Month: November 2016

The Slave Suggestion Box Doesn’t Matter

Voting, when you boil it down, is nothing more than a slave suggestion box. From a curated list of approved options we’re granted the privilege of submitting our opinion. But what happens when the slaves submit the wrong suggestion? That’s when the machinations of the court systems kick in. The slaves in the United Kingdom were given the option of voting to secede from the European Union and they voted to do so. That turned out to be the wrong way to vote so the courts have nullified their suggestion:

LONDON — The British government’s plan for leaving the European Union was thrown into uncertainty on Thursday after the High Court ruled that Parliament must give its approval before the process can begin.

The court’s decision seemed likely to slow — but not halt — the British withdrawal from the bloc, a step approved by nearly 52 percent of voters in a June referendum.

Democracy is an illusion upheld only as long as the slaves vote the way their masters want. When it looks like the slaves will vote the wrong way the rules are either changed or the courts are brought in to invalidate the vote. Here in the United States, for example, most states have implemented various restrictions on who can appear on an official ballot or is considered an acceptable write-in candidate. These rules exist to both prevent the slaves from voting for somebody who isn’t approved by their masters and to maintain the illusion that they can vote for an unapproved master.

Teaching Youngsters to Shoot

I believe that an armed society is a polite society. As the number of armed individuals increases in a society so does the cost of perpetrating a crime. This is why I’m a supporter of teaching young individuals how to shoot. The sooner they learn how to safely handle a firearm the sooner they are both inoculated against anti-gun fear mongering and prepares them for the day when they can carry a firearm. I especially support efforts like Elaina Spraker’s to teach young women how to shoot:

In 2009, Alaskan Elaina Spraker decided to start a gun training course for young women interested in learning about firearms, gun safety and how to shoot. Spraker said the idea came to her when she asked her then-teenage son if his female friends enjoyed going to the gun range as much as he and his friends did. Her son’s response caught her by surprise. He said most of the girls stayed back.

Women, on average, tend to be at a physical disadvantage to men. Firearms remove physical disparity from the equation. With a firearm a woman, elderly individual, or wheelchair bound individual can put up effective resistance against a physically fit 20-year-old male. There are few things as empowering as realizing that you can effectively defend yourself even against stronger attackers.

Having more armed women that are skilled at handling firearms can only benefit society.

It’s All About the Money

The war on drugs is probably been the single biggest government power grab in history. By declaring an ever expanding list of chemicals illegal the State has created a justification to expand law enforcement both in numbers and in equipment. In addition to expanding the power of its wealth expropriation force, the State has also written the laws in such a way as to better enable law enforcers to expropriate wealth. Consider civil forfeiture. Normally a law enforcement agent can’t just steal your cash or car. But if they claim that cash or your car are in any way possibly tied to a drug crime they can steal it and the burden of proving they weren’t related to a drug crime, a nearly impossible feat, falls onto you.

But the State isn’t the only culprit here. An entire industry has sprung up around helping law enforcement agencies expropriate wealth. One such industry is the manufacturing of field drug testing kits. These kits, which have an extremely dubious record in regards to reliability, give an officer probable cause to kidnap individuals. However, recognizing that the kits are unreliable most agencies will have the tested substance sent to a lab for more rigorous testing. But one agency that doesn’t is the Las Vegas Police Department (LVPD):

A new report from ProPublica and the Las Vegas Review-Journal finds that since the early 1990s, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has been using cheap drug field-test kits to determine whether found substances are illegal. While far too many police agencies have used the kits to determine probable cause for a search, in most cases the substances are later more thoroughly tested at a crime lab. In Las Vegas, the test results were apparently also used as evidence to help prosecutors win convictions.

As Billy Mayes would have said, but wait, there’s more!

