We’re going to listen to something a bit more obscure today. Dead Nature is a Brazilian power metal band that I recently came across. While their music contains a great deal of the usual power metal affair it’s also a tad bit heavier than a lot of new power metal:
Month: January 2016
The Voice Of The People Will Not Be Tolerated
Democracy is supposedly our species’ greatest invention since sliced bread. It’s sold as way for the voice of the people to be heard. In reality democracy, at best, enforces the will of the majority (which is why democracy has never been an effective tool for defending the rights of minorities). But when you boil it down the State is an institution of violence and it’s will is always guided by those with the largest capacity for force.
Venezuela’s latest election was cheer by many because the socialist party lost its majority in the National Assembly. Much to the chagrin of President Maduro, this was supposed to mean an end to the country’s failed socialist policies. But Maduro just won a trump card. The military of Venezuela has sworn undying allegiance to him:
Caracas (AFP) – Venezuela’s military pledged loyalty to President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday, ramping up a high-stakes standoff between his socialist government and a center-right opposition that has vowed to use its new legislative powers to oust him.
[…]
Venezuela’s defense minister and armed forces chief, General Vladimir Padrino, weighed in, saying the military was unwavering in its backing for Maduro — who has vowed to resist “with an iron hand.”
“The president is the highest authority of the state and we reiterate our absolute loyalty and unconditional support for him,” said Padrino, after the under-pressure government sued to stop the emboldened opposition using its newfound powers to kick out Maduro.
Which will win? The National Assembly and its votes or President Maduro and his guns? My money is on the latter. Government votes are powerless without guns to back them up. If, for example, there were no law enforcers in the United States nobody would care what Congress voted on because there would be no means to enforce its decrees. The reason people become so passionate about what Congress votes on is because they know, whether consciously or subconsciously, that those decrees will be ruthlessly enforced by law enforcers.
Even if the National Assembly votes to oust Maduro they have no way of actually ousting him. He, on the other hand, has the ability to round up all the “counter-revolutionaries” and either “reeducate” them or outright execute them.
Democracy is an illusion. It only offers the majority a voice so long as that voice is deemed acceptable by the State. The State, having the highest capacity for violence, can render the voice of the majority irrelevant rather quickly.
Centralized Failure
People have been using the attacks in Cologne to argue in favor of stronger border controls because, you know, the attacks must have been caused by immigrants and not the usual drunken debauchery that accompanies New Year’s Eve. Such arguments miss the point (well they miss several points but I’ll only address the biggest one here), which is the danger of centralization. It has been revealed that the police in Cologne were being overwhelmed with reports:
An internal police report reveals officers “could not cope” with the volume of attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, German media say.
Women were “forced to run the gauntlet” through gangs of drunken and aggressive men outside the station, it said.
Police say the number of reported crimes from the incident has risen to 121, about three-quarters of which involve sexual assault.
[…]
“The task forces could not cope with all the events, assaults, and crimes – there were just too many happening at the same time,” the senior officer concluded.
Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers has rejected claims teams were understaffed, insisting “we were well prepared”.
But he described what happened as “a completely new dimension of crime”.
I’ve discussed the weaknesses inherent in centralized security before. In this case it appears the central point of failure, relying on the police for security, was a major factor in these attacks getting as out of hand as they did. As the number of attacks increased the inability of the police to effectively respond became more obvious so the perceived risk of perpetuating additional attacks decreased. Since the average German citizen is unable to carry a firearm the risk of attacking them is already lower than it is in most states here. Couple that with the inability of the police to respond and you have a feedback loop of more attacks reducing the perceived risk of committing attacks, which in turn increases the likelihood of more attacks.
We’re All Libertarians Now
One of my friends came up with a phrase that has become quite popular amongst the circles I travel in: we’re all libertarians now. It brings to light the fact that many people call themselves libertarians without actually believing in the philosophy of libertarianism. Gary Johnson, who lost the last presidential election as the Libertarian Party candidate and announced his intentions to lose again this year, is an example. While many of his stated beliefs in the past have been fairly freedom oriented he is adopting a new strategy this year by going authoritarian:
Surprisingly for a libertarian, Johnson, who recently resigned as the CEO of Cannabis Sativa, a marijuana marketing form, said that he would sign a bill banning the wearing of burqas in America. Sharia, he insisted, was not an expression of religion but of “politics” and hence many of its practices could be banned or limited without running afoul of the Constitution.
“Under sharia law,” he argued, “women are not afforded the same rights as men.” Under a burqa, how do you know if a woman has been beaten?, he asked rhetorically. “Honor killings are allowed for under sharia law and so is deceiving non-Muslims.” Likening followers of sharia to members of the Ku Klux Klan, Johnson said that he wouldn’t censor the speech of people promoting sharia law but would mount a cultural campaign to counter its growth here. He said the Islamic terrorism proceeds directly from the same sources as the thinking behind sharia and that the United States government must make sure it is not inadvertently funding sharia overseas.
