Month: July 2016

Police Blast Yet Another Nonthreatening Person

In addition to having a carry permit while black, being a therapist while black is also grounds for being shot in the United Police States of America:

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, told WSVN television he was helping a patient who had wandered away from a facility.

Mobile phone video shows Mr Kinsey lying down with his hands in the air, and his patient sitting in the road with a toy truck.

The latest shooting follows weeks of violence involving police.

North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said officers were called out on Monday, following reports of a man threatening to shoot himself.

Police ordered Mr Kinsey and the patient to lie on the ground, he told The Miami Herald.

The video shows Mr Kinsey lying down while trying to get his patient to comply.

It seems therapists lying on the ground trying to help mentally disabled patients who have toys trucks is grounds for an office fearing for his life now. These officers are either the biggest cowards on the face of the planet or they’re the most psychotic. Either way, they shouldn’t be given power over others.

The progression we’re seeing is as interesting as it is alarming. Before this year the people being gunned down by the police tended to have a criminal history for boot lickers to use to justify the shooting. But now the police are becoming so brazen that they’re gunning down people who have little or no criminal background to speak of. Since they’re not being punished for their actions they’re also not motivated to stop escalating situations to deadly force.

This situation also demonstrates that the boot lickers’ claim that people won’t get shot if they obey the orders of officers is false. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air as the officers had ordered him to do and they still shot him. When you use threats of violence as a compliance mechanism and you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, that is to say you still attack your victim even if they do comply with you, you wreck what little trust you have between yourself and your victim. That makes future scenarios more difficult. Your new victims may decided to fight back instead of complying because they believe you’ll kill them either way but they might possibly survive if they resist. By shooting a complying person the officer increased the danger of future situations involving officers using threats of violence as a compliance mechanism.

The problem of police brutality will only continue to get worse since few seems to have the will to take action to curtail it.

Carry Permit Applications Spike in Florida

While gun control advocates are always quick to tell people they need to be more vulnerable, common sense seems to reign supreme. It’s not uncommon in the wake of a mass shooting for carry permit applications to spike. The most recent mass shooting in Orlando is a prime example of this:

Thousands of Floridians are looking to take personal safety into their own hands after the massacre at an Orlando nightclub last month.

In May, the Florida Department of Agriculture distributed more than 20,000 applications to people interested in a concealed weapon permit or other firearm license. That number jumped to more than 36,000 in June, according to recently released numbers.

The applications are either sent by mail or downloaded from the department’s website.

One of the reasons mass shootings are so frightening to the average person is because they demonstrate just how helpless unarmed individuals are against an armed individual. Gun control advocates, unwilling to face that fear, pray to their god, the State, to make all the bad things go away. People willing to face that fear take matters to mitigate their risks in case they find themselves in such a position. A byproduct of this practical attitude is that the general public becomes less vulnerable as more people within it are able to resist armed attackers.

Submit, Slave

Remember what I said in the previous post about the police not liking any of our government granted privileges? Here’s another example:

[Waterbury Conn.] Police Chief Vernon L. Riddick Jr. brought a message of cooperation with police to a mostly African-American crowd of more than 200 people at Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church on Wednesday night.

If an officer stops your car, if they ask to search your person or vehicle, if they demand entry into your home, comply and then complain later to the department’s internal affairs office and police chief’s office if you feel your rights have been violated, Riddick said.

In other words, when an officer asks to search your vehicle or home you should just roll over and be a good little slave.

The exact opposite is true however. If an officer requests to search your property the only response you should give them is, “Come back with a warrant.” Officers asking to search your property are on fishing expeditions. They’re asking permission because they don’t believe they have enough grounds to get a warrant issued. Fishing expeditions can’t help you but they certain can hurt you. As police are required to tell you when reading you your Miranda warnings, anything you say can and will be used against you in court. Likewise, anything an officer finds during a fishing expedition can and will be used against you in court.

Always keep in mind that the police are out to get you. That’s their job. The politicians pass laws and then task the police with finding and dealing with anybody who breaks them. Many of these laws, such as traffic citations and drug offenses, include a nice kickback to the department that makes the arrest. So do yourself a favor and always exercise what few privileges you have against the police.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Law enforcers have a proud tradition of hating any government granted privilege that inconveniences them. The Fourth Amendment irritates them because it throws up roadblocks between them and searching every vehicle and building. The Fifth Amendment irritates them because it stands between them and forcing suspects to incriminate themselves. The Second Amendment irritates them because they want to be the only ones carrying guns:

In Cleveland, police union head Steve Loomis said he made the request to protect officers following recent fatal shooting of three police officers in Louisiana on Sunday and the killing of five officers in Dallas on July 7. Kasich said he did not have the power to circumvent the state’s open-carry law.

