Month: November 2017

Turning Minneapolis into a Prison to Appease Our NFL Masters

Back in 2008 the Republican National Convention was hosted in St. Paul. In response the city was basically turned into a prison. Surveillance equipment was setup everywhere, heavily armed and armored officers were out on patrol, streets were shutdown, etc.

If you missed out on that experience or want to relive the experience, I have some news for you. The city of Minneapolis, in order to appease our National Football League masters, is going to be turned into a prison:

The final plans, including which streets are closed and when, are expected to be announced in the next couple of days.

If the most recent Super Bowls in San Francisco and Houston are an indication, the security operation is like none other the Twin Cities has ever seen. Snipers will be on rooftops and in buildings in strategic places. Officers in head-to-toe commando gear will be on the streets gripping assault rifles against their chests.

Minneapolis Police Cmdr. Scott Gerlicher said the influx of federal agents to Minnesota will be the largest in the 52 years of Super Bowl history. “We are prepared for anything that might come our way,” he said last week.

The full extent of the security won’t be visible, but it will be everywhere: in the skies and on the ground. Whatever equipment is available will be used — from tactical vehicles to helicopters and boats.

[…]

In addition to uniformed officers, there will be other obvious visible protections, including 2.5 miles of concrete barriers topped with wire fencing. Some busy spaces will follow NFL bag restrictions (including no purses) and have metal detectors. The airspace will be restricted above the stadium during the game.

All of this for one fucking game.

In addition to turning the city into a prison, the security arrangements will likely impact local businesses. A yet undisclosed number of streets in Minneapolis will be shutdown, which will impact any businesses that rely on them. And I highly doubt the NFL will compensate those businesses for such losses. Likewise, I highly doubt the City of Minneapolis will give those businesses a tax credit as compensation for not being able to use the roads they pay taxes to use. After all, they’re nobodies compared to the might that is the NFL.

I hope that the worse winter storm in the history of the state hits on Super Bowl weekend. It would be fun to see how well these assholes handle security in several feet of snow.

If Your Device Requires a “Cloud” Service, It’s Not Your Device

It’s time for a pop quiz. If you purchase a device and its basic functionality relies on a “cloud” service (somebody else’s computer), do you own it?

No, you don’t:

Bricking a device, which usually happens during firmware update gone wrong, is never a good thing. It’s even worse when companies do it to their devices intentionally. According to emails received by users, Logitech will be intentionally bricking all Harmony Link devices via a firmware update as of March 16th, 2018. The bad news was first reported by Bleeping Computer.

According to this Harmony Link review, the device cost $100.00 when it was released. For that $100.00 I’m sure there were a lot of consumers who mistakenly believed that they were buying the device when, in fact, they were merely renting it. Now the owner of those devices, Logitech, is going to turn them off.

Something to Look Forward To

Here’s something to look forward to:

Nov 8 (Reuters) – The Minnesota Senate will furlough its workers and suspend operations as soon as Dec. 1 due to an ongoing funding dispute with Governor Mark Dayton, the chamber’s Republican leader announced on Wednesday.

Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka said his chamber will run out of money by next month unless the state courts restore funding for the legislature that was vetoed by Dayton. He added that the Senate plans to seek certain funds from the Legislative Coordinating Committee which would keep the chamber operating through Jan. 12.

My only hope is that this suspension of operations ends up being permanent. But that’s a bit too optimistic.

I’m sure this news is being treated with a significant amount of gloom and doom by statists. They probably believe that Minnesotans will end up having to resort to cannibalism because all of the food will magically disappear along with the Senate. But we’ve all been through this before. The Minnesota government has a tradition of “shutting down” various parts of itself and so far the state hasn’t collapsed. In fact it’s usually hard to tell anything is amiss.

The Minnesota Senate suspending operations won’t cause anybody any harm. It will actually reduce harm since the senators won’t be passing new legislation. So kick back, relax, and enjoy a reprieve from the vultures.

The War Is Not Meant to Be Won

One of the defining characteristics of an empire is that it is almost constantly at war. War is the great excuse for the State to expand its power. Need to increase taxes? Start a war to justify the increase. It might seem like a bad idea due to the expense of waging war but if you plunder enough from the other nation you can walk away with a tidy profit. Are you a politician who needs to line you pockets with some cash? Start a war and watch the campaign contributions and other perks roll in from the defense contractors. Do you want to expand your surveillance powers? If you start a war, you need to search for enemy spies!

As Randolph Bourne said, “For war is essentially the health of the State.” So it should come as no surprise that the United States, which is already engaged in a series of wars, is positioning itself to enter another:

Mr Dumont said calculating “even the roughest” potential casualty figures would be extremely difficult.
He also gave some detail on what the first hours of a war would involve.

“The only way to ‘locate and destroy – with complete certainty – all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs’ is through a ground invasion,” he wrote in response to Congressman Lieu’s questions about a potential conflict.

The risks involved included a potential nuclear counter-attack by North Korea while US forces attempted to disable its “deeply buried, underground facilities”, he said.

A potential nuclear counter-attack might sound horrific but you have to remember that nobody involved in developing this assessment and nobody involved in issuing the war order would actually be sent to fight the war. Casualties are easy to justify when other people are the ones dying.

Let the Rationing Begin

According to socialists nationalizing healthcare brings a utopian world where everybody can get access to any medical care they need for free. While nationalized healthcare may look good on the surface but when you scratch off the thin venire there is an ugly world or rationing underneath:

The NHS has recently released treatment guidelines stating that patients who are obese or who smoke will be banned from receiving “non-urgent” surgeries unless they first lose weight or quit smoking. While the NHS claims the new guidelines will increase the level of personal responsibility taken by patients, the healthcare bureaucrats behind this rule also acknowledge that it will help to free up limited healthcare resources.