Libertarianism is a philosophy built around the non-aggression principle, which simply states that it’s wrong to initiate force. How can one claim they are opposed to the initiation of force when they’re openly supporting laws that threaten anybody wearing a burqa? They can’t. Two the are mutually exclusive.
I also find his opinions about sharia rather hypocritical since he’s running to become part of a government that operates under very similar principles.
While women are not afforded the same rights as men under sharia nobody is afforded any rights under United States law. Rights, by definition, cannot be taken away. But the United States government can legally take any so-called right away. When something can be taken away it’s called a privilege and to quote George Carlin, “That’s all we’ve ever had in this country; a bill of temporary privileges.” Because even the enumerated privileges in the Bill of Rights, which have all be violated by federal law, are a single constitutional convention away from being entirely removed.
Sharia allows honor killings? So does United States law. The terminology is different. Instead of honor killings United State law calls it war. But when somebody offends the honor of the United States they end up at the business end of the world’s largest military, which usually makes them very dead.
And United States law allows the government to deceive nongovernmental entities. Cops can lie to you (but you can’t lie to them because that’s a crime). Every politician can lie to you. Basically anybody employed by the government can lie to you. Hell, the government lies to its allies. In fact I’m not aware of a single entity the United States government doesn’t lie to.
By Gary Johnson’s own criticisms of sharia he should be working to abolish the State, not become part of it so he can do the very things he is criticizing Islam for doing.
This is a common problem amongst statist libertarians (a term I personally find oxymoronic). They aren’t interested in being a force of liberation for all and their acknowledgement of the non-aggression principle only extends as far as the people they like. I’m not sure why they desire to label themselves libertarians, it’s not like there are any cool points attached to the term, but they do and it has rendered the term nearly useless.
An Agorist’s View On Closed Borders
Borders are a sticky issue within libertarian circles. A lot of libertarians favor tightly controlled borders. Hell, even well-respected anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Hans Hermann Hopped favor strongly controlled government borders. Any libertarian in support of controlled borders is, in my opinion, foolish. But what about the agorist view? Agorism is all about continually transitioning economic activity from the white to the black market. In the case of borders the white market consists of those preventing people from crossing government borders and the black market consists of smugglers helping people across those same borders. And black market actors have enjoyed a great deal of success in overcoming the white market.
Let’s look at a quintessential historical example of heavily secured borders: East Germany. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) erected the famous Berlin Wall in an effort to stop its people from accidentally exiting the utopia of communism. For reasons nobody quite understands there were people who were actually trying to leave. Seeing a market demand many enterprising entrepreneurs stepped up to the plate and created a black market for smuggling people out of the GDR. One of those smugglers was Rainer Schubert. Mr. Schubert operated his successful smuggling operation for three years before the Stasi finally caught him. According to the Glasgow Herald he smuggled more than 100 people across the heavily guarded border. And he wasn’t alone. It turns out that there was quite an enterprise in helping people cross the heavily secured border of the GDR.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the demand for black market operations for crossing fortified borders hasn’t diminished, but has merely shifted elsewhere. The example most Americans are probably familiar with are Central Americans crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Smugglers who bring people from Central America into the United States are commonly referred to as coyotes and they have setup quite a black market business for themselves.
Agorism is necessarily opposed to government control over imaginary lines. By attempting to prevent people from crossing its borders a government creates a white market. As a philosophy based on moving white market activity into the black market agorism supports the efforts of smugglers helping people get across those borders illegally. Such efforts end up moving a lot of white market activity into the black market. People crossing a border illegally are not paying governments for visas, passports, or other travel documents. Because they’re in the country illegally they’re not going to declare any income, which keeps money out of the hands of the revenuers. In addition to that, most of their work will likely be done “under the table” since they won’t want to risk leaving a paper trail that could get them arrested and/or deported so it’ll be paid for with cash (or some other form of exchange that is difficult for the government to surveil).
David Chaum Becomes A Quisling
Online anonymity is important. In fact it’s the difference between life and death for many political dissidents around the world. Recognizing this many developers have put their efforts into developing effective anonymity tools such as Tor and I2P. But what makes an anonymity tool effective? An effective anonymity tool is one designed in such a way where a third party cannot utilize the tool itself to discover the identity of a user (no tool, however, can be designed in such a way to stop a user from voluntarily revealing identifiable information about themselves).
