Month: April 2013

Minnesota Gun Rights Battle Round Two

Several things are certain in life. Water will always be wet, fire will always be hot, and politicians, if you let them, will always try to take more power from you and transfer it to themselves. After the battle here in Minnesota for gun rights concluded with no real changes a couple of politicians have decided to restart their holy crusade:

MINNEAPOLIS — Some Minnesota lawmakers are still hoping to pass tougher gun laws this session, despite a defeat for gun control advocates earlier this week in Washington.

The two main sponsors of gun control legislation in the House and Senate, Rep. Michael Paymar and Sen. Ron Latz, say they are disappointed that a U.S. Senate effort to extend background checks was recently voted down.

The two Democrats are pushing for legislation that would not only increase background checks, but would also patch holes in the state’s background check system and add more crimes to the list of offenses that make a person ineligible to possess a firearm.

This is a battle that will continue until the politicians know that we gun owners will no longer comply with the state. So long as we show a willingness to play their game and obey their decrees they will believe they hold power over us. I’m sure calls will go out for Minnesota gun owners to show up to hearing and make their presence known and all that jazz that didn’t even win us half a year of reprieve. You can do that if you want but I urge you to take a different route. Instead of playing their game by their rules I would urge Minnesota gun owners to play a different game and make it very clear that all new gun control law will be openly disobeyed. Only through massive acts of civil disobedience will we be able to demonstrate the state’s lack of power and only through such demonstration will we be able to convince them to stop pushing for gun control less the general populace realize that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes and the entire power structure of the state collapses.

The Friendly Face of Fascism

Shutting down a large section of a city so the police can hunt for one man is the definition of a police state. However, many people seem to think the event that occurred in Boston didn’t qualify as a police state action because it happened here in America. This is the land of the free after all. In fact the tried and true way of demonstrating facts on the Internet, memes, are now being used to demonstrate the event in Boston wasn’t tyranny. Feast your eyes on the following meme:

Since the police were being nice and helping out a family in need they obviously weren’t being tyrannical, right? Let’s set aside the fact that the police officer was only alleviating a problem that he and his fellows created and look a the tactics used by two tyrannical regimes. Tyrants have a long history of providing goods and services to people in need in order to buy their loyalty.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazis, established an organization in 1933 called the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare (NSV) to provide welfare to those in need. As you can guess, the purpose of the NSV was to provide financial services to poor families, daycare centers for working families, and schools for students.

Today Golden Dawn, Greece’s main fascist party, has been opening soup kitchens to feed the hungry:

Far-right Parliament party Golden Dawn started soup kitchens providing hundreds of people with food in Ilion, Athens and other areas. The first day the kitchen soups were initiated, masses marched to the area demonstrating their unemployment cards or papers certificating their having large-families.

As with any fascist organization Golden Dawn has gone the extra mile to win the admiration of the people. Not only are they opening soup kitchens but they’re doing it with state money and purchasing from Greek producers:

Each item in the food supply was bought from state money the party received in proportion to the acquired parliamentary seats (according to the legal framework for elected parties). Everything was bought from Greek firms and Greek producers exclusively. In a symbolic show, in this way, Golden Dawn MPs ‘return’ the Greek people the money they gave them with their vote.

Providing goods and services to people is nothing new for fascism, it’s actually one of the philosophy’s favorite tactics. Most people aren’t willing to accept a totalitarian regime unless there is something in it for them. Usually these regimes promise food, shelter, and protection to everybody or a subset of people in a society. At first these regimes may try to deliver on those promises but they eventually move away from such tactics once their power is cemented.

A police officer bringing milk to a family is not a demonstration that Boston wasn’t suffering under a fascist-esque regime. Quite the opposite is true. Seeing the police officer delivering milk demonstrates that the police were actively buying the obedience and loyalty of the people in the affected area. This is how and why tyranny works. It starts off nice. People receive food, shelter, and clothing from the tyrants and once everybody has rolled over the real pain begins. Don’t let little memes such as the one above trick you into thinking the event in Boston was anything other than a demonstration of the police state we live under here in the United States.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your King

Politicians are notorious liars, cheaters, and thieves. However once in a great while you catch one of these vile creatures being honest about how they feel. Most of the time these brief glimpses of honesty result in shock and disgust from the general populace, even though most of them seem to realize what manner of beast politicians are. Tommy Tucker, a congress critter from North Carolina, recently expressed his personal beliefs to the public:

Sen. Tommy Tucker of Waxhaw said a mouthful with just 13 words on Tuesday.

“I am the senator. You are the citizen. You need to be quiet.”

It was no coincidence that Tucker’s silencing of an N.C. newspaper publisher – heard by at least three people who were there – came just after he railroaded a bill through his committee that would let government operate in more secrecy.

Mr. Tucker is the manner lord and your are but mere serfs. Shut your filthy holes before he has you drug out to the public square and hanged. While the views expressed by Mr. Tucker may seem odd coming from a so-called representative they are most likely shared with most of his cohorts. One need only look at the laws being passed in the United States to see how the political body views non-state agents. It seems that every law passed expands the state’s power in some manner and restricts the legal actions available to non-state agents. If anything Mr. Tucker should be thanked for his willingness to be honest. Were more politicians honest about their beliefs it’s likely that things in this country would begin to change for the better.

Bad People Do Bad Things Regardless of the Law

Gun control laws are justified by making society safer. While the concept sounds good on paper in practice is don’t work. The problem comes from the fact that bad people will do bad things. People willing to commit murder are unlikely to be deterred by a law prohibiting them from owning firearms. That’s why this news about the suspected perpetrators of the Boston bombing doesn’t surprise me:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts police official say the brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon before having shootouts with authorities didn’t have gun permits.

