Month: June 2014

No Fly List Process Ruled Unconstitutional for Whatever That’s Worth

For whatever it’s worth a federal judge had determined that the process of adding names to the no fly list is unconstitutional:

PORTLAND, Ore. – In a landmark ruling, a federal judge struck down as unconstitutional the government’s procedures for people on the No Fly List to challenge their inclusion. The decision came in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit brought on behalf of 13 Americans who found themselves on the list without any notice, reasons, or meaningful way to get off it.

The judge ordered the government to create a new process that remedies these shortcomings, calling the current process “wholly ineffective” and a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. The ruling also granted a key request in the lawsuit, ordering the government to tell the ACLU’s clients why they are on the No Fly List and give them the opportunity to challenge their inclusion on the list before the judge.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is treating this like a major victory. But anybody who pays attention to this sort of thing knows that the government will just find another way to continue doing what it has been doing. Perhaps it will simply appeal the ruling and move it up until the Supreme Court rules it constitutional. Perhaps it will simply create a secret court, similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, to determine who will be on the list. Perhaps the federal government will simply tell the judge to go fuck himself and not change a damn thing. Either way I highly doubt any actual change will come of this. We’re too much of a totalitarian state for pesky judges to make any effective changes.

On the upside this ruling does give a lot of people a warm and fuzzy feeling inside and that’s worth something.

I’m Boycotting GunBroker

GunBroker has been a useful site. Without it I wouldn’t have my SPAS-12 and accompanying choke tubes. But it is time for me to say farewell to it. As it turns out GunBroker prohibits users from using one of the best tools available for protecting free speech online: Tor:

GunBroker.com is now detecting if users are connecting to them through Virtual Private Networks (VPN), proxy servers or Tor. Users who are detected using these services are being given one warning to stop using these to access the site or have their account terminated.

If your site doesn’t allow users to access it via Tor then you aren’t getting any of my money and I will do what I can to convince other people not to give you money. Protecting free speech online is just as serious as protecting the right to keep and bear arms in my book.

Bypassing Canadian Gun Control Laws

Gun control is such an interesting thing to debate. This is because advocating for gun control is pointless. Laws, being human constructs, will always be ignored, bypasses, and worked around. Take Canada’s gun control laws. While they’re not as draconian as many other nations’ gun laws they are still pretty strict. Fortunately some innovative people have come up with a novel way to get verboten guns into the country, attach them to automobiles going across the Canadian border:

The gun smugglers called him “fool” – one of many Windsorites they used to unwittingly mule firearms over the border.

Buried in volumes of recently released Toronto police documents is the frightening revelation that Windsor gun runners hide firearms and GPS devices in the cars of unsuspecting Canadians to sneak them through customs.

[…]

Police say Porter and the people who worked with him scouted out cars with Ontario licence plates in Michigan parking lots. Once they found suitable vehicles, police said, they would hide guns and GPS devices under the bumpers. Chrysler Pacificas, Dakotas and Jeeps were among the cars they looked for.

Sometimes they would follow the car, watching as it crossed the border. Other times, they would let the GPS lead them to the person’s home.

Speaking from a smuggler’s point of view, this method is pretty low risk. If the guns are discovered your hands remain clean. You may lose the gun but so long as you get enough across to meet your needs you’re victorious. Speaking from an unsuspecting mule’s point of view, this sucks because you’re at risk of being prosecuted under Canada’s bullshit object restriction laws.

But this demonstrates, yet again, why attempting to control objects is a foolish. So long as those verboten objects are in demand some entrepreneur will find a way to fulfill that demand.

Anti-Gun Activists a Such Friendly People

I think my favorite thing about being a gun rights advocate is how friendly, lovable, and peaceful our opponents are. Even though we disagree on the issue of guns we can still debate things in a civil manner and not stoop to death threats. Take Mike Malloy. You may not have heard of him. He’s a nobody with a talk show that has less listeners then my blog has readers. But he’s one classy dude:

I guess what I’ll do if I’m ever in that situation and I see one of these half-witted yahoos walking in with a weapon, high-caliber rifle like that, I’ll just put on a berserk act.I will just start screaming Gun! Gun! Gun! Watch out, everybody hit the deck! Guns! Guns! Everybody! And then dial 911 and I will say, shots fired, which will bring every god-damned cop within 15 miles. And then the half-wits with the long guns are going to panic and they’re going to run out of the store and if that rifle isn’t shouldered properly, the cop is going to take a look at that and put a bullet right in their forehead.

See how wonderful he is? He’s not trying to start a bloodbath or get the police to murder people who disagree with him. Nope. He wants a peaceful world free of guns. Well at least free of guns not being used to murder people he disagrees with. But beyond that he’s one classy dude. And there are many gun control advocates just like him, which is why the gun discussion may be heated at times but it never stoops to threats of violence.

Another GOP Candidate Lost His Muzzle

Oh, look! The GOP stupid train is pulling into station right on time! Yes, yet another GOP candidate lost his muzzle and said something stupid. This time it’s Jody Hice, a Republican candidate from Georgia who really doesn’t like Muslims. And like most people who irrationally hate entire groups of people he has found a way to justify why the state, under its current laws, can persecute them:

Jody Hice, a Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat from Georgia, does not believe that Islam is truly a religion and doesn’t think it should be protected under the First Amendment.

