Author: Christopher Burg

Airport Security Remains a Joke

How can one best illustrate the ineffectiveness of airport security? By pointing out that serial stowaways are a thing:

The woman known as a “serial stowaway” for her years-long history of sneaking onto airplanes was arrested once again at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport early Sunday — just two weeks after she managed to board a flight to London from the same airport.

In an attempt to divert attention away from the failure of the airport security team, a member of the local sheriff’s department made a statement that actually made them look even more incompetent:

The sheriff’s office had advocated for special treatment for Hartman, according to NBC Chicago.

“Releasing any seriously mentally ill person without support and treatment is never a good idea,” Cara Smith, the sheriff’s policy chief, told NBC Chicago on Thursday. “This order seriously reflects many things wrong with the criminal justice system.”

“We have a woman who is obviously suffering and in need of significant services,” she said, according to the station. “Without the help she clearly needs, history is likely to repeat itself.”

Not just any woman managed to board two flights but a woman who apparently doesn’t have full faculties.

Security theater continues to be a joke. Its existence only serves to ease the fears of ignorant flyers. Anybody who has read the seemingly ceaseless stream of stories about airport security failures is left to realize that airport and security are currently mutually exclusive terms.

The Rules Change When the Super Bowl Is in Town

Starting either late Sunday night or early Sunday morning an incident erupted at the Graduate Hotel in Minneapolis. Police have been very coy about the entire ordeal. From what little they have provided it seems that their officers are standing off against an individual who has locked himself in his room. What is especially noteworthy though is that as of this writing the situation is still ongoing:

A standoff between police and a man holed up in a hotel room near the University of Minnesota entered its second day Tuesday as authorities continued to work for a peaceful resolution.

[…]

Late Monday after 21 hours, the man released a woman who had been in the sixth floor room with him. She was uninjured and was talking with investigators, said University of Minnesota spokesman Chuck Tombarge.

The suspect was still in the room negotiating with officers from the U, Minneapolis, State Patrol and Brooklyn Park, he said.

I feel as though this guy is only alive because the Super Bowl is in town. If we look at the history of the Minneapolis Police Department, we could safely assume that the standard response to situations like this is to rush in and waste the guy. However, that kind of reaction tends to result in a lot of bad press and none of the higher ups in Minneapolis want to make any headlines that aren’t exceedingly positive while the city is hosting the most holy of holy events.

Monday Metal: Like Orpheus by Orphaned Land

Orphaned Land released a new album on Friday. It’s their usual affair, which is a blend of metal with traditional Middle Eastern music. Furthermore, the album has a lot of songs that attempt to bridge the gap between Judaism and Islam that exists especially in Israel. This song specifically, is about exactly that. Needless to say Orphaned Land realizes that metal really is a universal language.

A Reasonable Response

I often refer to laws as arbitrary rules. This doesn’t sit well with statists because they believe that laws are more than arbitrary declarations by politicians. In their world laws are the result of a problem being recognized, intelligently discussed, and sensibly addressed through appropriate legislation. But when the “problems” being identified are as minuscule as disposable straws, any claim that the problems being addressed by politicians are actual problems at all gets tossed out of the window:

Calderon, the Democratic majority leader in California’s lower house, has introduced a bill to stop sit-down restaurants from offering customers straws with their beverages unless they specifically request one. Under Calderon’s law, a waiter who serves a drink with an unrequested straw in it would face up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

“We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans,” Calderon explained in a press release.

If this were being proposed anywhere besides California, I’d bet against it going anywhere. But since it is being proposed in California, I give it even odds. That state’s politicians are especially loathsome. But I digress.

Let’s consider the problem. Apparently Calderon is upset about disposable straws ending up in landfills. I highly doubt Mother Gaia is going to keel over on account of a pile of straws, especially when I consider all of the other major environmental issues, many of which are created by the government. So I think it’s safe to list disposable straws as a rather minor issue deserving no real attention at all. But since it’s being given attention the punishment should at least be minor. However, Calderon’s proposal is to destroy the lives of waiters who give unrequested straws.

