News You Need to Know – Page 44

The Attack in Orlando

Yesterday a person claiming allegiance to the Islamic State attacked the Pulse club in Orlando. In his wake are 50 bodies. Like vultures the politicians have already descended on this tragedy. Predictably Obama and Hillary are blaming the lack of gun control laws:

Mr Obama said the “brutal murder of dozens of innocent people” was a further reminder of how easy it was to acquire a deadly weapon in the US and shoot people.

[…]

Mrs Clinton said she was an “ally” of the gay community and used a statement to push for tighter gun controls. She said: “This reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets.”

The irony of two people who have used the might of the heavily armed United States military to murder innocent civilians complaining about the wide availability of weapons is not lost on me.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Trump is calling for Obama to step down because he didn’t speak the right words:

Meanwhile her Republican rival, Donald Trump, said Mr Obama should step down for refusing to use the words “radical Islam” when condemning the attack.

Absolutely nothing would have changed if Obama said the words “radical Islam” or any other phrase.

Politicians always leave a sick feeling in my stomach. Their concern for the dead only extends to their ability to exploit them for political posturing.

Over the next week or two the major media outlets are going to report on everything and anything they can get their hands on, even though almost everything will be speculation as an investigation hasn’t been conducted, so they can boost their ratings and up their advertisement revenue. I feel safe in saying that it’s best to ignore them until a proper investigation has been conducted and actual facts are available. Only time will reveal the facts. Until then the only thing that can be done is offering as much assistance to the families of the victims as possible.

Tragedy Of The Commons

Waze is a wonderful app that allows users to alert other users of traffic issues. I use the app because I like to report and know about road pirate activity but it’s also useful for avoiding traffic issues that aren’t caused by thieves with badges. Now that we’ve entered road construction season here in Minnesota Waze is useful to routing around the every changing landscape is the transportation infrastructure. But some people are unhappy with the app because it sometimes routes travelers through their neighborhoods:

When the traffic on Timothy Connor’s quiet Maryland street suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew who was partly to blame: the disembodied female voice he could hear through the occasional open window saying, “Continue on Elm Avenue . . . .”

The marked detour around a months-long road repair was several blocks away. But plenty of drivers were finding a shortcut past Connor’s Takoma Park house, slaloming around dog walkers and curbside basketball hoops, thanks to Waze and other navigation apps.

“I could see them looking down at their phones,” said Connor, a water engineer at a federal agency. “We had traffic jams, people were honking. It was pretty harrowing.”

And so Connor borrowed a tactic he read about from the car wars of Southern California and other traffic-weary regions: He became a Waze impostor. Every rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to deflect some of the flow.

He continued his guerrilla counterattack for two weeks before the app booted him off, apparently detecting a saboteur in its ranks. That made Connor a casualty in the social-media skirmishes erupting across the country as neighborhoods try to contend with suddenly savvy drivers finding their way on routes that were once all but secret.

Cry me a river. Mr. Conner must have quite the ego if he thinks he has some kind of right to decide who can and cannot use roads he doesn’t even own.

The issue he’s seeing, without being intelligent enough to realize it, is a tragedy of the commons. Most roads in this country are considered public (which is a fancy word for the State claiming exclusive ownership rights). They’re funded by money that has been stolen from the population in the form of taxes. That being the case, Conner has no right to bitch about how the road in his neighborhood is used. If it suddenly becomes popular with motorists and that popularity causes the road to degrade faster and to be less usable by people living in the neighborhood then there’s no recourse for the people of the neighborhood.

There is a solution to this: private roads. Suddenly everything changes. The people using your private road without your permission are trespassers. If they do want to use your road they can attempt to negotiate a deal with you. If you’re not interested in a deal then you can tell them to buzz off. But none of that is possible if the roads are public because then the State gets to decide who can and cannot use them.

Instead of whining about people using the road that they were forced to pay for, Mr. Conner should really try to see if there is a way to privatize the road so his neighbors and him can decide who gets to use it.

Switzerland Dodges a Bullet

The people of Switzerland demonstrated that their knowledge in mathematics is still sound. There was a proposal to implement universal basic income (UBI) and the people voted it down by a wide measure:

Swiss voters have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to introduce a guaranteed basic income for all.

Final results from Sunday’s referendum showed that nearly 77% opposed the plan, with only 23% backing it.

When I posted this link on Facebook one of my friends asked what my problem with UBI is. While there are a plethora of economic arguments to make against it my only real objection is the fact it can’t be implemented without government violence.

The wealth needed to fund UBI has to come from somewhere. There are two popular methods that governments use to fund their programs. The most common one is the seizing of wealth from the general populace, which is sometimes referred by the far more cuddly term “taxation”. If the Swiss government opted to fund UBI through taxation it would have been pulling the usual government routine of putting a gun to everybody’s head, demanding a tithe, and kidnapping and imprisoning anybody who refused to pay the tithe. As usual, if their intended kidnapping victims refused to go quietly they would be murdered.