[…]

Across the country, similar battles are playing out in states where municipal authorities, often backed by police departments, are clashing with state lawmakers over how to regulate the open carrying of firearms.

Dallas’s police chief drew criticism from gun rights advocates for saying open carriers made it more “challenging” for his officers to respond to a shooter who killed five policemen at a demonstration this month.

[…]

Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have been trying and failing to restrict the open carrying of guns for years. The state attorney general argues that citizens have a constitutional right to publicly display weapons, which cannot be overruled by city authorities.

“I wish more of our legislators could see past the ideology,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. “They have no concern about the impact in urban environments that are already plagued by too many guns and too much violence.”

These officers are focusing on open carry, not because it makes their job more challenging (after all, it’s pretty easy to distinguish a person with a holstered gun from a person actively shooting people), but because it’s currently the most controversial form of carry. This is how these fights always play out. You start with the most controversial aspect of the thing you’re trying to crush because it’s the aspect you can get popular support for. Once you’ve crushed the most controversial aspect the next aspect can be made controversial.

These officers aren’t against open carry, they’re against carry. If they achieved their goals and managed to get open carry abolished they would then move on to claim that concealed carry makes their jobs difficult because it’s hard for them to know who is legally carrying a firearm and who is a drug dealer illegally carrying a firearm.

In the end these officers want a world where us mere serfs have no protections whatsoever against them.

Judgement

The rider of the white horse comes forth to deliver judgement:

At least a dozen California GOP staff members at the Republican National Convention have been quarantined in their hotel rooms after becoming ill with what appears to be a highly contagious norovirus, also known as the cruise-ship virus, according to officials from both the California GOP and local health agencies.

Implied Licenses are Bullshit

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been thoroughly fucking over people in the United States since 1998. One of the things that the DMCA accomplished was effectively abolishing property rights on anything that includes copyrighted material. This has had wide reaching ramifications including preventing farmers from repairing their own equipment:

In fact, the craziness of this goes even further: In a 2015 letter to the United States Copyright Office, John Deere, the world’s largest tractor maker, said that the folks who buy tractors don’t own them, not in the way the general public believes “ownership” works. Instead, John Deere said that those who buy tractors are actually purchasing an “implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

[…]

But what this has meant is that tractor owners can’t repair their own tractors—and if they do, they’re in violation of the DMCA. So, if a machine stops working, its owner can’t pop the hood, run some tests, and find out what’s going on; he or she is legally required to take the tractor to a service center (one owned by the manufacturer, since that’s the only entity allowed to analyze the tractor’s issues).

I’m against the concept of copyright, in part, because it is an implied license.

That is to say it’s a contractual agreement that the purchaser didn’t agree to. If you manufacture something and want to restrict the user of that thing then you need to get them to agree to contractual terms. For example, if you want to sell a book and prevent the buyer form copying it then you need to write up a contract that states the signer agrees not to copy the book and include penalties if the contract is broken. Then you need to convince the buyer to agree to it.

Copyright doesn’t work that way though. When you buy a book you don’t sign a contract binding you to an agreement not to copy the book. The agreement is implied, which is a fancy way of saying you were bound to it involuntarily. As the article notes, John Deere stated in a letter to the United States Copyright Office that people who had purchased its equipment were restricted by an implied license. The company is changing the rules after the fact by trying to force an agreement upon farmers through the State. In any sane sense of contract theory that is nonsense but in the statist interpretation it’s a perfectly sound method of getting buyers to agree to specific terms.

People should not be subject to involuntary agreements of any sort and nobody should be allowed to change an agreement willy nilly after the fact without the other party agreeing to those changes.

Freedom at the Republican National Convention

The Republican Party likes to market itself as the party of freedom. Here is a sign listing items prohibited from the Republican National Convention (RNC) this year:

rnc-2016-no-freedom-allowed

The first thing that probably pops out to most of you is the prohibition against weapons. While the Republican Party likes to pay lip service to gun rights its actual support is far less enthusiastic than advertised. When I point out this common restriction at Republican Party events many people are quick to tell me that the Secret Service, which many Republican Party politicians use for protection, dictates that rule. However, nobody is required to utilize Secret Service protection. If these Republicans actually cared about the right of the people to keep and bear arms they would tell the Secret Service to buzz off unless it utilized a ruleset that also respected the rights of individuals. But they don’t care about gun rights beyond lip service.

Some of the other restrictions are just bizarre. No umbrellas? If it rains I guess convention goes can just suck it up and deal with being wet. No strollers? I guess I agree that politician conventions are no place a responsible parent would take their small child. But political types always want to start brainwashing children at a young age so this prohibition seems out of place. No whole fruit? Does that mean sliced fruit is okay? What about whole vegetables?

I think the sign speaks volumes about the Republican Party in general.