Month: June 2014

The GOP Stupid Train; The Only Train in America the Run On Time

Will you look at the time, it’s almost Republican Candidate Says Something Stupid O’clock! Oh, and here’s the GOP stupid train right on time:

This week, an Oklahoma magazine discovered that last summer, Tea Party state House candidate Scott Esk endorsed stoning gay people to death: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” he said in a Facebook post. Esk went on to add nuance to his position:

That [stoning gay people to death] goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.

If you go to the source link you will see that this isn’t one of those instances where Slate took something a GOP candidate said way out of context. No. Mr. Esk actually said this shit! And then he calls himself largely libertarian.

you-keep-using-that-word

But this is par for the course. The Republican Party has a long history of candidates who say really stupid shit in public.

Check Your Gun Control Privilege

If you can’t beat them, join them. The social justice crowd spends a lot of time talking about privilege. What started out as valid point, that is some individual in society do enjoy privileges over others (for example, as a white male I’m less likely to be the target of police brutality), has become a mechanism to silence any and all opposition. If you don’t agree with somebody you are automatically accused of being privileged and therefore are no longer allowed to have an opinion (which, in my book, would mean the other person has an opinion privilege).

As this mess has gotten increasingly absurd I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible. But the more I think about it the more I realize that gun control is a form of privilege. Specifically it’s something that only those who the social justice crowd traditionally label as privileged can enjoy.

Consider Michael Bloomberg. He’s arguably the most influential advocate of gun control in modern times. Granted it’s pretty easy to be the most influential advocate of gun control when you’re a billionaire and can personally fund several gun control advocacy groups. But those billions of dollars allow him to fund something else: armed body guards. Bloomberg even has enough cash to pay for armed body guards for his fellow gun control advocates.

Gun control, as the name implies, is about controlling who can have access to firearms. One question that should always be asked when the topic of gun control comes up is who gets to decide who can own a gun. The answer is always the state. And who makes up the state? A president who enjoys a lifetime of Secret Service protection and millionaire white males. In other words most of the people deciding who can have a gun are the very people most social justice advocates point out as being privileged.

So gun control is great if you’re on the top of society. It just sucks if you’re not. Unless the state has deemed you worthy of possessing a firearm or can afford to hire people who have been deemed worthy to shadow you 24/7 you’re mostly reliant on the police for protection. That’s not a good position to be in as police response times increase. And if you live in poorer neighborhoods, places where people arguably need protection the most, you’re going to suffer even longer response times. The further you are from the top the longer it will take to get state protection, if you get it at all.

This brings me to the main point of this post. Gun control works for those who social justice advocates consider privileged because they control who can possess guns and can afford body guards. The rest of us are more or less on our own. Sure we’re given access to police officers who may respond to our call for help if they’re not too busy, tired, or hungry. But if you need immediate defense you’re screwed.

There are bad people in this world, which is unfortunate. But so long as those people exist the need for self-defense will likewise exist. Whether you like guns or not you cannot argue against them being effective tools for self-defense. They’re equalizers that render physical ability and skill mostly irrelevant. A woman bound to a wheelchair can effectively use a gun to defend herself against an athletic male who means her arm. An African-American male can effectively use a gun to defend himself against an armed police officer who is attempting to brutalize him. Any social, physical, racial, or gender privileges an attacker may enjoy are meaningless when his or her target has access to a gun for self-defense. Even targets suffering from most physical disabilities can render their attacker’s ableism irrelevant.

In the end it is the people who social justice advocates label as privileged thate are the primarily advocates of gun control. They are the ones who can decide who can have a gun. They are the ones who can afford armed body guards. They are the ones who can live under gun control without concern.

There Hasn’t Been 74 School Shootings

Advocates for gun control wouldn’t irritate me so much if they stuck to the truth. Granted if they did that they wouldn’t have a case for gun control but that’s another story for another time. One of Michael Bloomberg’s shell corporations, Everytown for Gun Safety, released a map that showed that 74 school shootings have occurred since the one in Newtown:

Tuesday’s school shooting in Oregon is at least the 74th instance of shots being fired on school grounds or in school buildings since the late-2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., according to a list maintained by the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for policies it believes limit gun violence.

The problem is the list is a lie:

Charles Johnson, a journalist and writer, started sorting through the list Everytown published. He spent hours yesterday on Twitter publishing his analysis, one by one. See below for embeds of his stream.

What he found is that the group was far off base in its classification of what constitutes a “school shooting.” Events that occurred after hours, accidental shootings, suicides, gang activity and even a shooting in self-defense somehow meet the group’s definition.

In the fine print of their report the group says, “Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”

So Everytown for Gun Safety took every incident of a firearm being discharged on a school property and labeled it a school shooting. I don’t understand why anybody takes anything gun control groups publish seriously. Time and time again it has been demonstrated that they either outright lie or twist facts until they fit their agenda. Oh well, for the time being the media and a lot of people will lap up their lies so I will continue joining the rest of the gun rights movement in pointing out those lies.