In his book published in 2012, “It’s Now Or Never,” Hice made some anti-Islamic statements, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology,” he wrote. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.”

That sounds a lot like the Catholic Church back in the day. But it’s always fun to see the mental gymnastics people play to justify persecuting people. It does go to show that if somebody wants to persecute somebody bad enough they can find a way to justify it under whatever ideology they’re operating under.

Register for Agorafest 2014

Are in or near Minnesota? If not, are you willing to travel to Minnesota? Do you want to get your counter-economics on? Have you been looking for an event where you can hang out with agorists instead of people who want to vote their way to liberty? If so I have the event for you, Agorafest 2014! That’s right, after last year’s success we’ve decided to host another weekend of telling the state to go fuck itself.

For those who haven’t heard of Agorafest (which is probably a large number of you since last year was the first year) it’s a conference for agorism. Agorism, for those unfamiliar, is a strategy of attaining liberty not by begging our masters (also known as politics) but through counter-economics. In other words it’s a strategy to live freer today by using voluntary cooperation amongst like-minded individuals. You can read all about it in And Agorist Primer [PDF]. Like any good conference, Agorafest will have food and alcohol available. We will also have vendors because counter-economics isn’t much fun if there isn’t, you know, economic activity.

Agorafest 2014 will take place on August 22nd through the 24th at the Villa Maria Retreat in Frontenac, Minnesota. All of the information is available at the registration page. We’re still getting the schedule of events up but we will have a wide selection of counter-economic discussions and workshops just like last year.

Is Your Neighbor a Snitch

There are tradeoffs to anywhere you live. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates. But wealthier neighborhoods tend to have a more insidious problem: snitches. You know the type, a nosy neighbor who calls the city if they notice anything they don’t like about a neighbor’s property. Brian Collins decided to put up one of those adorable little free libraries that you see springing up throughout metropolitan areas. They’re little more than cabinets where people can withdraw and deposit books. Usually they’re based on the honor system where for every book you take you leave one in its place. But the city recently caught wind of Mr. Collins’ free library and told him that it had to go:

LEAWOOD, KS (KCTV) – Can a library be illegal? The City of Leawood says yes.

Little Free Libraries are popping up across the metro. They allow book lovers to borrow and share their favorite books whenever they want.

“We came back to find a letter from the code enforcement telling us it was an illegal dwelling or structure,” Brian Collins said.

Whenever city officials move in on little things like this it’s always in response from a neighborhood snitch. Can you spot the snitch in this story? There he is:

Not everyone thinks it’s fun. Another neighbor told KCTV5 off camera he’s glad the city is making Collins remove the library because he believes it’s an eyesore for the neighborhood.

And like any neighborhood snitch he’s too much of a chickenshit to reveal his identity. As the popular saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice thing. These free libraries are a neat idea that I believe promote literacy. They offer a free, convenient way for people in a neighborhood to share books. But every neighborhood has that one asshole who calls the city whenever he sees something he doesn’t expressly approve of, regardless of how petty his complaint is.

Hillary is Turning Out to Be the Ideal Republican Candidate

I feel bad for whoever gets the Republican Party presidential nomination next election. Not only will they have the misfortune of being the nominee for the more incompetent of the two parties but they will most likely be going up against the perfect Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton. Hillary has proven to be the neocon’s neocon. She revels in killing leaders of countries in the Middle East, has a legacy of war mongering, can’t managed finances, and is extremely insensitive regarding rape:

Hillary Clinton’s successful 1975 legal defense of an accused rapist has surfaced again with the victim, angered over a tape of Clinton chuckling over her courtroom tactics in the case, lashing out at the potential Democratic presidential candidate.

“Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” the victim told the Daily Beast in an emotional interview published today. The woman said that if she saw Clinton today she would say, “I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I heard you on tape laughing.”

The name of the woman, who is now 52, was withheld for privacy reasons. She decided to speak out after hearing never-before-heard audio tapes released by the Washington Free Beacon earlier this week of Hillary Clinton talking about the trial. In the recordings, dubbed the “Hillary Tapes,” Clinton is heard laughing as she describes how she succeeded at getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was guilty.

“He took a lie-detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton said about her client on the tapes, which were initially recorded, but never used, in the early 1980s.

Good luck finding a more perfect neocon, Republican Party.

But what will make this race even more interesting than the fact that the Democratic Party will almost certainly field a Republican candidate is how the social justice warriors will respond to this. Obviously the social justice warriors want a woman president, which will incline them to support Hillary. But they’re also against, what they call, the rape culture. I’m not scholar on rape culture but I would imagine getting a rapist off on a lighter sentence would certainly qualify. So what will the social justice warriors choose? Will they opt to support Hillary because they want a woman president or will they opt to oppose Hillary because she promoted the rape culture? Only time will tell.

Monday Metal: Message From Baghdad by Acrassicauda

With the clusterfuck going down in Iraq this is as good of time as any to post some Iraqi metal. This week we’re listening to a song by Acrassicauda, a band that was actually founded under and played during Saddam’s regime. From what I have gathered the band had to flee Iraq after the regime changed because the new more religious regime felt as though the band’s music was a little too… satanic panic for its taste. The band now lives in New York, which is almost as much of a shithole as Iraq (I kid, I kid):