Month: January 2013

A List of Children Murdered by Drone Strikes Personally Ordered by Obama

Regarding gun control Obama said if it saves one child’s life it’s worth it. This is a very odd thing for Obama to say since he has personally ordered drones strikes that have lead to the death of over 150 children. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism put together a list of names of children killed by drone strikes that Obama admitted to personally ordering:

PAKISTAN
Name | Age | Gender
Noor Aziz | 8 | male
Abdul Wasit | 17 | male
Noor Syed | 8 | male
Wajid Noor | 9 | male
Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male
Ayeesha | 3 | female
Qari Alamzeb | 14| male
Shoaib | 8 | male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male
Tariq Aziz | 16 | male
Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male
Maezol Khan | 8 | female
Nasir Khan | male
Naeem Khan | male
Naeemullah | male
Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male
Azizul Wahab | 15 | male
Fazal Wahab | 16 | male
Ziauddin | 16 | male
Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male
Fazal Hakim | 19 | male
Ilyas | 13 | male
Sohail | 7 | male
Asadullah | 9 | male
khalilullah | 9 | male
Noor Mohammad | 8 | male
Khalid | 12 | male
Saifullah | 9 | male
Mashooq Jan | 15 | male
Nawab | 17 | male
Sultanat Khan | 16 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male
Noor Mohammad | 15 | male
Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male
Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male
Abdullah | 18 | male
Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male
Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male
Shahbuddin | 15 | male
Yahya Khan | 16 |male
Rahatullah |17 | male
Mohammad Salim | 11 | male
Shahjehan | 15 | male
Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male
Bakht Muneer | 14 | male
Numair | 14 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Taseel Khan | 18 | male
Zaheeruddin | 16 | male
Qari Ishaq | 19 | male
Jamshed Khan | 14 | male
Alam Nabi | 11 | male
Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male
Rahmatullah | 14 | male
Abdus Samad | 17 | male
Siraj | 16 | male
Saeedullah | 17 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Salman | 12 | male
Fazal Wahab | 18 | male
Baacha Rahman | 13 | male
Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male
Iftikhar | 17 | male
Inayatullah | 15 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Adnan | 16 | male
Najibullah | 13 | male
Naeemullah | 17 | male
Hizbullah | 10 | male
Kitab Gul | 12 | male
Wilayat Khan | 11 | male
Zabihullah | 16 | male
Shehzad Gul | 11 | male
Shabir | 15 | male
Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male
Shafiullah | 16 | male
Nimatullah | 14 | male
Shakirullah | 16 | male
Talha | 8 | male

YEMEN
Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser | 9 | female
Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 7 | female
Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 5 | female
Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser | 4 | female
Ibrahim Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 13 | male
Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 9 | male
Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | female
Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 3 | female
Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye | 1 | female
Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye | 6 | female
Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | male
Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye | 15 | female
Maryam Hussein Abdullah Awad | 2 | female
Shafiq Hussein Abdullah Awad | 1 | female
Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh | 3 | female
Maha Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 12 | male
Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 9 | female
Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 4 | female
Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 2 | male
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari | 13 | male
Daolah Nasser 10 years | 10 | female
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout | 12 | male
Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki | 16 | male
Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki | 17 | male
Nasser Salim | 19

A tip of the hat goes to Zerg539 for sending me this story via Twitter.

Let this list sink in and then decide for yourself whether Obama gives a damn about the lives of children.

Poor Risk Assessment

Every year hundreds of thousands of people flock to the Minnesota State Fair. One of the biggest attractions of the Fair is the ocean of heart attack inducing deep fried food on sticks. Even though the food at the Fair is likely to take a few years off of your life the primary health concern of fair goers appears to be second hand smoke:

The fair’s board of managers voted to ban smoking in virtually all open-air space on the 320-acre grounds starting with the 2013 Great Minnesota Get-Together. Smoking, already prohibited in fair buildings or in entertainment seating areas such as the bandshell and grandstand, will be restricted to designated outdoor smoking areas.

Risk assessment is hard.

National Day of Civic Hacking

The state has decided to declare June 1st and 2nd as National Day of Civic Hacking:

This summer, on June 1-2, 2013, citizens in cities across the Nation will join together to improve their communities and governments as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans. While civic hacking communities have long worked to improve our country and the world, this summer will mark the first time local developers from across the Nation unite around the shared mission of addressing and solving challenges relevant to OUR blocks, OUR neighborhoods, OUR cities, OUR states, and OUR country.