Only Hillary’s Wealth Allowed Her to Go So Far Into Debt

Hillary Clinton has been trying to build sympathy by claiming she and Bill went broke during her stint as a war criminal in office. In all likelihood they simply shuffled their money elsewhere so they appear to be broke on paper but I digress. Assuming she has been telling the truth (I know that’s a pretty big pill to swallow but stay with me) and the Clintons are actually millions of dollars in debt. For that to even happen the Clintons needed to be both wealthy and have perceptible future value:

The story with the Clintons is that they left office millions of dollars in hock to various law firms. But this wasn’t some random financial misfortune that could have happened to anyone. If you found yourself in legal hot water, you wouldn’t possibly be able to hire the Clinton’s lawyers. No firm would let you run a multi-million dollar tab. The reason the Clintons were able to get away with it is that it was always obvious that Bill had enormous post-presidential earnings potential. This is a situation where the Clintons’ ability to go so deeply into debt is a sign of the vast economic privileges they enjoyed. Not just the ability to become millionaires after leaving office, but the ability to access certain aspects of the millionaire lifestyle even before leaving office.

To put it into social justice warrior language the Clintons’ wealth privilege (which is probably derived from their white privilege or something) is the only thing that enabled them to go millions of dollars into debt. It will be interesting to see the social justice warriors’ take on this matter. On the one hand Hillary is a woman and therefore a member of the oppressed class. On the other hand she was wealthy and has the ability to be wealthy again so she is certainly riding some serious wealth privilege. From what I’ve seen wealth privilege tends to override almost any oppression points and therefore Hillary is probably in shitlord territory.

Punching People in the Face Less Effective Then It Used to Be

Evolution is a fascinating thing to study. Looking at the way species developed over time you can get a small understanding of what potential difficulties they encountered and what adaption best suited them to overcome them. The Guardian has a piece about how our faces have evolved overtime to better take hits:

Five million years of slugging it out with fists has left its mark on the human face, scientists believe. Evidence suggests it evolved to minimise damage from altercations after our ancient ancestors learned how to throw a punch.

Researchers studied the bone structure of australopiths, ape-like bipeds living 4m to 5m years ago which predated the modern human primate family Homo. They found that australopith faces and jaws were strongest in just those areas most likely to receive a blow from a fist.

Granted the face is still a good target if you’re looking to strike somebody in a way that will quickly end the fight. There are just too many small, fragile bones in the face. But it’s interesting to see that evolution has apparently made us less susceptible to strikes in the face and even with that we still often focus on striking the face.

Personally I prefer grappling over striking because it allows more control over the situation. More control allows one to resolve a situation with less violence in most cases. But striking appears to be popular enough amongst our species to change the way we’ve developed and that’s kind of cool.

Ermahgerd Weapon Lights

Do you have a weapon light mounted on any of your rifles or handguns? If so you’re a bad person. At least that’s what I get from the Denver Post’s recent article disguised as a study that attempts to link weapon lights to negligent police shootings:

In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.

“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”

Flanagan was right. Three months after the October 2010 shooting in Plano, a 76-year-old man took a bullet in the stomach from a New York police officer trying to switch on the same flashlight model.

At least three other people in the U.S. over the past nine years have been shot accidentally by police officers with gun-mounted flashlights, an investigation by The Denver Post found. Two victims were fellow officers.

In Colorado, Denver’s police chief banned the use of tactical flashlights with switches below the trigger guard after two officers accidentally fired their guns last year.

One of the officers may have shot a suspect when his finger slipped from the flashlight switch to the trigger, firing a bullet into a car window of the fleeing driver.

How your finger could slip off of a light activation button located on the grip is positively beyond me. But reading through this article one is supposed to take away how dangerous weapon mounted lights are. In reality the article demonstrates that police departments provide poor training for offices.

I’m a firm believer that you should become intimately familiar with any weapon you plan to carry. You should know how everything on it operates normally, how it will likely fail, and how to recover from any failures. If you add accessories to a weapon you plan to carry you should know how to properly use them. Any failure due to inadequate training isn’t an indicator that the equipment is faulty, it’s an indicator that the training is faulty.

If police departments are having problems with officers and weapon mounted lights it demonstrates that those departments really suck at teaching their officers how to use weapons with attached lights. In my opinion it also demonstrates the poor quality of the officers since weapon mounted lights aren’t fucking rocket science. On lights with with a switch in front of the trigger guard I guess I can kind of see a scenario where a very inept person could negligently discharge the firearm when trying to activate the light. But I can perceive of no scenario where a light with a grip mounted switch could lead to a negligent discharge when the user went to activate the light. The trigger finger doesn’t even touch the switch. I think you would literally have to be retarded to fire a gun when you were really trying to press the grip mounted light switch.

Google Releases Chrome Extension for End-to-End E-Mail Encryption

Like most large corporations I have a love/hate relationship with Google. The company’s practices as far as selling customer data disturb me but it releases a large number of really good products. Last week Google announced an alpha release of an alpha version of a Chrome extension that is meant to make e-mail encryption easier:

Developers at Google have released an experimental tool—for Gmail and other Web-based services—that’s designed to streamline the highly cumbersome task of sending and receiving strongly encrypted e-mail.