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of a government is to make money for the members of the government. It does this through expropriation. In order to maximize its profits, a government needs to convince the people it’s steal from that it’s a legitimate entity, which requires throwing them bones. “Free” healthcare is a pretty large bone. By setting aside some of its stolen money a government can convince a lot of people of its legitimacy, which allows it to keep stealing for longer. But “free” can quickly begin to cut into the government’s profits. Once that happens the government begins finding ways to curtail the “free” goods or services.

The National Health Service (NHS) is going for the low hanging fruit by cutting off smokers and obese individuals, which will likely enjoy popular support since both conditions are voluntarily brought on by the individual. However, the rationing won’t stop there. At some point the NHS will likely being to issue guidelines against treating people with certain “undesirable” traits such as genetic conditions that cause an individual to be more prone to develop a debilitating condition. To make matters worse, the British government won’t refund any tax dollars to those who are deemed ineligible for “free” healthcare, which will deprive those individuals of money they could spend on private healthcare options.

Using Politics is Akin to Using Astrology to Solve a Physics Problem

According to gun control advocates we have a gun problem. Gun rights advocates have been rebutting their opponent’s claim by claiming that we have a mental health problem. Who the hell is this “we” they’re both talking about? I have neither a gun nor a mental health problem.

The biggest problem with political debates is that they rely on collectivism. Collectivism is a concept that exists solely in our heads, it doesn’t exist in the real world. Each individual is a unique entity. Just because they share some common traits with other individuals doesn’t mean they are like those individuals. If membership in a group controlled an individual’s actions, we would never have any schisms.

The political means fails to solve problems because it doesn’t operate in the framework of reality. Using politics to solve a problem is no different than using astrology to solve a physics problem. When the very premise of your strategy is make believe, you can’t expect to develop a real solution.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Not all heroes wear capes. Some heroes wear business suits and work as accountants and lawyers who specialized in defending their client’s assets from thieving governments:

The world’s most profitable firm has a secretive new structure that would enable it to continue avoiding billions in taxes, the Paradise Papers show.

They reveal how Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its controversial Irish tax practices by actively shopping around for a tax haven.

It then moved the firm holding most of its untaxed offshore cash, now $252bn, to the Channel Island of Jersey.

Apple said the new structure had not lowered its taxes.

It said it remained the world’s largest taxpayer, paying about $35bn (£26bn) in corporation tax over the past three years, that it had followed the law and its changes “did not reduce our tax payments in any country”.

The article appears to be implying that Apple is lying about its tax payments not changing. However, I’m betting that Apple is being truthful and the move prevented its tax payments from increasing after the crackdown in Ireland (Ireland had a sweet deal until its neighbors, upset that Ireland was getting a lot of business, put pressure on it to bring its corporate tax structure up to their standards).

The accountants and lawyers that Apple hired to pull this off deserve the same applause as anybody else who stops a thief from mugging another person. Unfortunately, the world is populated with statists so those heroes will be treated like villains.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

Proponents of gun control aren’t the only ones clamoring for a ban of some sort after the recent Texas shooting. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is setting the ground work to once again push for a ban on effective cryptography:

A Federal Bureau of Investigation official said today that the agency has been unable to access an encrypted phone used by the gunman who killed 26 people at a rural Texas church on Sunday.

At a press conference, Christopher Combs, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, said the phone had been transported back to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia for examination. Investigators have identified Devin Patrick Kelley as the gunman in the shooting, which unfolded in the town of Sutherland Springs.

“Unfortunately, at this point in time, we are unable to get into that phone,” Combs said.

The shooter is dead and from what I’ve seen his motivations are understood. There is no evidence that he was part of a network that is planning other similar attacks so who fucking cares if the FBI can’t get into his phone? Statists. Why? Because the FBI’s inadequacy, in their minds, makes everybody unsafe. It’s the same mindset that causes people to demand a ban on firearms. If a technology allows an individual to defend themselves, especially against government agents, then it is dangerous and must be prohibited.

Statists want nothing more than to turn the entire country into Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Sordid State of Conspiracy Theories

Remember when conspiracy theories involved shadowy organizations pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to advance plots so complex that they made James Bond villains look like simpletons by comparison?

Now we get mundane plots like George Soros paying some leftist militant to attack Rand Paul in order to send a message. I blame the degraded literacy rates. Nobody appears capable of crafting complex plots like those found in many novels. Instead people today seem to only be capable of concocting straight forward storytelling of the likes found in most Marvel movies.

Universal Background Checks Will Fix Everyth… Never Mind

There was a mass shooting this weekend in Texas, which means the gun control advocates are screaming about all of the new restrictions we need to put into place to punish the gun owners who had nothing to do with the shooting. Besides banning “assault weapons,” whatever that made up category means, the gun control advocates are also screaming about the need for universal background checks. However, I can say with authority that universal background checks wouldn’t have stopped the Texas shooting. How can I say such a thing authoritatively? Because the government dropped the ball:

ATLANTA (AP) — The gunman who slaughtered 26 people at a Texas church was able to buy weapons because the Air Force failed to report his domestic-violence conviction to the federal database that is used to conduct background checks on would-be gun purchasers, authorities said Monday.

The very same government that’s supposed to handle universal background checks can’t even get its shit together enough to maintain its database properly. Why am I supposed to have faith in it again?