I’m probably going to surprise you but this is actually an idea I can get behind. Hackers have the means of greatly improving our communities by developing new mechanisms to help individuals bypass the state’s watchful eye. Hidden services, such as Silk Road (if you’re on Tor you can access the site via this link), allow individuals to conduct business without having to concern themselves with taxes, regulations, and laws. If somebody needs some electrical work they could use a hidden service to find people in their community with experience in electrical work and hire them (under the table of course). The same could be done for any good or service, you would be surprised to discover the number of skilled individuals living in your community.

In keeping with the spirit of the day such hidden services can also help improve governments by depriving them of resources and therefore making them either scale back operations (wouldn’t it be nice if your local police department didn’t have a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team standing by to squash any potential dissidence) or increase their rate of expropriation, which would push more people to use state avoiding hidden services. Overall I think National Day of Civic Hacking could be a boon for everybody.

I encourage hackers to spend National Day of Civic Hacking working on projects that help their local communities avoid the tyranny of the state. Even if you don’t have the knowledge to create hidden services you can help the cause by running a Tor relay on your computer. Donating a portion of your bandwidth to help dissidents in your local community and around the world is certainly a good cause.

Governor Dayton Looking to Increase Taxes in Minnesota

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A state spent more money than it expropriated from the people living within its claimed borders. Eventually the state realized it was deeply in debt and had no way to sustain its expenditures at its current rate of expropriation. Faced with a decision, to reduce spending or increase expropriation, the state decided to increase expropriation. Yeah, it’s a story as old as states themselves but like many great stories it continues to be relevant today. Governor Dayton has decided that the best way to get Minnesota out of debt is to increase the state’s rate of expropriation:

He would also increase the cigarette tax by 94 cents a pack, primarily as a way to discourage smoking.

Smokers have been a victim of constantly increasing state expropriation. Through its propaganda machine the state has made smokers into pariahs who receive little or no support from non-smokers. Due to their pariah status smokers make excellent tax victims since nobody is going to come to their defense when the state says the cost of their cigarettes will be increasing.

Dayton, who campaigned in 2010 calling for the state to “tax the rich,” would create a new tax rate of 9.85 percent, to be paid on taxable income above $250,000 for joint filers and above $150,000 for single filers. That would net about $1 billion from 53,000 returns and give the state one of the top five top rates in the country.

Are you a successful entrepreneur? If Dayton gets what he wants, and he most likely will, you will be punished for providing your community with the goods and services they desire. The “rich” (which is an arbitrary term), like smokers, have been a victim of constantly increasing state expropriation. Like it did with smokers, the state has used its propaganda machine to create a rift between the “rich” and everybody else. Few people are willing to stand against increased income taxes so long as it only applies to the “rich” (which is defined by most people as anybody who makes $1 more than they do).

For the first time, Minnesotans would pay sales tax on clothing — items above $100 — and on services like haircuts, auto repairs and legal fees.

Minnesota is an inhospitable wasteland for several months out of the year. During our winters an individual needs to dress in layers. One of those layers, the winter coat, usually costs more than $100. Boots, another article of clothing necessary for withstanding winter temperatures for any length of time, also generally cost more than $100. A sales tax on clothing costing more than $100 is really a tax on survival in this state. I guess it serves us Minnesotans right, living in this climate is rather idiotic and should be punished harshly.

Now that you know what the game is let me tell you how to avoid the game. Start doing all your shopping online. Amazon offers everything you need to survive Minnesota winters and doesn’t collect sales tax. Smokers can buy cigarettes online (I’m not a smoker so I don’t know if that’s a good site, it’s merely an option I came across) and avoid paying individual state sales taxes. These sales tax increases don’t concern them since I do most of my shopping online anyways.

The apparently obvious weakness in shopping online is the threat of a national sales tax. Fortunately that’s a minor problem. Sites like Alibaba allow individuals in other parts of the world to sell to other individuals in other parts of the world. If the United States enacted a national sales tax that would merely mean you would have to buy products from other countries. At one time buying from overseas sources would have been difficult due to shipping but international shipping has becomes so streamlined that it involves, at most, a slight increase in delivery time. My laptop, a MacBook Pro, was shipped directly from Shanghai, China free of charge in four or five (I don’t remember exactly) days.

The Internet is the greatest tool for those wanting to avoid state tyranny. It connects every part of the world with every other part of the world. International borders and, by extension, states have been rendered less and less relevant.

The Slow Death of Intellectual Property

I’ve haven’t had time to write about the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz but his death demonstrated much of what is wrong with business models that rely on intellectual property. Aaron Swartz committed suicide while facing a potential 35 years in prison for the act of “stealing” electronic academic journals for the purpose of making them publicly available, for free, to everybody. I put the term stealing into quotation marks because I don’t believe what Aaron did qualifies as theft. Theft implies that another person was deprived of something. If I steal your car you are deprived of the use of your car. Aaron’s act of “theft” didn’t deprive anybody of those journals as they were still available to subscribers of Journal Storage (JSTOR).

