Author: Christopher Burg

A More Entertaining Show

A bunch of conservatives threw a tantrum because Nike chose an individual who failed to stand during prayers to skycloth as its mascot. While a bunch of triggered snowflakes cutting up their socks and burning their shoes is mildly entertaining, this has the potential to be extremely entertaining:

Ford, (F)a sponsor of the National Football League, has voiced support for NFL players exercising their right to free speech and peaceful protest after President Donald Trump urged fans to consider a boycott.

“We respect individuals’ rights to express their views, even if they are not ones we share,” the company said on Monday. “That’s part of what makes America great.”

Queue a bunch of triggered conservatives burning their Ford F-150s.

Yeah, I know it won’t happen. Virtue signalling only goes so far. Some people may be willing to cut up a $10 pair of socks or even burn an old pair of shoes to demonstrate their virtuousness, but few are willing to destroy a vehicle worth tens of thousands of dollars to show the world how much they love the skycloth.

Bernie Sanders: Acronym Master

Bernie Sanders has been standing on his high horse condemning companies for paying their employees the same amount he pays his interns at least since he entered politics. One of his primary targets as of late has been Amazon. Why? Because Amazon is a household name and nobody has ever gained political fame by going after a company that nobody has heard of. In his crusade to convince companies to pay their employees more than he pays his interns, Bernie has introduced legislation which, if nothing else, should receive in award for best convoluted acronym:

Sanders’ Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated “Stop BEZOS”)…

It’s too bad the ability to create clever acronyms wasn’t a more marketable skill because if it were, whichever intern came up with that one would have a promising career ahead of them.

What may be even more noteworthy than the acronym itself is the target. The name of this legislation makes it obvious that it’s a personal attack against Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos. The reason this is noteworthy is because it demonstrates that the myth that democratic governments are a neutral party is false. No government has ever been neutral. They always have a list of targets. However, democratic ones usually try to maintain a thin veneer of neutrality.

A Modest Proposal

It appears as though the confirmation hearing for the new Supreme Court justice went well:

The confirmation hearing for US President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has descended into “mob rule”, a Republican senator said.

John Cornyn of Texas spoke out as Democrats demanded an adjournment. Seventy people were arrested as protesters interrupted the proceedings.

Brett Kavanaugh faces four days before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If approved, the conservative appeals court judge would be expected to tilt the court’s balance to the right.

Minutes after Mr Kavanaugh, 53, entered the committee rooms on Tuesday, the hearing was disrupted by angry shouts from members of the public and lawmakers alike.

Shenanigans like this, where groups of people attempt to shutdown proceedings by screaming, seem to be becoming more common in this country. I can’t help but think that this is due to the fact that no mechanism exists today for resolving major political disagreements. This wasn’t always the case.

Long ago in this nation’s history there was a contentious president named Alexander Hamilton. He had a major disagreement with another politician named Aaron Burr.

That disagreement never devolved into public display of stupidity like that witnessed at this confirmation hearing though. Do you know why? Because there was a mechanism in place that allowed people like Hamilton and Burr to resolve their disagreements with each other in an unambiguously way.

What I’m saying is, there is an obvious solution to this country’s political disagreements.

Bring back dueling.

California Gives Bureaucrats More Leeway to Impost Pretrial Punishment

Bail is an old concept that allows individuals accused of a crime to avoid the pretrial punishment of rotting in a cage. The idea is that an individual hands over a substantial stake (along with travel documents such as passports) that will be returned when they show up for their trial date. Simple enough, right? Not so much. Since bail is set by bureaucrats of the court, a court that wants to punish somebody who hasn’t yet been found guilty of a crime can do so by setting a suspect’s bail absurdly high. The government of California decided that this practice was unfair and chose to eradicate it. However, as is always the case with government, there’s a catch:

California will end the cash bail system in a sweeping reform for the state. Rather than requiring defendants to pay in order to be released before trial, their release will hinge on an assessment of their risk to public safety.

“Today, California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are treated fairly,” Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement.

By rich and poor being treated fairly, Governor Brown means they will all have their fate solely in the hands of a board of bureaucrats. In other words, nothing has changed. Now, instead of setting bail absurdly high, bureaucrats of the court merely need to claim that an individual is too dangerous to be allowed to roam free if they want to punish them before their trail.

Impotent Rage

Nike announced its new mascot, Colin Kaepernick. Since Kaepernick made a name for himself by failing to stand during prayers to skycloth, a lot of conservatives are upset with Nike and have chosen to make Nike feel their impotent rage:

Following the announcement, the hashtags #BoycottNike and #JustBurnIt started trending on Twitter and shares started falling. Some angry consumers even posted photos and videos of themselves burning their Nike shoes and other gear to protest the company using the divisive figure in its 30th anniversary ad campaign.

I ask you this, is there a more useless way to protest a company than destroying your own property? I can’t think of one. If you purchase a pair of Nike shoes and later burned them, it doesn’t hurt Nike one bit, the company already has your money.

With that said, I am glad that Nike chose Kaepernick as its mascot, not because I feel that a backup quarterback best represents the company but because the memes that have sprung forth have been solid gold! This one is my favorite so far:

The People Who Decide Legality

Anybody who has looked into the history of the politics and legalities of firearms knows that the people who write and interpret laws regarding firearms are generally clueless about the subject matter. The same is true for technology (and possibly more so). The people who write and interpret laws regarding technology are almost always completely clueless about the subject matter. But what happens when you combine firearms and technology? An entirely new level of ignorance is unlocked:

On Monday, a federal court in Washington state blocked Cody Wilson and his company Defense Distributed from putting his 3D-printed gun schematic online. The court’s order—the latest in a years-long legal tussle that has picked up this summer—largely focuses on government rulemaking procedures, but a number of times it has to consider how technology works. When it does, it manages to get the technology remarkably wrong.