All along, though, police and prosecutors knew the tests were vulnerable to error, and by 2010, the police department’s crime lab wanted to abandon its kits for methamphetamine and cocaine. In a 2014 report that Las Vegas police submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice under the terms of a federal grant, the lab detailed how the kits produced false positives. Legal substances sometimes create the same colors as illegal drugs. Officers conducting the tests, lab officials acknowledged, misinterpreted results. New technology was available — and clearly needed to protect against wrongful convictions.

Not only is the LVPD not using more thorough testing measures before brining charges but the department, as do all other departments, knows that the field testing kits are unreliable.

Why would the LVPD rely on unreliable tests to prosecute individuals? If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you already know the answer: law enforcement isn’t about justice, it’s about expropriating wealth from the populace. The whole point of the war on drugs is to give the State yet another method on top of taxes, citations, and permit fees to transfer money from your bank account into its own. But the State wants this expropriation to look legitimate so people don’t see it for the organized criminal gang that it is. To create an illusion of legitimacy the State surrounds its expropriation with a bunch of legal rituals. These rituals make the process of expropriation look impartial and fair.

If you’re charged with a drug crime you have the option of a jury trail. In a jury trail the State must convince 12 jurors that you are actually a very bad person. The process of convincing a jury that you’re a very bad person involves submitting evidence that proves that the glazed doughnut you were eating was actually crystal meth. Since field drug testing kits are biased towards false positives they make excellent evidence, especially when the jurors are selected specifically because they’re entirely ignorant of how the tests work and how unreliable they are.

Gun Sales are Up

This year’s presidential election is notable for many reasons. Somehow both major parties managed to nominate the single worst option that was available to them. The level of hatred supporters of both candidates have for supporters of the other candidate has reached unprecedented levels. And both parties have managed to nominate advocates for gun control. This last point is likely what has lead to yet another month of very impressive gun sales:

There were 2,333,539 gun-related checks processed through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, last month, according to FBI documents posted on Monday. That represents an increase of more than 350,000 checks over the previous October, itself a record. It’s also the 18th month in a row to set a record.

With two months to go, 2016 has already seen 22,206,233 NICS checks, making it the second highest year for checks in the history of NICS with only 2015 seeing more.

I sometimes wonder if gun control advocates are secretly being funded by firearm manufacturers because their actions do more to increase gun sales than anything else.

If gun control advocates really wanted to decrease the number of guns in circulation the easiest thing they could do would be to stop pushing for gun control. The only reason people are buying pallets of AR-15 lowers, AK-47s, and standard capacity magazines is because they believe that they can make a significant profit if the manufacturing of those items is prohibited. It’s basic economics. The more scarce a desirable product is the more expensive it becomes. If I can buy a pallet of AR-15 lowers for $50.00 a piece today and the manufacturing of those lowers becomes illegal tomorrow the profit I can make off of those lowers will only increase over time.

LastPass Opts to Release Ad Supported “Free” Version

My hatred of using advertisements to fun “free” services is pretty well known at this point. However, it seems that a lot of people prefer the business model where they’re the product instead of the customer. Knowing that, and knowing that password reuse is still a significant security problem for most people, I feel the need to inform you that LastPass, which still remains a solid password manager despite being bought by LogMeIn, now has an ad supported “free” version:

I’m thrilled to announce that, starting today, you can use LastPass on any device, anywhere, for free. No matter where you need your passwords – on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone – you can rely on LastPass to sync them for you, for free. Anything you save to LastPass on one device is instantly available to you on any other device you use.

Anything that may convince more people to start using password managers is a win in my book. People who don’t utilize password managers tend to reuse the same credentials on multiple sites, which significantly increases the damage that a password database leak can cause. Furthermore, using a password manager lowers the hurdle for using strong passwords. Instead of having to use passwords that are memorizable a password manager also allows users to use long strings of pseudorandom characters, which means if a password database is breached the time it takes to unveil their password from its stored hash is significantly increased (because the attacker has to rely on brute force instead of a time saving method such as rainbow tables).