If these people were, in fact, the bombers then it should come as no surprise that they were also in possession of firearms. A person willing to detonate two bombs at a large sporting event isn’t going to have a moral issue with acquiring a firearm illegally. The general population of the United States seems to have been suckered into believing that laws will prevent evil men from conducting evil. In reality laws are hindrances only to those willing to obey them. Passing laws against owning equipment after somebody commits a heinous act with that equipment is a worthless gesture, especially when the act itself was already illegal.

Monday Metal: Ravenlord by Mystic Prophecy

To start this Monday off I have a song from German power metal band Mystic Prophecy. I hadn’t heard of Mystic Prophecy until last night. From what I’ve heard of theirs so far I’m impressed. The band does a good job of blending many of the heavier elements found in American power metal with the cleaner melodies frequently exhibited in European power metal (I tend to prefer European power metal so it’s interesting to find bands that blend to two well):

Collective Punishment Rears its Ugly Head

News outlets are announcing that the suspects in the Boston bombing are Muslims from Chechnya. As if on cue there are now calls going out to kill all Muslims and/or Chechens. In fact many people are bringing up the Chechnya’s violent history and using Besland school crisis as evidence that Chechens are evil people. People are also pointing out the usual fear mongering about Muslims.

While these accusations concern me in general, they really concern them when they’re being made by members of the gun rights community. If any group of people understood the problems inherent in collective punishment I would think it would be a group that becomes the subject of collective punishment whenever a shooting occurs. Apparently not. I don’t even have enough fingers to count the number of instances I’ve seen where a member of the gun rights community has either made mention of slaughtering the Muslims, Chechens, or everybody living in the Middle East.

I don’t even have words to properly express my disgust. For fuck’s sake people, we should understand that two individuals from a country that has 1,268,989 people doesn’t even make for a correlation, let along a case. The only people who are responsible for the bombing in Boston are the people who detonated the bombs.

Why Terrorism Works

Feat your eyes on the following picture lifted from the BBC’s story covering the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

That picture shows very succinctly why terrorism works. For the cost of some explosives and a couple of pressure cookers two individuals have managed to cost the state what must be approaching millions of dollars. The streets of Boston are crawling with expensive police officers, wearing expensive armor, driving expensive armored personnel carriers, and carrying expensive weaponry.

Terrorism works because it exploits basic economics. For very little cost a handful of individuals can excise a heavy toll from the state. Warfare, ultimately, is a competition of economies. The loser of a war is the one who no longer has resources to continue. They lose because they run out of soldiers, guns, ammunition, food, medical supplies, effective countermeasures against the other army’s weapons, etc. Fourth generation warfare tactics, such as terrorism, work because they’re too expensive to counter militarily.

An improvised explosive device, like the bombs used in Boston, can injure and kill multiple people with ease. When killing a soldier you not only kill a person but you also wipe out the resources poured into his training and unrecoverable equipment. If you injure a soldier you not only remove a fighter off from the field, possibly permanently, but you also cost his military resources in medical care. Killing an innocent bystander can also cost the other military morale. Vietnam was an example of this. By killing Vietnamese civilians the United States military generated a great deal of hatred back home and that hatred, often aimed at soldiers, eroded the morale of fighting men.

The Central Banks are Flying Blind

Are you ready for some surprising news? You may want to sit down for this. As it turns out, the central banks haven’t a clue as to what they’re doing:

Growing concern at the International Monetary Fund over the long-term side-effects of interest rates close to zero came as some of the leading figures in central banking conceded they were flying blind when steering their economies.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, the former member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, captured the mood at the IMF’s spring meeting, saying: “We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.”

But the best part of the article the following paragraph:

It is troubling for monetary policy experts that their crisis-fighting tools – rates stuck at zero, money printing operations to bring down longer-term interest rates and encourage private sector spending, and efforts to calm financial market fears – might have nasty side-effects.

Who would have thought that artificially lowering interest rates to nothing, printing billions upon billions of dollars, and sucking people into malinvestment would have any harmful side-effects? Just everybody with an elementary school understanding of basic economics. Unfortunately the politicians decided that Keynes’s mysticism sounded much better than Mises’s deductive logic, which isn’t surprising since Keynes’s mysticism basically said anything the state does to bolster the economy is good whereas Mises said the state should take an entirely hands off approach. Needless to say the state liked the idea of monopolizing the monetary system and it has been downhill ever since.

Our Nation of Laws

My favorite thing about living in a nation of laws is that we have so many laws that our overlords can do whatever they want. The gun control bill has been pulled by Mr. Reid but Mr. Obama is going to use his great powers as the king of the Executive Branch to implement gun control:

On a conference call with “stakeholders,” Biden told gun control advocates that the fight is not over and that eventual action on gun control will come. Press were not invited to the conference call; a participant provided BuzzFeed with access.

“Look, I know you’re going to say that I’m just being an optimist and I’m trying to put a good face on this. But, you know, I’ve been around here a long time and we’ve already done, because of you, some really good things,” Biden said. “Number one, the president is already lining up some additional executive actions he’s going to be taking later this week.”

After the Newtown shootings, Obama took a number of executive actions to expand research into gun violence and other areas favored by the gun control community. He took the actions without congressional approval, leading to outrage by some conservatives.

The system works like a well oiled machine. When one branch of the state fails to accomplish something another branch moves in. The best part is that any action Obama takes will be legal until either Congress says no (which will never happen, Congress has been ceding power to the President since the start of this country) or the Nazgûl in the Supreme Court rule otherwise (and they probably won’t hear the case). Statism always seems like such a good idea until the people in power inevitably find out they have the power to do whatever they want.