the TSA

File this story under obvious outcomes of the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) naked body scanners:

TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.

One woman who flew out of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport several months ago said a female agent sent her through a body scanner three times after the agent commented on her “cute” body.

“She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’‘You just have such a cute figure,’” Ellen Terrell recalled to CBS News in Dallas.

Agents of the TSA targeted women for naked body scans? Who would have predicted such a possibility? Everybody with a functioning brain of course. I’m sure there was a conversation that went something like this:

TSA Thug 1: “Check out that hottie. Send her through the scanner, let’s take a look.”

TSA Thug 2: “AWWW YEAH!”

Then they bump fists and send the unsuspecting woman through the scanner. If the agents like what they see they’ll send her through a few more times. These body scanners give viewing TSA thugs all the porn they could hope for without making them sink to the level of using Google to find it.

Klobuchar Brings More Legislation that Ignores True Problems

Amy Klobuchar, one of the two idiot clowns elected to be senators in Minnesota, is presenting an amendment to a transportation bill that will supposedly address the shortage of medicinal drugs in the United States:

The recent shortage of a critical medicine for childhood cancer has prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar to attach her bill on drug shortages to transportation legislation under discussion in the Senate, the lawmaker said on Tuesday.

Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, along with Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a bill that would force drug companies to tell the Food and Drug Administration about looming shortages. The FDA said early notification helped it to prevent 99 shortages in 2011.

This legislation fails to address the actual problem. An interesting fact I came across in a previous, but related, post was the fact that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) put quotes on the amount of drugs pharmaceutical companies can produce. I did some looking around and came across a Department of Justice (DoJ) report [PDF] that flat out stated this fact:

DEA limits the quantity of Schedule I and II controlled substances which may be produced in the United States in any given calendar year. By utilizing available data on sales and inventories of these controlled substances, and taking into account estimates of drug usage provided by the FDA, the DEA establishes annual aggregate production quotas for Schedule I and II controlled substances. The aggregate production quota is allocated among the various manufacturers who are registered to manufacture the specific drug. DEA also allocates the amount of bulk drug which may be procured by those companies which prepare the drug into dosage units.

Klobuchar is forcing pharmaceutical companies to report shortages to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who will, I guess, report the shortage to the DEA who will raise it’s production limit. A simpler solution that would take care of this entire mess in one fell swoop would be to remove the DEA’s quotes on drug production. Instead of attacking the actual problem, the DEA’s power to create artificial shortages, Klobuchar has decided to put more burden on manufacturers.

The war on drugs has far wider implications than illegal drugs. Along with trying to control verboten drugs the DEA also attempts to control legal drugs and part of their scheme involves restricting the quantities that can be produced by pharmaceutical companies. These restrictions are responsible for shortages of other medical drugs yet the government refuses to attack the actual problem, instead they pile more bureaucracy on top of the already thickly layer bureaucracy. It’s not turtles all the way down, it’s bureaucracy all the way down.

Of course Klobuchar is going to be cheered on as a proponent of the people for this amendment because the average American doesn’t understand or care about the actual causes of problems.

Reductio ad Somalium and Roads

Whenever a libertarian argues with a statist either reductio ad Somalium or reductio ad roads comes up. For those who don’t know reductio ad Somalium is akin to the Internets general Godwin’s Law. That is to say when an argument between a libertarian and a statist goes one long enough the likelihood the statist will bring up Somalia approaches one. Reductio ad roads is the same thing except you merely replace the word Somalia with roads.

In the statist’s delusional world Somalia is the unavoidable result of too small or a lack of a state. On top of that statists also believe that it’s impossible for roads to be built or maintained without a state. Following such logic Somalia should be entirely devoid of roads, right? Think about it, Somalia apparently has no government and roads can only be built and maintained by states. Taking a look at Somalia on Google Maps showed me something unexpected… roads. Thinking that Google Maps must be inaccurate I checked Bing Maps, which also displays roads in Somalia. Thinking there must be some kind of corporate conspiracy I decided to check an independent project that claims to be compiling data about roads in Somalia, and surprisingly found the data they obtained wasn’t entirely empty!

What gives? Something fishy is going on. Either Somalia has a state or roads can be built and maintained without a state. Perhaps I’ve found a logical fallacy in statist thinking? I will have to research this more in depth and get back to you guys with my findings.

I’ve Detected a False Dichotomy

In a way you almost have to admire statists. Regardless of how often they are proven wrong they always managed to find some way to make ultimatums that make their opposition look like really bad people. Case in point, the current debate over Internet surveillance laws that is taking place in Canada right now. Opponents of Internet surveillance laws say they will violate the privacy of Canadian citizens while the supporters have said anybody who opposes said laws support child pornography:

But when Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia attacked the Conservatives for “preparing to read Canadians’ emails and track their movements through cellphone signals” – which does appear to be a severe distortion of the bill’s powers – Mr. Toews’s counterattack was fierce.

“As technology evolves, many criminal activities, such as the distribution of child pornography, become much easier,” he told the House. “We are proposing to bring measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide police with the lawful tools that they need.

“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

“Child pornography” is the new say for statists to say, “Shut up slave!” without actually using the word slave (as that word has some negative connotations). Anytime they want to shove a new law down our throats they either claim it’s for the children or to fight terrorism. In this sense you have to give the statists credit for being consistant. While anti-statists find an almost uncountable number of reasons statism is bad the statists only need one; fear. When anti-statists say Internet surveillance is a violation of laws protecting people from unwarranted search and seizure the statist only needs to reply with one of two boogeymen; child pornographers or terrorists (or, theoretically, terrorist child pornographers).

I doubt it needs pointing out but the choice between an Internet free of government snooping and child pornography is a false dichotomy. The Internet is remarkably good at policing itself. When a highly undesirable thing appears on the Internet groups like Anonymous move to attack it.