On Tuesday, the company unveiled highly unstable “alpha” code that in theory allows people to use the Google Chrome browser to generate encryption keys, encrypt e-mails sent to others, and decrypt received e-mails. Dubbed End-to-End, the Chrome extension also allows Chrome users to digitally sign and verify digital signatures of e-mails sent through Gmail and other services. The code implements a fully compliant version of the OpenPGP standard, which is widely regarded as providing virtually uncrackable encryption when carried out correctly.

OpenPGP is a great tool for communicating securely over e-mail. However using OpenPGP can be difficult for newcomers as it requires some technical knowledge. I haven’t had a chance to play with this extension yet but if it makes using OpenPGP with popular webmail providers it could be significant. Key management has traditionally been the biggest hurdle for newcomers to OpenPGP and if this extension can help make that easier it will really boost OpenPGP’s ease of use.

Judges Fail Turing Test

In the world of artificial intelligence there is the Turing test. The Turing test was a mechanism developed by Alan Turing see if a machine exhibits intelligence indistinguishable from a human’s. Administration of the test is performed by a human who has access to a terminal that allows him to ask another entity, whom he cannot see, questions. If the administrators cannot determine whether he’s conversing with a human or a machine the machine is said to pass the Turing test.

A couple of days ago the media was abuzz with news that a machine has finally passed the Turing test:

Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that’s what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers and candy and that his father is a gynecologist, but it’s all a lie. This boy is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.

That a third of judges were convinced that Goostman was a human is significant — at least 30 percent of judges must be swayed for a computer to pass the famous Turing Test. The test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, was designed to answer the question “Can machines think?” and is a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies.

The problem with the Turing test is that it depends on the intelligence of both the machine and the administrator. So one could easily say that a machine that passes the Turing test was the result of the judge or judges failing the Turing test. Considering that only one third of the judges were convinced that the machine was human I would say it’s more apt to say that one third of the judges failed the Turing test.

Basing a test meant to detect intelligence on the abilities of a handful of individuals is, in my opinion, a poor method of deciding intelligence. Such a test is going to be extremely subjective. As this test demonstrates some humans are more easily fooled than others.

My thoughts regarding the Turing test aside I still think it’s neat that somebody built a chatbot that actually convinced one third of judges that it was human. That’s no small feat assuming the judges have a background in computer science or psychology.

The State Loves Soldiers Until It Doesn’t

The New York Times finally realized that police departments in modern American are beginning to resemble militaries. The article doesn’t contain much of interest if you’ve been following this militarization for any amount of time but there was a nugget worth mentioning:

In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.

“You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.’s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,” Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told the local Fox affiliate, referring to improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs. Sergeant Downing did not return a message seeking comment.

This brings up the state’s hypocritical view of military personnel. We the people are constantly propagandized about how great the United States military is. According to this propaganda American soldiers are heroes who deserve devout worship. As civilians we’re supposed to thank any soldiers we come across for protecting our “freedoms”. But that’s only while soldiers are deployed overseas. Once they come back and leave the military they’re suddenly dangerous monsters that must be watched careful at all times and put down when they fail to do what they’re told.

I’m not sure why anybody would enter the military these days. It’s a shitty job that involves a great deal of risk. They pay isn’t great and the benefits are pretty nonexistent. And once your time in the military is completed you get to suffer a substandard medical system (it somehow manages to be worse than the standard medical system the rest of us are inflicted with) and be viewed like a threat from your former employer.

Hosting Major Gladiatorial Events is Expensive

Minneapolis will be hosting the Super Bowl in 2018. In order to do this the city had to agree to a long confidential list of demands from the National Football League (NFL):

Free police escorts for team owners, and 35,000 free parking spaces. Presidential suites at no cost in high-end hotels. Free billboards across the Twin Cities. Guarantees to receive all revenue from the game’s ticket sales — even a requirement for NFL-preferred ATMs at the stadium.

Those requirements and many others are detailed in 153 pages of NFL specifications for the game. An official on the host committee that successfully sought the game — Minneapolis beat out Indianapolis and New Orleans — said the panel had agreed to a majority of the conditions but would not elaborate.

The document, which the Star Tribune obtained through sources, has not been released publicly but shows how the NFL will control the event and many of its public aspects. The NFL declined to comment on the document and host committee officials are declining to make it public, citing state data privacy laws.

It doesn’t appear as though the Star Tribune posted the document so I can only assume that making the lives of the homeless miserable was also stipulated somewhere in that contract.

It’s amazing what a bunch of wealthy NFL officials demand from a city in order for it to be allowed the “privilege” of hosting one year’s major game. City officials will justify paying for all of this with tax money by claiming the game will bring major economic activity. Of course there is no way for them to know that before, during, or after the event because such things are unknowable (sorry Keynesians but you can’t accurately predict such things as the continued failure of you school to accurately predict economic matters has demonstrated). And we also know that hosting these games has nothing to do with economic activity. They’re just ways for city officials to make their dicks look bigger to other cities that wanted to host the game.