One of the downsides of the current slew of popular anonymity tools is they tend to be slower than tools that don’t attempt to maintain anonymity. Accessing a website over Tor usually takes longer than accessing that same site over the regular Internet. David Chaum, a well-known and previously (I’ll get to that in a second) well-respected cryptographer is promising a new “anonymity” tool that doesn’t suffer from the performance issues of popular tools such as Tor:
With PrivaTegrity, Chaum is introducing a new kind of mix network he calls cMix, designed to be far more efficient than the layered encryption scheme he created decades ago. In his cMix setup, a smartphone communicates with PrivaTegrity’s nine servers when the app is installed to establish a series of keys that it shares with each server. When the phone sends a message, it encrypts the message’s data by multiplying it by that series of unique keys. Then the message is passed around all nine servers, with each one dividing out its secret key and multiplying the data with a random number. On a second pass through the nine servers, the message is put into a batch with other messages, and each server shuffles the batch’s order using a randomized pattern only that server knows, then multiplies the messages with another random number. Finally, the process is reversed, and as the message passes through the servers one last time, all of those random numbers are divided out and replaced with keys unique to the message’s intended recipient, who can then decrypt and read it.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Chaum even claims PrivaTegrity is more secure than Tor. But as it turns out this “anonymity” tool isn’t effective because it allows third parties to unveil the identity of users:
On top of those security and efficiency tricks, PrivaTegrity’s nine-server architecture—with a tenth that works as a kind of “manager” without access to any secret keys—also makes possible its unique backdoor decryption feature. No single server, or even eight of the nine servers working together, can trace or decrypt a message. But when all nine cooperate, they can combine their data to reconstruct a message’s entire path and divide out the random numbers they used to encrypt it. “It’s like a backdoor with nine different padlocks on it,” Chaum says.
[…]
“It’s like the UN,” says Chaum. “I don’t think a single jurisdiction should be able to covertly surveil the planet…In this system, there’s an agreement on the rules, and then we can enforce them.”
One Key to rule them all, One Key to find them, One Key to bring them all and in the darkness spy on them.
You know who else had an agreement on the rules? The Nazis! Put down the Godwin brand pitchforks, that was purposeful hyperbole. My point is agreement on the rules is meaningless fluff just as his claim that no single jurisdiction should be able to surveil the planet. By implementing a backdoor he has made his network a single jurisdiction capable of surveilling everybody who uses it. His network is also the rule maker. The only reason I would shy away from calling PrivaTegrity a government is because it still outsources enforcement to the State by handing over identifiable information of users deemed guilty by the Nazgûl. PrivaTegrity isn’t about protecting the identity of every user, it’s about protecting the identity of favored users.
This backdoor capability also means PrivaTegrity is less secure than Tor since Tor doesn’t have a built-in method to reveal the identity of users. Every major government in the world will try to compromise PrivaTegrity if it every comes into wide usage. And due to the existence of a backdoor those efforts will bear fruit. Whether compromising the servers themselves, buying off the administrators of the servers, or by other means it will only be a matter of time until governments find a way to utilize the built-in backdoor for their own purposes. That is why the mere existence of a backdoor renders an anonymity tool ineffective.
The only upside to PrivaTegrity is that the existence of a backdoor almost guarantees nobody will adopt it and therefore when it’s compromised nobody will be put in danger.
Without The TSA Who Would Molest 10 Year-Old Girls
When a job description involved feeling up small children nobody should be surprised when the applicants turn out to be pedophiles. Granted, the grounds on which I accused the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) goon in this story of being a pedophile are speculative but I can’t think of any other reason why she spent two minutes “patting down” a 10 year-old girl:
A young girl’s family is speaking out after a TSA agent patted her down for nearly two minutes at an airport over the holiday break, leaving the girl feeling like screaming.
The girl should have screamed. She should have also kicked the TSA officer as hard as she could and ran as fast as she could. Her parents should have intervened. But what makes this story even more angering is the fact the girl’s father just filmed the molestation and then got down and licked the TSA’s boots like a good little slave:
Her father shot video of the incident at an airport in North Carolina, for a flight back to San Diego. Kevin Payne told NBC San Diego he’s all for airport security and making sure people have a safe trip, but he and his daughter feel the pat-down was uncomfortable, long and inappropriate.
Apparently the father is all for sexual molestation but only if it lasts for less than two minutes. And herein lies my biggest problem with American culture: complacency. For a nation full of people who pride themselves on not taking shit from anybody it seems most Americans are more than happy to roll right the fuck over when somebody with a badge orders them to. Unless the culture can be changed there is no hope for freedom for the masses currently incarcerated in the United States.
Mental Illness And Guns
Mental illness has become a sort of panacea in the gun rights debate. If only we can address the mental illness factor all the violence will cease. It’s one of the few things that both the pro-gun and anti-gun sides can agree on. In fact I agree that mental illness needs to be looked at. Where I differ strongly from most people in this debate is that I don’t think the State should be involved in the matter. When the State gets involved it issues decrees and those decrees always lead to punishments. Obama’s latest executive order on firearms claims to address mental illness but the way it goes about it can only make things worse:
The Social Security Administration has indicated that it will begin the rulemaking process to include information in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm for mental health reasons.
