Month: October 2012

Pure Awesome on Your Wrist

The things watchmakers can do has always amazed me. Using tiny sprints, gears, jewels, and miscellaneous other parts watchmakers are able to make machines that keep accurate time. Most watches are fairly insignificant devices, displaying the time and date. Some watches, such as the Aeternitas Mega 4, are marvels of horology. The Mega 4 is a purely mechanical watch containing 1,483 moving parts, support for two timezones, and an impressive prepetual calendar mechanism:

The eternal calendar of the Franck Muller Watchland workshops is different from any traditional perpetual calendar in that it takes into account the rule governing the Gregorian calendar stating that all century years not divisible by 400 are common years and not leap years.

The eternal calendar follows a cycle of 1’000 years (renewable to infinity) thanks to two additional sets of wheels:

The first set of wheels, comprising a wheel of 10 years, a wheel of 100 years and a wheel of 1’000 years, allows for the display of a cycle of 1’000 years.

The second set of wheels was designed for the setting, through the use of cams, of the skipping of the leap years three times in a row every 100 years and its re-establishment the fourth time.

A feature set like this on an electronic quartz watch wouldn’t be very impressive but the fact this watch is mechanical demonstrates the sheer skill some horologists have.

Illegal Attempted Criminal Behavior

You know the police state is in full swing when attempted criminal acts are illegal:

A 29-year-old Geneva man is facing charges after 10 pounds of marijuana was found inside a package.

Angnem Green of Geneva is charged with attempted criminal possession of marijuana, a felony.

Mind you that the man isn’t being charged with possession but attempted possession of marijuana. Shouldn’t the man actually have to have possession of an illicit substance before he’s charged with a crime? I guess people are easier to control if you make everything illegal.

Equality, the Lowest Common Denominator

Modern society has become obsessed with the idea of equality. Public schools have especially become proponents of making everybody equal, even if it means making others miserable:

A talented head cook at a school in central Sweden has been told to stop baking fresh bread and to cut back on her wide-ranging veggie buffets because it was unfair that students at other schools didn’t have access to the unusually tasty offerings.

What’s next? Will a high school football team with a great quarterback be forced to remove him from the team to ensure teams with poor players can compete equally? Reality doesn’t concern itself with what’s fair. Some people are simply luckier than others and nothing can be done to correct that. While many children are born into poor families in third world countries some are fortunate and born into wealthy families. Most children are both with good health but some are unfortunate and have horrible health issues starting at birth. When we obsess over perfect equality or fairness we are effectively saying we must bring everybody down to the lowest common denominator, which will require lowering the standard of living for a huge number of people.

Instead of punishing those with advantages we should be striving to boost everybody’s quality of living to match those of the more fortunate.

Who Will Protect the Poor

When discussing anarchy it’s inevitable that somebody will make some snide comment about protecting the poor. In the eye’s of a statist the state protects the poor but in a stateless society the poor would go without protection because they would be unable to afford protection services. This argument is absurd though because it relies on the false premise that the state actually protects the poor, it doesn’t:

Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.

After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.

In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.

But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder.

Instead of protecting the poor the state inflicts harm on them. Many times throughout history the poor have been used a guinea pigs by states for many gruesome experiment. Let’s not forget the Tuskegee syphilis experiment:

The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama; 400 who had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 200 without the disease. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.

We should also remember when the United States government experimented on poor college students without their consent:

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal[1] human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[2] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[3][4][5][6] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people’s individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[7]

These are just a tiny handful of examples. To claim that the state protects the poor is absurd. In fact the poor are the favored prey of the state. If you want to protect the poor you should detest the state.

Making Up Propaganda

The state has a habit of making up stories in order to make itself appear necessary and benevolent. For example the United States government has spend untold amounts of money convincing the people living within its claimed territory that certain drugs are bad. Needless to say the same government also like to brag about drug busts because it believes such busts will convince the people of the government’s necessity. Sometimes the state gets caught making up such propaganda and it’s usually quick to deny such allegations, even when those allegations are undeniable:

[P]olice still won’t admit the plants they seized in what was supposedly the biggest outdoor marijuana bust in Lethbridge history are plain old flowers — daisies, to be precise.