Waiters aren’t known for raking in money. A $1,000 fine is a pretty significant chunk of change for somebody making waiter money. But the real icing on the cake is the jail sentence. If a waiter is forced to miss work for months, they will likely find themselves without a job when they return. Furthermore, that waiter will then have a criminal record, which will make finding another job difficult. For the “crime” of distributing a disposable straw a waiter would find their life completely destroyed by this legislation.

There is nothing reasonable about this proposal but it could be passed into law because laws are arbitrary decrees issued by politicians.

Drunk Driving Laws Are About Profit, Not Safety

The blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) for sober driving (as opposed to drunk driving) is 0.08 for most of the country. Utah, however, decided to lower its BAC for sober driving to 0.05 and now neoprohibitionists want that standard set throughout the entire country:

The U.S. government-commissioned report by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine made multiple recommendations, including significantly lowering drunken driving thresholds. It calls for lowering the blood-alcohol concentration threshold from 0.08 to 0.05. All states have 0.08 thresholds.

But there’s a slight problem:

A Utah law passed last year that lowers the state’s threshold to 0.05 doesn’t go into effect until Dec. 30.

Utah’s arbitrary definition of drunk driving isn’t in effect yet so there’s no way an argument can be made that lowering the BAC to 0.05 reduces incidents of drunk driving. So if there’s no data indicating that Utah’s law is helping the situation, why is anybody arguing in favor of taking that law to the federal level? Money.

When somebody is charged with drunk driving they weren’t necessarily drunk. The dictionary definition of drunk is, “affected by alcohol to the extent of losing control of one’s faculties or behavior.” The legal definition of drunk is having a BAC over 0.08. Those two definitions are entirely unrelated. Alcohol affects different people in different ways. Some people are lightweights and a BAC of 0.08 impairs them while others aren’t impaired at all by a BAC of 0.08. If the real concern were dangerous driving, the law arbitrarily declaring drunkenness would be tossed out and the law against reckless driving would be used instead. But that would severely cut into government profits because it wouldn’t allow it to issue citations unless somebody was actually impaired.

Lowering the BAC for sober driving wouldn’t address the problem of dangerous drivers. It would increase government profits though, which is the actual reason such laws are sought after by politicians and the panels they commission.

The NSA Has Become More Honest and Open

Believe it or not, the National Security Agency (NSA) has a set of core values. Those values are little more than doublespeak but the NSA has finally decided to be a bit more honest and open about its intentions:

Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”

On January 12, however, the NSA removed the mission statement page – which can still be viewed through the Internet Archive – and replaced it with a new version. Now, the parts about honesty and the pledge to be truthful have been deleted. The agency’s new top value is “commitment to service,” which it says means “excellence in the pursuit of our critical mission.”

This reminds me of a picture I saw of a homeless guy holding up a sign that read something along the lines of, “I need money for booze and cigarettes. Hey, at least I’m not bullshitting you.” By removing honesty and truthfulness from its core values, the NSA has ceased bullshitting us as much. While that doesn’t help us plebs who are being constantly surveilled by the agency, we at least have a better idea of what we’re getting.

Getting Away with Murder

Yesterday Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that Officer Noor will be getting away with murder:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman has convened a grand jury to compel testimony and gather evidence in the July 2017 officer involved shooting death of Justine Damond.

For those wondering why I’m so sure Officer Noor won’t be charged it’s because grand juries have an extremely strong tendency to side with officers and that’s because grand juries are designed to intimidate jurors into siding with officers. Grand juries are usually just officious rituals tacked onto the act of dismissing charges against an officer.

Another point of interest in this decision is that it goes against one of Freeman’s previously made promise:

In recent years, Freeman has said he would no longer use grand juries to decide whether officers would be charged in police shootings, saying he would make those decisions himself to provide more accountability and transparency.

I understand that Freeman is caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he’s an employee of Hennepin County. As a government employee he has a conflict of interest. Officer Noor, like himself, is also a government employee and government employees are supposed to have each other’s backs. But if Freeman just declared Noor innocent there would likely be civil unrest. By reneging on his promise he can effectively let Noor off while claiming he did the best that he could but the decision was in the hands of a grand jury.

Welcome to the United States of America, the freest country on Earth… if you have a badge.

Prosecutors are Scum

If one mindlessly accepts the bullshit fed to them by public schools and other government propaganda departments, they believe that governments exist to protect the people by ensuring justice is served. After even a minor amount of analysis though one is left realizing that the purpose of government is to rob wealth from the masses. A good example of this is how government approaches justice.