The other common method governments use to fund their programs is printing money. This scam is more insidious since it doesn’t rely on overt violence. Instead of sending men with guns to thump skulls, a money printing scam steals wealth from anybody holding the government’s currency (this is why you don’t want to mess with government currency unless you’re under duress) by devaluing it. As more money is printed the purchasing power of each unit already in circulation diminishes.

No matter how you shake it, UBI can only be funded at the point of a government gun.

If You Don’t Talk To Your Kids About State Violence, Who Will

Those of you who have watched Equilibrium probably remember the protagonist’s son. There are a few scenes in the movie where he, wearing his little jackboot uniform, ensures his father is taking his government mandated drug. In the movie the State trains the children to find offenders who aren’t taking their mandated drugs and goes so far as to train them to spy on their own parents. It’s an idea taken right out of the pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sadly, that part of the movie isn’t entirely inaccurate today. Many parents unknowingly have little quislings living in their homes. To make matters worse, they often praise their children’s traitorous behavior. Take the Richardson family as an example:

Little 6-year-old Robbie Richardson called 911 on his dad when he “ran a red light.”

“911 what’s your emergency?,” Quincy Police Dispatcher Michael Bowes asks when he answers the call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC News.

“Um, Daddy went past a red light,” the dutiful kindergartner explained. “Daddy went past a red light. He has a black truck. He was in the brand new car, my mommy’s car, and we had to go to the car wash, and then he went past the red light.”

The 911 operator wasn’t a total douche and didn’t send a law enforcer to thump the father’s skull. But I’m sure the father had a good talk with his son about government violence, right? No:

As for their son, Robbie’s parents are proud of their little law-abiding citizen.

“I am proud of him that he knew if there was an emergency you call 911, but we were kind of in shock,” said McDonald. “We explained to him when we hung up the phone that you don’t call for those things, but if there was an emergency and someone needs to get a hold of the police, then you call.”

She’s now keeping clips of Robbie’s newfound fame because you never know what the future holds.

“He could become a police officer when he’s older and this would be cute to look back on,” she said. “I think I’m going to look into getting him a little ticket book.”

I’m going to have a headache all day from face palming after reading that. State violence begins at home. You should talk to your kids early on about the difference between actual crimes, ones involving a victim, and government decrees. Your children should also know that there is a chance of real violence anytime the police are brought into a situation. What may start as dad growing some cannabis so he can deal with his chronic pain, could end up in dead family pets and dad being kidnapped if a law enforcement agent finds out.

One thing is certain, if you don’t teach your children about government violence the public education system will brainwash them into believing the government is their friend. Programs like D.A.R.E. exist to convince kids at a young age that they can “trust police officers”, that “police officers are their friends”, and that they can always “tell a police officer anything”. These ideas could end up convincing your children to turn you in for violating a government decree.

If you don’t talk to your children about state violence, who will?

You Have No Right To Privacy In Minnesota If You Live In A Multiple Unit Dwelling

Are you a Minnesotan who lives in an apartment or condominium? If so, a local court of appeals has ruled that you have no expectation of privacy:

Stuart Luhm of Minnetonka had challenged his conviction on drug and weapons offenses because police did not have a warrant to enter his building in the August 2014 raid that was based on a tip from an informant.

The front door of the building is normally locked, but police used a key in a locked box to which police have access, and Brio the drug-sniffing dog confirmed that drugs were probably in the condo unit Luhm shared with a girlfriend.

That was the point when police got a search warrant and found large quantities of marijuana, 93 oxycodone tablets, 7 firearms, and two bullet-resistant vests.

Two members of the Court of Appeals ruled today that there is no expectation of privacy in the common areas of a condominium building. It also said the fact the building owners make access available to police negated the need for a warrant to enter the building.

What makes this case interesting is that the drug dog alerted in the common area and that gave the law enforcers the justification they needed to pull a warrant. Drug dogs are of questionable effectiveness, so the idea that a warrant can be issued because one alerted is a bit absurd in my book. But this ruling effectively opens the doors for law enforcers to enter multiple unit dwellings with drug dogs but without warrants, allow the dog to sniff around, and pull a warrant for any dwelling that the dog raises an alert on. That sounds like a wonderful revenue raising scam if I’ve ever seen one.

It also raises questions about medical cannabis users. What happens when a dog raises an alert on an apartment because it caught the sent of cannabis? The law enforcer can obtain a warrant, kick in the door, shoot the family pet, and basically force the medical cannabis user to divulge their medical history to somebody who isn’t a medical professional to avoid being kidnapped for the crime of not having purchased a single family house.