All police will concede at this point is the 1,624 plants torn from a suburban Lethbridge garden on July 30 isn’t marijuana, as first claimed after a phalanx of police marched in and starting plucking.

Daisies aren’t marijuana but the state isn’t going to admit that anytime soon.

Jeffery Tucker on the Presidential Debate

You have to love Jeffery Tucker, the man is a wordsmith. His quote on Wednesday’s presidential debate summed up the political system in this country perfectly:

Romney and Obama are both extraordinarily talented and smart. That’s what it takes to pull off the world’s biggest hoax. In their public debates, they must shamelessly play along with the expectation that they are masterminds of history’s largest and most expansive government with thousands of departments, millions and millions of regulations, astonishingly complex networks of graft and corruption, and legacy content dating back more then a century, and, further, claim — with a straight face — that their personal “vision” can encompass and control the whole apparatus, and, by extension, the nation and the world. They must pull off this ostentatious and wildly implausible display of the pretense of knowledge with the look and feel of genuine conviction. Anyone who can do this has to be pathological, if he believes what he is saying, or duplicitous to an extent that vastly exceeds the human norm. It’s all mightily impressive, so much so that the entire show could and should be moved to Broadway as a profitable venture. In that way, it could become consumer-pleasing entertainment rather persist in what it actually is: the biggest threat to peace, prosperity, and freedom in the world today.

There really isn’t much else to say on the subject.

No Win Situations

Statists would have you believe that there is no way to not consent to the state. As Herbert Spencer pointed out long ago in his book The Right to Ignore the State, there is no way to argue against the state according to advocates of statism:

In affirming that a man may not be taxed unless he has directly or indirectly given his consent, it affirms that he may refuse to be so taxed; and to refuse to be taxed is to cut all connection with the State. Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general, one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to every thing his representative may do, when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him; and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected some one holding opposite views—what then? The reply will probably be that by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said “Yes,” whether he said “No,” or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine, this.

If you vote for the man who becomes president statists will claim you’ve consented to everything the president does for the duration of his term. If you vote for a man who doesn’t become president statists will claim you’re still consented to the system because you participated by voting. Finally, if you don’t vote for a presidential candidate statists will claim you have no right to complain because you didn’t attempt to get somebody else into office.

Statists have attempted to shield themselves from any debate but claiming everybody consents to the state whether they vote or not. One is generally considered the loser of an argument if they have to resort to claiming it’s impossible to disagree with them.

Calling for Unrelated Gun Control Schemes

While gun control advocates confuse me in general this story has given me a major headache:

The ease of stockpiling ammunition once again became apparent after police discovered that the perpetrator of one of the deadliest mass shootings in Minnesota history had packaging for 10,000 rounds of ammunition in his south Minneapolis home.

Last Thursday, Andrew J. Engeldinger had a Glock 9-millimeter handgun, two 15-round magazines and several loose rounds when he killed four co-workers, a UPS man and himself after being fired from Accent Signage Systems. In addition to the ammunition shipping boxes, police found a second Glock 9mm handgun in his house.

Let me get this straight, Engeldinger had no more than 30-some rounds of ammunition when he shot up Accent Signage so gun control advocates are now calling to control large lots of ammunition purchases? The man had less than a box of 9mm ammunition on his person. Whatever stockpile he had at home is entirely irrelevant because he didn’t use it in commission of his crime. To use the often-beloved car analogy this would be like demanding stricter controls on the number of automobiles an individual can purchase after a getaway driver for a bank robbery was found to own 12 vehicles.

I’m glad we have people like Andrew Rothman in this state raising these exact questions:

Andrew Rothman, vice president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, said it’s not uncommon for people to make bulk purchases to guard against changes in gun laws and increases in ammunition prices in recent years.

“The shooter probably used 10 or 20 rounds of ammunition [in the attack] — is it really relevant how many rounds he had at home?” Rothman said.