For justice to be served there must first be a crime. A crime necessarily involves a victim. The government gets around this by espousing a nonsense belief that society, a concept that exists solely in our imaginations, can be a victim. It uses this belief to charge people with victimless crimes such as being in possession of a plant or firearm that has been arbitrarily declared verboten. Another factor that must exist for justice to be served is that only a person guilty of a crime is punished for it. Prosectors, however, are primarily concerned with conviction rates, not justice:

Prosecutors are supposed to disclose any information they uncover that might help the defense. But enforcing that obligation — and punishing those who ignore it — has been no easy task. After Mr. Thompson was freed, he won a $14 million judgment, only to have the Supreme Court reverse the award in 2011, ruling that prosecutors can be held financially liable only if they are shown to have a pattern of unethical behavior. He received nothing.

[…]

This time, lawyers for Mr. Jones and experts at the Innocence Project have pored over court records to compile evidence of a pattern.

“This was a galling disregard for the constitutional rights of defendants,” said Michael L. Banks, a lawyer with the Philadelphia firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “From the top of this office, there was a culture of winning. And winning meant getting convictions. And that’s why there’s such a striking pattern of wrongful convictions.”

Once again we see the redundancies built into the government to protect its power. Withholding evidence from the defense is supposed to be a crime itself but the Supreme Court ruled that it’s only a crime if there is a pattern of such behavior. What constitutes a pattern? Who knows. But it ensures that yet another barrier exists between corrupt prosecutors (a redundant term) and their victims so business can continue as usual. And that’s the way government works.

If Your Device Relies on the Cloud, You Don’t Own It

Towards the end of 2016 Pebble announced that much of it had been acquired by Fitbit. Since Pebble wasn’t doing well financially, news of it being acquired wasn’t surprising. However, Pebble fans had hoped that Fitbit was planning to continue the Pebble line. As is often the case with acquisitions, Fitbit was primarily interested in Pebble’s intellectual property, not its product portfolio. As part of the acquisition Fitbit promised to keep Pebble’s online services running for a while. Yesterday Fitbit announced the date it would be shutting down those services:

But for those who want nothing to do with Fitbit OS development and only care about how long their Pebbles will last, this news is bittersweet. According to Fitbit’s announcement, Pebble devices will continue to work after June 30, but these features will stop working: the Pebble app store, the Pebble forum, voice recognition features, SMS and email replies, timeline pins from third-party apps (although calendar pins will still function), and the CloudPebble development tool.

Pebble fans have been unhappy with the acquisition every since Fitbit announced that it was planning to shutdown Pebble’s online services. However, I think Fitbit was actually pretty decent about the entire thing since it left the online services running for as long as it did and even allowed Pebble developers to push some firmware updates to allowed existing Pebble devices to continue operating in some capacity without the online services. Unfortunately, even with those firmware changes, a lot of Pebble functionality will be crippled once Fitbit turns off the old Pebble servers.

So the lesson people should take away from this is that proprietary devices that rely on proprietary online services aren’t owned property, they’re temporarily licensed products. At any moment the manufacturer can decide to turn off the online services, which will effectively brick or reduce the functionality of the devices that rely on those services. Had the Pebble been an open source product the option would have at least existed for the community to develop new firmware and alternate online services to keep their Pebbles running.

America Had Always Been at War with the Great Powers

America was at war with the great powers. America had always been at war with the great power.

US Defence Secretary James Mattis has said competition between great powers, not terrorism, is now the main focus of America’s national security.

Just like that the War on Terror has taken a backseat and America is locked in a conflict with the forces of communism the great powers.

This shift in enemies isn’t surprising. America has been at war with terrorism for over one and a half decades and hasn’t achieved victory. It has to be pretty embarrassing for the world’s most powerful military to be unable to declare victory against a bunch of desert peasants in tents after more than a decade and a half. So instead of continuing to declare those peasants public enemy number one, America is going to shift focus to Russia and China who at least match up militarily and therefore aren’t as embarrassing to lose to.

The important thing to remember though is that America is at war with somebody and you should therefore continue to believe that the federal government is the only thing standing between you and certain death.