If money has been the only thing that has held you back from using a password manager you should take a look at LastPass’s “free” version. While ads are a potential vector for malware they can be blocked with an ad blocker and the risk of being infected through ads is significantly less than the risks involved in not using a password manager.

“Libertarians”

I make no secret of my disagreement with political libertarians. While they claim that we need to implement incremental change by working within the system I’m rolling my eyes because I know that the system has numerous redundancies that prevent anti-statist meddling and that the State, like the One Ring, corrupts all who try to wield it.

The Star Tribune ran a story about the Crystal City Council. Crystal, for those who don’t know, is a suburb here in the Twin Cities. The Libertarian Party controls a majority of its city council. That’s the joke, this is the punchline:

At the same time, in a seeming departure from Libertarian principles of thrift, the city has raised property taxes and water and sewer fees.

Libertarians seized control of a municipal government and taxes went up. If these Libertarians didn’t exist I’d have to make them up to illustrate my point about political action being an ineffective strategy for libertarianism. One is probably wondering why a “libertarian” city council would raise taxes and water and sewer fees. After all, that seems like a pretty anti-libertarian decision. It’s for muh roads and the children, of course:

The alliance split in September when the City Council raised property taxes nearly 8 percent. One of the Libertarians, Councilwoman Olga Parsons, said she voted in favor because she thought the budget was already lean and she didn’t see anywhere to cut spending.

The budget was already tight? She is obviously not a libertarian. Any libertarian could find a significant amount of unnecessary crap to cut. For example, they could start with the police. Most police departments invest the majority of their time in enforcing victimless laws such as drug offenses and speeding citations. Stopping the department from enforcing those nonsense laws would greatly reduce the need for officers and the city could downsize the department (I would personally eliminate it entirely but this is me trying to play the libertarian political game). City “services” could be privatized or eliminated entirely and the city properties related to providing those “services” could be sold. Doing that would allow the market to decide what the community actually wants and what has been forced down its throat by a handful of politically connected community members. The bottom line is that if the budget is tight that means the city is providing things it shouldn’t be providing.

In spite of what the Star Tribune and these “libertarians” claim, paying cash for government projects isn’t libertarianism. Libertarianism is dismantling the government. If there’s a government project any libertarian worth their salt should be working to eliminate it, not fund it.

More Malware Spreading Through Advertising

My biggest grip with the advertisement based model most Internet services have opted to use is that ads can easily be used to spread malware. Because of that I view ad blockers as security software more than anything. And the Internet seems to enjoy proving my point every few weeks:

As a security researcher, it’s always exciting to discover new vulnerabilities and techniques used by malicious actors to deliver malware to unsuspecting users. These moments are actually quite rare, and it’s increasingly frustrating from a researcher’s perspective to watch the bad guys continue to use the same previously exposed methods to conduct their malicious operations.

Today’s example is no different. We discovered a malvertising campaign on Google AdWords for the search term “Google Chrome”, where unsuspecting MacOS users were being tricked into downloading a malicious installer identified as ‘OSX/InstallMiez’ (or ‘OSX/InstallCore’).

In this case the malware didn’t spread through a browser exploit. Instead it exploited the weakest component of any security system: the human. The malware developers bought ads from Google so that their link, which was cleverly titled “Get Google Chrome”, would appear at the very top of the page. This malware was targeted at macOS users so if you were a Windows user and clicked on the link you’d be redirected to a nonexistent page but macOS users would be taken to a page to download the malware installer. After running the installer the malware opens a browser page to a scareware site urging you to “clean your Mac” and then downloads more malware that opens automatically and urges the user to copy it to their Applications folder.

As operating systems have become more secure malware producers have begun relying on exploiting the human component. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to train mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma on proper computer security practices. Explaining the difference between Google advertisement links and Google search result links to your grandparents is often a hopeless cause. The easiest way of dealing with that situation is to hide the ads, and therefore any malware that tries to spread via ads, from their view and ad blockers are the best tools for that job.