Why does the state enact such harsh punishment for intellectual property violations? Because intellectual property lobbyists have invested a great deal of money in getting strong intellectual property laws enacted and the state takes care of its customers. People seldom stop to consider the fact that the state has customers and most people who consider this fact mistakenly believe that the people, that is to say you and me, are the state’s customers. In reality the state’s customers are those who purchase protection from the state. Lobbyists are in the business of buying such protection. Walt Disney, the Recording Industry Association of American, and the Motion Picture Association of American are examples of the state’s intellectual property customers. They purchase intellectual property laws through campaign contributions, giving former state agents cushy jobs as lobbyists or advisers, and other benefits to those comprising the state. In exchange the state grants those entities mafia-like protection. Anybody caught violating the intellectual property lobbyist’s laws can find themselves the victims of kidnapping, extortion, assault, and even murder. Unfortunately for intellectual property lobbyists their business model, which relies entirely on purchased intellectual property laws, is dying and the Internet is its killer.

In order to succeed a business model must be built around scarce goods. This is why nobody has tried building a business model around selling ice to Eskimos or air. Eskimos are surrounded by ice so they have little incentive to buy it and air is all around us so we have little incentive to buy it. The Internet has made things like music, literature, and movies superabundant, that is to say they are no longer scarce goods. Once a song, book, or movie is posted online it literally becomes infinitely reproducible. Intellectual property lobbyists have tried to create artificial scarcity through the purchase of intellectual property laws but to little avail. Even increasing punishments for violating intellectual properly laws has failed to create the lobbyists’ desired scarcity. The death of intellectual property is inevitable and businesses based on intellectual property will either adapt or die themselves.

Sadly many people fail to see the inevitability of intellectual property’s death so individuals like Aaron Swartz will continue to face the state’s violence for some time. What makes matters more depressing is the fact that intellectual property laws aren’t necessary. Just as the Internet has killed intellectual property it has empowered the producers of art. Bands, authors, and movie producers no longer need the assistance of the record, publishing, and movie industries in order to reach their audiences. With a little additional creativity a band, author, or movie producer can still make money off of their art, they just need to change their business model. Kickstarter is an example of a potential new business model for creative individuals. Once an idea has been made public it becomes superabundant but it remains scarce so long as the originator keeps his or her mouth shut. Consider an author. An author could release a title for free and make any future titles pend on whether or not they receive enough donates from a service such as Kickstarter. The first title would be used to build an audience who would fund future titles. The same business model would work for bands and movie producers. In fact the movie Iron Sky was heavily funded in such a manner.

The sooner businesses relying on intellectual property come to terms with the death of their business models the sooner tragedies like what happened to Aaron Swartz will stop. There is no reason state violence is necessary for creative individuals to make money and the fact that violence is still used in order to profit creative individuals demonstrates an ill in our society.

Not Helping

As usual Ann Coulter, psychotic neocon (but I repeat myself) extraordinaire, isn’t helping:

Ann Coulter is insisting that guns don’t kill people, non-white people kill people.

The conservative columnist on Monday told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the country had a “demographic problem” because “white populations” in the U.S. and Belgium had the same low murder rate.

“As you know, I just got back from England,” Coulter explained. “On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe and, ‘Oh, they’re so low and they have no guns.’ If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium.”

“So, perhaps, it’s not a gun problem, it is a demographic problem, which liberals are the one are pushing, pushing, pushing, ‘Let’s add more [African-American mass murderer] Colin Fergusons and more whoever the [Muslim] guy was who shot up Fort Hood.’ Why are they coming in to begin with?”

Even though gun control has its roots in racism I think it would be wise to divorce the topic of gun control from race. Coulter’s attempt to blame demographics is absurd. Self-defense isn’t about race, religion, or gender. Everybody has the right to defend themselves.

Shootings Seem to be Rampent in Gun-Free Zones

Another shooting happened in another so-called gun-free zone:

Three people were injured as gunfire rang out during an argument at a college in the US state of Texas, say police.

A sheriff’s official said both people involved in the altercation at Lone Star College in the Houston area were wounded and taken to hospital.

A college maintenance man was also injured in the cross-fire.

These events seems to be happening with great frequency as of late. If I were a more paranoid individual I’d swear the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) decided to expand their program to arm dangerous individuals by giving firearms to violent individuals outside of the Mexican drug cartels. In all seriousness though I find it telling that these events continue to occur in state labeled gun-free zones.

