No Honor Among Thieves

State informants are some of the lowest of the low. Before becoming informants many are participants in crime rings (real crime rings, not anti-state activists). After becoming informants they continues their participation in their crime rings and they snitch on their fellows. Sometimes this cycle of subterfuge leads to hilarity:

For much of 2011, Icelandic then-teenager and self-described hacker Sigurdur Thordarson worked as both a WikiLeaks volunteer and an FBI informant.

[…]

In an instant message conversation with Thordarson Thursday, I asked him what he might have given to the FBI that could be relevant to its investigation, and he responded immediately with a log of an instant message conversation between himself and the member of the LulzSec hacker group known as Sabu, which he says he gave to the FBI and which he claims shows “that information was passed on from LulzSec that later got published by WikiLeaks.” Thordarson told me he believes the log supports a “conspiracy” charge against Julian Assange or others in WikiLeaks.

[…]

More interesting, or at least more humorous, is the fact that the chat log represents a conversation between two FBI informants, both of whom seem to be trying to lure the other into providing evidence they can turn over to their law enforcement handlers–or even into a meeting that could lead to the other’s arrest. Sabu, also known as Hector Xavier Monsegur, had agreed to work as an FBI mole within LulzSec months before his conversation with Thordarson.

It’s always nice to see informants wasting their energy on trying to turn in fellow informants. There truly is no honor among thieves.

Obama the Jackass

Obama is proving to be one of the biggest jackasses in presidential history (and that’s quite an accomplishment when you look at the other presidents this country has suffered). Take the speech he recently made in Johannesburg, South Africa. During the speech Obama stated:

“Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy,” Obama said.

Translation: Unless we find a new way of producing energy the people of Africa are just going to have to suffer toils that today are seldom faced by their American and European brethren.

This is another one of those “for me, not thee” statements. Obama effectively told the people of South Africa that they can’t enjoy the same standards of living as Western civilizations because if they do the world will literally end. If Obama is the spokesperson for the United States it’s no surprise that a good chunk of the world hates us.

More Information Released About the NSA’s PRISM Program

The Washington Post has released more slides about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program. When news of PRISM first broke many of the companies listed in the initially released slides, including Facebook and Apple, claimed they weren’t actively participating in any such program. The newly released slides refutes those refutations. According to those slides the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has hardware located on the premises of PRISM participants:

The FBI uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA.

PRISM simply accesses those FBI systems. In other words, PRISM participants can claim to not be participating in the program because the program is actually querying FBI systems. Likewise, the NSA can claim they have no direct access to PRISM participant servers. It’s a wonderful web of denial that the state has managed to setup.

The FDA Demonstrates Its Incompetence Again

In order to sell pharmaceuticals in the United States they must first be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Why does the state get a monopoly on determining whether or not a drug is safe? Because many people have been suckered into the belief that the state is some kind of egalitarian entity that is beyond corruption or mistake, unlike private approval agencies such as Underwriters Laboratories (UL). However, the FDA has a long history of failures. Its most recent failure demonstrates the danger of granting any organization a monopoly on assessing the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceuticals:

The FDA announced last week that the 300mg generic version of Wellbutrin XL manufactured by Impax Laboratories and marketed by Teva Pharmaceuticals was being recalled because it did not work. And this wasn’t just a problem with one batch – this is a problem that has been going on with this particular drug for four or five years, and the FDA did everything it could to ignore it.

The FDA apparently approved this drug – and others like it – without testing it. The FDA just assumed if one dosage strength the drug companies submitted for approval works, then the other higher dosages work fine also. With this generic, American consumers became the FDA’s guinea pigs to see if the FDA’s assumption was right. It wasn’t.

Why would an organization tasked with assessing whether or not drugs are safe and effective fail to test higher dosages of previously approved drugs? Because the organization has a legal monopoly on therefore knows no consequence will befall it for failing in its assigned task.

For a non-state approval organization reputation is everything. UL, for example, has an invested interest in testing every product before granting approval because failing to do so could harm its reputation. An approval organization that has a poor reputation isn’t going to be relied on by anybody. The FDA, and other government created monopolies, face no risks because their approval can be mandated by law.

Michael Bloomberg’s Brand of Racism

Michael Bloomberg recently displayed is more, shall we say, colorful side when he complained that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was stopping too many white people and not enough minorities. No, I’m not making this up:

NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday that police “disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little” as compared to murder suspects’ descriptions, sparking criticism from activists and some politicians in a city that has been immersed in a debate about law enforcement and discrimination.

Thanks to a previous lawsuit the NYPD was forced to release its numbers for its “stop and frisk” program. As it turns out many precincts were focusing almost exclusively on minority groups. Of all the persons stopped and frisked by the 73rd precinct, 98% were either Black of Hispanic.

I guess Bloomberg wants a city where minorities are stopped exclusively.