Unfortunately, the advertisement based model isn’t going away anytime soon. Too many people think that web services are free because, as Bastiat explained way back when, they’re not seeing the unseen factors. Since they’re not paying money to access a service they think that the service is free. What remains unseens are the other costs such as being surveilled for the benefit of advertisers, increased bandwidth and battery usage for sending and displaying advertisements, the risk of malware infecting their system via advertisements, etc. So long as the advertisement based model continues to thrive you should run ad blockers on all of your devices to protect yourself.

Yet Another AR-15

Springfield Armory’s greatest product isn’t its guns but its marketing (that’s not to say their guns are bad, I several Springfield Armory firearms and they’re all solid). Other gun companies could learn a lot from Springfield Armory’s hype producing machine.

Case in point, a few weeks ago Springfield Armory started teasing its soon to be unveiled SAINT firearm. One of my friends asked me what I thought the SAINT was going to be. Because I’ve been exposed to enough marketing to have become jaded over the years I snarkily said “Probably yet another AR-15.” As it turns out, my snarky response was correct:

After weeks of advertisements, videos, and other vague references to the Springfield Armory SAINT the anticipation has to be killing you, or at the very least driving you a bit crazy. After I threw up my hastily written sneak peek, some of the theories I saw in the comments went anywhere from the downright ludicrous to spot on.

[…]

So, what does the SAINT mean for shooters? Frankly, it means another AR-15 to choose from on the rack at your local gun store. The catch is, it is going to be easy to overlook the greatness they built into the rifle. In over a decade of shooting the AR-15/M-16 platform almost exclusively, I have never come across a rifle that offers this level of performance for around $850 MSRP.

Besides the gaudy SAINT logo engraved in gigantic letters on the magwell, the rifle doesn’t look half bad. It appears to be a decently specced AR-15 for a price point that isn’t entirely stupid. But for the amount of marketing hype that was being pumped out of Springfield Armory you could have reasonably expected something new and unique instead of another version of a rifle that everybody and their grandmother already produces.

Thanks to Springfield Armory’s name, which is partially built on the nonexistent ties to the old Springfield Armory and partially on having a history of releasing pretty solid firearms, I’m sure the SAINT will sell well. But this announcement makes me grateful for the likes of Israel Weapons Industry, Beretta, Bushmaster (I never though I’d say that), and Fabrique Nationale for releasing the Tavor, ARX, ACR, and SCAR rifles. While those rifles aren’t revolutionary they are modern rifles that aren’t yet more AR-15s. They’re something different and while I really like the AR-15 platform it has become so common that it’s boring.

Although I expected the SAINT to be yet another AR-15 I was still disappointed because part of me was hoping for something interesting, like an announcement that Springfield Armory was going to bring in a civilian version of the VHS, the new bullpup rifle manufactured by the same company that currently manufactures Springfield Armory’s XD line of handguns. Still, I have to give respect to Springfield Armory’s marketing machine. It managed to build up hype for yet another AR-15, which can’t be easy to do in a market that is already saturated with AR-15s. Perhaps Springfield Armory should start renting its marketing department to other firearm manufacturers. It would probably make more on that than its firearm sales.

Politics is the Opium of the People

One of Karl Marx’s most famous sayings was “Religion is the opium of the people.” It’s a rather hypocritical criticism for a man whose philosophy makes the State into a religion to make. But as we all know, because we’re all suffering due to it, Marx was the victor in the great political philosophy war. Almost every government has been influenced by his works. Even the United States, which was once heralded as the beacon of individual freedom, has more in common with what Marx preached than what Mises preached. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to see statism become the predominant religion.

Statism has become such a predominant religion that previously established religions have had to step aside. Even Catholics are apt to side with statism before Catholicism:

One significant voice about climate change has been Pope Francis, who released a letter (called an “encyclical”) in 2015 titled Laudato si’ (or Praise be to you). The encyclical acknowledges human-caused climate change as an unavoidable reality and frames action as a moral imperative. Many hoped that this might have an impact among Catholics who still doubted climate science.