The Gun Control Advocates Make Their Move Thursday

It looks like Thursday is the day the gun control advocates in Washington DC are planning to make their move:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office confirmed that she will be introducing in the Senate Thursday a new version of the so-called assault weapon ban. A spokesman said the full text will be released at a press conference on Thursday.

I’m sure the legislation will make for entertaining reading material. In all likelihood Feinstein is planning to go full fascist and declare as many firearms as she thinks she can get away with as verboten devices. Until I read the text of the bill I won’t have much more to say regarding this issue.

Lowering Standards in Public Education

This is unlikely to surprise most of you but fewer and fewer kids leave the state’s K-12 education system with, what I will call, functional literacy. In fact the problem is finally becoming prevalent enough that the state is actually looking to address it:

Fast forward to high school reading today, and you might find that a lot of high school English teachers are identifying with Holden more than their students are identifying with him. Reading scores for American students have dropped dramatically, and the solution could see their world change as well.

“So many kids, often as many as 50 percent, graduate high school … demonstrably not ready for the demands of a first-year college course or job-training program,” says David Coleman, president of the College Board, a nonprofit membership organization that administers standardized tests like the SAT.

When I say the state is moving to address the problem I don’t want to imply that it is trying to determine and address the root cause, that’s not how the state operates. Instead I mean to imply that the state has looked at how it defines functional literacy and is adjusting it, while throwing in a few destructive curriculum changes, so that the numbers appear to be higher without actually fixing the problem:

Coleman is the lead architect of the Common Core Standards Initiative, a sweeping curricula change that integrates nonfiction text into the English program. So where does it leave The Catcher in the Rye and similar literary classics?

That question is one stirring debate over how to integrate nonfiction works into English programs to improve reading scores, while not abandoning the novels that have become the gold standard of high school reading lists.

[…]

Coleman tells weekends on All Things Considered host Jacki Lyden that fiction remains at the heart of English and language arts programs under Common Core, but high-quality literary nonfiction, like the founding documents of the United States, is introduced as well.

In my opinion one of the biggest hurdles to functional literacy is the materials pushed on kids during their K-12 years. Elementary and high schools like to assign kids reading material that is considered classic but that isn’t very useful when kids have no desire to read such works. Instead of encouraging kids to read the state’s education system discourages kids to read by assigning material that most K-12 students find exceptionally boring. I remember the crap we were assigned to read in elementary and high school, none of it appealed to me. Fortunately I had a habit of doing what I wanted instead of what I was told so I read voraciously. For assignments I would, as I assume most kids today are doing, skim just enough material to complete any required test or report or I would forgo reading the material entirely so I could return to reading books I actually cared about (before high school I was reading novels like Jurassic Park and 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Focusing more on nonfiction isn’t going to solve the problem, in fact it may exacerbate it. In order to find things like the founding documents of the United States interesting one must also have enough historical knowledge to put those documents into perspective. Needless to say most state schools fail to teach much in the way of history (and what history they do teach is watered down and entirely boring) so forcing students to read historical material is an exercise in futility. Furthermore the founding documents of the United States are a rather dull read. Most people don’t want to read legal documents such as the United States Constitution. Legal documents lack a story, which requires some kind of conflict. Religions generally teach their laws and doctrines by using parables, which end up being more interesting since they contain story elements such as conflict and character interactions. This was likely done, at least in part, because the writers of religious texts understood that people were usually uninterested in reading and listening to lengthy sterile legal documents. Perhaps it is time we apply that understanding with children today and push them to read fiction instead of nonfiction.

I think the best way to improve functional literacy rates in this country is to introduce a little anarchy into the state’s schools (it’ll never happen unfortunately). Allow students to read material they’re interested in. This doesn’t mean assigning everybody in the class to read Twilight, it means allowing each student to select books they’re personally interested in. If a kid wants to read Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings let him read it an receive due credit instead of forcing To Kill a Mockingbird down their throats.

The Root of Gun Control

Something many gun control advocates are ignorant of is the root of gun control, which is racist in nature. Early gun control laws were enacted to prevent newly freed slaves from acquiring arms and fighting against aggression from organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. These laws persisted into the mid 20th century and prevented Martin Luther Kind Jr. from acquiring a carry permit:

A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.”

As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King’s house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.

At least we can give gun control advocates some credit for overcoming their racist history and finally advocating equal punishment for all individuals. Sadly what they advocate, disarming non-state entities, prevented and, if they have their way, will continue to prevent people such as Martin Luther King Jr. from obtaining the proper means to defend themselves.