Notice the stark difference between gun rights advocates and gun control advocates in this story? Gun control advocates are striving to find something to further restrict while gun rights advocates are asking what relevance the amount of ammunition owned by the shooter had to do with the shooting. I think this is why our society has slowly turned away from supporting stricter gun control, the people advocating such things fail to make logical arguments.

Those calling for ammunition controls have also failed to explain what good such controls would do. A person is limited in the amount of ammunition they can use in a crime. First of all ammunition isn’t weightless so the amount of can carry on their person is limited to the physical strength of the individual in question. Second of all a person can only operate a fixed number of firearms at the same time (two, if they’re operating a handgun in each hand) so the amount they can fire is limited by human anatomy. The story mentioned that controlling ammunition could give police an indicator that an individual is planning to do something wrong but they would be forced to interview every competitive shooter in the state (we go through a lot of ammunition). They would also be forced to interview ever person purchasing for a group buy or simply stockpiling ammunition because they found a really good sale. In other words the police would be forced to sink their time into countless wasted interviews. It would accomplish nothing besides wasting everybody’s time.

We should also consider the absurdity of controlling ammunition. Ammunition isn’t complicated to make, in fact there are reloading presses that allow you to make great quantities of ammunition quickly. If somebody is unable to purchase 10,000 rounds of ammunition they will simply make it or buy it from somebody who does make it (what a great agorist opportunity).

There is no logic in gun control and even less in ammunition control.

What if Gary Johnson Won

Yesterday the Republican and Democratic candidates had their first presidential debate. While I didn’t watch the debate I’m assuming it was a publicly broadcasted circle jerk where both candidates refused to say anything truly critical of the other while pretending some iota of difference exists between them (I feel this assumption is safe based on previous presidential debates and both candidates’ voting records). This is the problem with presidential debates, they’re predictable and boring. Many people are being quick to point out that these debates could be made much more interesting if third party candidates were allowed to participate. Unfortunately those candidates aren’t allowed to participate in the debates unless they reach 15% in a series of polls (and if they do manage to get close the Commission of Presidential Debates will surely raise the required percentage).

One of the more notable movements regarding third party candidates are Gary Johnson’s supporters. They’ve been demanding Johnson be allowed to participate in the debates, going so far as to support the lawsuit brought against the commission by Johnson’s campaign. Johnson’s supporters believe that participation in these debates will allow Johnson to win the presidential election (or, at least, help the Libertarian Party achieve victory in a future election). This raises an interesting question, what would happen if Johnson won the election?

In our system of checks and balances Johnson’s victory would be entirely symbolic. Yes we would have a third party president but we would still have a Congress controlled by the Republicans and Democrats. As it currently stands the system of checks and balances doesn’t check or balance anything. Congress isn’t motivated to control the president and the president isn’t motivated to control Congress. The Supreme Court, which is composed of judges appointed by members of the two major parties, has been more than happy to further the statist agenda through its rulings. Our state is one big happy family. Each of the branches helps out the others because they’re controlled by the same people.

Johnson’s victory would throw a monkey wrench into the current state circle jerk. While that in of itself sounds hilarious it would effectively change nothing. Once the circle jerk is broken you can guarantee that the legislative and judicial branches of the state will use every check and balance at their disposal to control Johnson. Congress will suddenly question executive orders, challenge Supreme Court nominations, and probably go so far as to actually declare wars to prevent Johnson from brining the troops home (then they would probably move to impeach him if he still ordered the troops to return, claiming he is derelict in his duties as command-in-chief). You can also guarantee that Congress will call for impeachment hearings the second Johnson sliped up in any way.

Although people are often quick to point out the checks and balances supposedly designed into our federal government as a tool against tyranny they seem to be oblivious of the fact that such tools aren’t effective if they’re all controlled by the same statists. Checks and balances only work if each involved entity actually desires to control the other involved entities. If the legislative branch wants to control the executive branch they can but if they don’t want to the executive branch remains free to do whatever it please. The Republicans and Democrats have developed an understanding with one another. Neither party will throw up any actual resistance against the other so long as the favor is returned. The second a third party gets into a position of power both major parties will work together to check and balance that outsider into ineffectiveness.