A group of researchers led by Texas Tech’s Nan Li neatly planned out a pair of before-and-after surveys to assess those hopes with data. So what impact did the encyclical actually have on American Catholics?

Many prominent climate “skeptics” and politicians demonstrated one possible response that fell somewhat short of sudden conversion—they stuck to their guns and criticized the pope’s statements. They argued that this was a political and economic issue rather than a moral or doctrinal one, leaving the pope perfectly capable of being fallible.

The point of this post isn’t about climate change but the way people are increasingly likely to let their political affiliation guide their ideals over their stated religious beliefs. Statism has become their true religion whether they want to admit it or not.

I don’t know how anybody who has been observing politics from the outside can deny that statism is the new religion. The State is treated as a god that provides all that is good in the world, other states are treated at demons that are responsible for all that is bad in the world, desecrating the symbols of the State is treated as hearsay, and for many political participation is almost indistinguishable from religious worship. The State even has its own prayers, such as the Holy National Anthem, and those who fail to publicly proclaim their faith but reciting the prayer are harshly criticized. People even sign up to be sent off to foreign lands so they can kill the heretics of heathen states.

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is the difference between Catholics and Lutherans. They both worship the same god but they have some disagreements that seem very important to them but absolutely trivial to outside observers. Likewise, the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties seem very important to party members but absolutely trivial to us outside observers.

And now we’re seeing that belief in Republicanism or Democratism is usurping belief in Catholicism or Lutheranism. That being the case, it’s not surprising to see Catholics side with their political party’s beliefs over a statement made by the Pope (and in fairness to Catholics, there are Catholics out there that don’t view the Pope very highly and do cool things like hold mass in Latin but their views in that case aren’t formed by their political affiliation). Politics really is the opium of the people and the people are very addicted.

Your Daily Two Minutes Fear

In George Orwell’s frighteningly prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four members of the Party in Oceania had to participate in a daily Two Minutes Hate. During the Two Minutes Hate the Party members are shown an image of Emmanuel Goldstein and are expected to scream obscenities, make threatening gestures, and perform other acts that demonstrate their hatred of the author of the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.

Here in the United States that theme has been taken a slightly different albeit related direction. Instead of Two Minutes Hate we have a daily routine of Two Minutes Fear. Although the theme is slightly different the purpose is the same: instill loyalty to the State. Where Oceania’s Two Minutes Hate tried to accomplish this by focusing the populace’s anger at an outside source the United States plays on the populace’s fears. By instill a deep fear of pretty much everything the State tries to convince people that it is the only thing keeping them safe.

Halloween was yesterday so today’s Two Minutes Fear is not surprisingly Halloween related:

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) – The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office will offer free Halloween candy X-ray screening at the Washoe County Courthouse and the Mills Lane Justice Center the day after Halloween.

Court security staff will screen candy at the X-ray stations inside the courthouse entrances from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, November 1, 2016. The Mills Lane Justice Center is at 1 S. Sierra Street and the Washoe County Courthouse is at 75 Court Street, both in downtown Reno.

Can you remember an incident in your neighborhood where a child ended up getting a piece of candy that had an embedded needle or razor blade in it? I’m guessing you can’t because the number of times that that has actually happened is so low that it is a statistical anomaly. If you’re worried about protecting your children you’d be far better off taking them to swimming lessons to protect them from drowning than getting their Halloween candy x-rayed by the Sheriff’s Office.

There is no value in taking candy to get x-rayed and there’s no conceivable way that the people running the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office are ignorant of that fact. After all, they have access to the number of criminal instances that have happened within the county and therefore know that the number of cases where metal has been embedded into Halloween candy is either zero or damn close to zero. But playing to people’s fears is what the State does. Why throw away a perfectly good opportunity to subtly encourage the people of Washoe County to be slightly more dependent on law enforcers to feel safe?