Perhaps the most comical of these is when the decision considers whether letting the schematic go online will cause “irreparable harm.” Most of the files are already online, Wilson’s attorneys argued, so what’s the harm in putting them up yet again? Yet the court disagreed, saying those online copies might be hard to find—only “a cybernaut with a BitTorrent protocol” could locate them “in the dark or remote recesses of the internet.”

If you think downloading a schematic for a firearm is insane, just want until you see what else I can do with a BitTorrent protocol! You’ll have to wait though since I’m short on BitTorrent protocols at the moment (please donate).

In addition to the use of the word cybernaut, I find it comical that the Internet Archive is considered a dark and remote recess of the Internet by this judge.

What should really stand out about this story though is that court officials who are entirely ignorant about the subject matter that they’re ruling on are allowed to make official rulings. When this judge issued their spiel about cybernauts using BitTorrent protocols to obtain schematics from the dark and remote recesses of the Internet, it had the force of law. If Defense Distributed violated this ruling, armed thugs with badges could be sent out to kidnap Cody Wilson or even kill him if he resisted their kidnapping attempt because an idiot in a magic muumuu has the power to make whatever they say an enforceable law. If that isn’t a great case against statism, I don’t know what is.

Creating New Definitions

I’ve often heard people say “words have meanings” when they believe somebody is using a word incorrectly (especially in a debate). It’s true, words do have meanings. Unfortunately, many words have multiple meanings. What makes this matter even more complicated is that words often have different meanings when used in a legal context. For example, a monopoly is generally considered an entity that operates without competition. However, according to the Fascist Communications Club (FCC) and a court that backed it, an entity that operates without competition isn’t necessarily a monopoly:

An appeals court has upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling that broadband markets can be competitive even when there is only one Internet provider.

The real tragedy here isn’t that the FCC and a court have decided that the absence of competition is a competitive market, it’s the fact that the ruling backs a regulatory environment that the government created.

The lack of competition in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) market isn’t due to market phenomenon, it’s due to regulations put in place by government officials to protect their favored ISPs from competition. But nobody (besides government officials and monopolists) likes monopolies so in order to appeal to the stupid sheep that continue to vote for them, government officials have had to create a new definition of monopoly that allows them to grant monopolies without actually calling the companies that receive their grants monopolists. It’s a complicated business. You should probably just pick up the newest version of the Newspeak dictionary and learn the new definitions and roll with them.

The Best Memory

The powers of the current United States president never cease to amaze me. For example, he apparently remembers the bombing of Pearl Harbor:

“I remember Pearl Harbor,” Trump reportedly told Abe as part of a tirade against the U.S. trade deficit with Japan. The president reportedly wanted better deals to help U.S. car and beef producers.

Considering Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941 and Trump was born in 1946, he apparently has a really good memory, just the best.

Love It or Leave It… If You Can

Love it or leave it is a common phrase used by nationalistic Americans who would rather tell people who criticize their beloved country to get the fuck out than acknowledge its imperfection. What these individuals don’t stop to consider is that getting out isn’t necessarily easy and it’s becoming more difficult everyday:

PHARR, Texas – On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official U.S. birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.

It’s pretty difficult to leave without a passport.

This is another sign of something that nationalists often fail to acknowledge, the United States is a police state. Controlling passports and other forms of travel papers has been a beloved strategy of tyrannical regimes to keep people from fleeing to greener pastures. The Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic were especially notorious for this. In fact in those two countries merely requesting official permission to leave could land you on a secret police watch list. Even if it didn’t, your chances of getting permission were slim unless your communist credentials were solid or you had some collateral (i.e. family members) to put up to ensure your return.

As the United States government continues to tighten the cuffs it has placed on the wrists of population, passport denials for citizens will become more frequent. This, of course, will be sold as necessary for national security but it will really be about stopping tax cattle from taking their wealth outside of the government’s power to steal it.

Why Connecting Things to the Internet Doesn’t Give Me Warm Fuzzies

The tend in seemingly every market is to take features that function perfectly well without an Internet connection and make them dependent on an Internet connection. Let’s consider two old automobile features: remote door unlocking and engine starting. Most modern vehicles have the former and many now come equipped with the latter. These features are usually activated by a remote control that is attached to your key chain and have a decent range (the remote for my very basic vehicle can reliably start the engine through several walls). Tesla decided that such a basic feature wasn’t good enough for its high-tech cars and instead tied those features to the Internet. Needless to say, the inevitable happened:

Tesla’s fleet network connection is currently down, which means that owners of the EV brand of cars aren’t able to sign into the mobile app. Unfortunately, this means that they can’t remote start or remote unlock their cars, and they’re also unable to monitor their car’s charging status.

In all fairness, this isn’t an issue unique to Tesla. Any product that makes features dependent on an Internet connection will run into a service outages at one point or another. Your “smart” coffee maker’s service will eventually go down, which will force you to walk over and press the brew button like a goddamn barbarian instead of kicking off the brew cycle from an app as you continue lying in bed.

When these Internet dependent features really bite you in the ass though is when the service provider goes out of business, especially if the product itself cannot operate without the Internet service. There are a lot of current “smart” devices that will soon end up in a landfill not because they mechanically failed but because their service provider went bankrupt. While the features that became unavailable when Tesla’s service went down weren’t critical for the functionality of the vehicle, no longer being able to remotely unlock doors, start the engine, or check the charging status would really degrade the overall user experience of the company’s vehicles.