The Department of Health and Human Services is finalizing a rule to remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing States from reporting relevant information about people prohibited from possessing a gun for specific mental health reasons.
Both clauses create additional barriers between people suffering from mental illnesses and treatment. Although the common belief held by Americans is that all mental illnesses are permanent the reality is quite different. Many people suffer from temporary mental illnesses. Non-chronic depression is probably the most common example. Even people who suffer from chronic mental illnesses are often able to control them through therapy, medication, meditation, etc.
A lot of people fall into temporary periods of depression that can become bad enough where they’re deemed a danger to themselves and others. Unfortunately these temporary periods can lead to lifetime prohibitions. Let’s consider a gun owner who has fallen into a period of severe depression after the death of their spouse. This gun owner desperately needs to seek help but doesn’t want to risk losing his gun ownership privileges. With every additional barrier that is erected the likelihood that this gun owners will seek help goes down.
Controlled chronic mental illness isn’t treated any better. Let’s consider another gun owner. This one suffers from bipolar disorder and their lows get severe enough where they can become a danger to themselves. It’s possible that this gun owner could live a much healthier and safer life with proper medication. Obtaining such medication requires them to get help from a mental health professional but they don’t want to see one because they are afraid they will become a prohibited person for the rest of their life. Again, we have a person suffering from a mental illness who has been dissuaded from seeking help because of fear of punishment. Instead of taking steps that could lead to a better, healthier life they continue suffering alone and therefore remain a continuing risk to themselves.
Addressing the mental illness factor should start with eliminating punishments for having a mental illness. I know that sounds backwards to a lot of people. But seeking help should be a pain-free as possible. In fact seeking help should be encouraged. Our hypothetical gun owners mentioned above shouldn’t have to fear becoming prohibited persons for the rest of their lives because they sought help.
This Was Always The Plan
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was sold as legislation that would guarantee every American enjoyed health insurance. Anybody who looked at the methodology would be lead to question the sales pitch though. What the ACA did was require anybody who didn’t have health insurance to pay a fine. As the New York Times has noticed many people are opting to pay the fine rather than health insurance premiums because the former is cheaper:
Mr. Murphy, an engineer in Sulphur Springs, Tex., estimates that under the Affordable Care Act, he will face a penalty of $1,800 for going uninsured in 2016. But in his view, paying that penalty is worth it if he can avoid buying an insurance policy that costs $2,900 or more. All he has to do is stay healthy.
“I don’t see the logic behind that, and I’m just not going to do it,” said Mr. Murphy, 45, who became uninsured in April after leaving a job with health benefits to pursue contract work. “The fine is still going to be cheaper.”
Two years after the Affordable Care Act began requiring most Americans to have health insurance, 10.5 million who are eligible to buy coverage through the law’s new insurance exchanges were still uninsured this fall, according to the Obama administration.
It seems many people are mistaking this for an unintended failure when in fact it was the plan. The ACA, like all legislation, was passed to transfer wealth from the people to the State. The health insurance industry is one of the State’s larger partners. By requiring people to do business with insurance companies the ACA funnels money into the health insurance industry where a portion of it is funneled back to the State (in the form of taxes, lobbying efforts, regulatory compliance fees, etc.).
But some people are too poor to afford health insurance or too stubborn to buy it even when it’s mandated. In order to squeeze money out of those two categories of people the ACA also created a middle tier. You don’t have to buy health insurance but you also won’t be kidnapped and locked in a cage if you’re willing to pay the State a small fee directly. The trick is the fee is lower than buying health insurance but high enough to look favorable compared to being kidnapped and locked in a cage.
Manufacturers have long understood the importance of a middle tier. Apple, for example, prefers you buy the top of the line iPhone but makes lower tiers available because it realizes not everybody can afford or is willing to pay for the top of the line. The difference between the market’s middle tier products and the State’s is the former’s lower tier doesn’t involved armed officers kicking down your door at oh dark thirty, murdering your family dog, and kidnapping you.
So the ACA creates a three tier system. The upper tier is buying health insurance, the middle tier is paying the fine, and the lower tier is being a slave laborer for Federal Prison Industries (also known as UNICOR) for a number of years. It’s a piece of legislation designed specifically for the purpose of extracting more wealth from the public. What may appear to be a failure, the fine being lower than buying health insurance, is in fact part of the design meant to maximum the law’s effectiveness.
Once In A While Facebook Has Your Back
I have an extremely dark sense of humor. That is why the first thing that crossed my mind when I read this:
Authorities discovered the body of a man attached underneath the ice Monday afternoon in a channel between Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun.
Was this:
When I admitted this on Facebook the magical suggestion algorithm gave me this:
A more perfect punchline could not be made by an army of the world’s best comedians. I haven’t laughed so hard for so long in ages.