Since drug dogs are of questionable in their effectiveness, this ruling also opens the door for legal harassment of non-drug users. If a law enforcer wants to harass somebody living in an apartment all they have to do is bring a drug dog into the common area, claim the dog raised an alert on the apartment, pull a warrant, and legally enter and harass the person for however long they so choose (and maybe find evidence of another crime while they’re tossing the joint).

Of course, privacy has been dead for a long time in this country. This ruling doesn’t change much. But it’s worth noting because it’s a great example of how the courts and law enforcers often work together (as opposed to act as checks and balances against one another) to expand the State’s ability to expropriate wealth from the populace.

Employers Having A Difficult Time Finding Employees Who Can Pass A Drug Test

The war on drugs has permeated our entire society. Police have been militarized and given almost limitless power, entire industries have developed around detecting illicit drugs, and employers have become snoops that test employees for illicit drug use. The last one really baffles me.

Outside of being coerced at the point of the State’s gun, why would an employer waste their time and the time of their employees testing them for drug use? If an employee is performing their job satisfactorily an employer shouldn’t care what that employee puts into their body. If an employee isn’t performing their job satisfactorily then the employer will likely terminate them regardless of the reason. But employers have allowed themselves to become snoops for the State and is do doing have handicapped themselves:

SAVANNAH, Ga. — A few years back, the heavy-equipment manufacturer JCB held a job fair in the glass foyer of its sprawling headquarters near here, but when a throng of prospective employees learned the next step would be drug testing, an alarming thing happened: About half of them left.

That story still circulates within the business community of this historic port city. But the problem has gotten worse.

All over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: They are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test.

That hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies.

I’ve heard a lot of people who work in human resource departments at software development firms joke about how their companies would lose all of their employees if they actually started doing drug testing. It’s good evidence that users of illicit drugs aren’t incapable of performing reliably. This is especially true when many drugs that are declared illegal aren’t actually that harmful. Cannabis, for example, is an example of a drug that’s still illegal in many states but doesn’t actually cause a great deal of harm. In fact it can improve an individual’s performance at work by helping them coax with anxiety or stress.

The lesson from this story is that you should not volunteer to enforce the State’s policies. Even though the State has declared a massive list of chemicals illegal that doesn’t mean you, as an employer, should volunteer to test your employees. You gain no advantage from it (when’s the last time you heard of the State giving a sizable reward to an employer for drug testing their employees) and actually put yourself at a severe disadvantage by limiting your pool of potential employees.

The FBI Cares More About Maintaining Browser Exploits Than Fighting Child Pornography

Creating and distributing child pornography are two things that most people seem to agree should be ruthlessly pursued by law enforcers. Law enforcers, on the other hand, don’t agree. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) would rather toss out a child pornography case than reveal one stupid browser exploit:

A judge has thrown out evidence obtained by the FBI via hacking, after the agency refused to provide the full code it used in the hack.

The decision is a symptom of the FBI using investigative techniques that are usually reserved for intelligence agencies, such as the NSA. When those same techniques are used in criminal cases, they have to stack up against the rights of defendants and are subject to court processes.

The evidence that was thrown out includes child pornography allegedly found on devices belonging to Jay Michaud, a Vancouver public schools worker.

Why did the FBI even bring the case Michaud if it wasn’t willing to reveal the exploit that the defense was guaranteed to demand technical information about?

This isn’t the first case the FBI has allowed to be thrown out due to the agency’s desperate desire to keep an exploit secret. In allowing these cases to be thrown out the FBI has told the country that it isn’t serious about pursuing these crimes and that it would rather all of us remain at the mercy of malicious hackers than reveal the exploits it, and almost certain they, rely on.

I guess the only crimes the FBI actually cares to fight are the ones it creates.

Free Speech Is Inconvenient

Evelyn Beatrice Hall once said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That attitude used to be widely held but the freedom of speech is quickly becoming another casualty to statism. A lot of people are happy to support suppressing the speech of people they disagree with. Fortunately, the freedom of speech hasn’t been slain yet. There are a few holdouts who understand the value of the freedom of speech even if it can be inconvenient:

Rowling gave a brief but exquisite address in which she lauded free speech in the broadest terms, saying, “The tides of populism and nationalism currently sweeping many developed countries have been accompanied by demands that unwelcome and inconvenient voices be removed from public discourse … Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable.” Speaking out about an online petition that sought to ban Donald Trump from visiting the UK, she said, “I find almost everything that Mr Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine.”

The problem with suppressing free speech is the same problem inherent in any political solution: it sounds great while your people are in power but turns out not being so great when your opposition is in power.

Political power in democratic systems tends to change hands frequently. When things turn south the people tend to blame whatever party is in power and punish that party by handing one of its competitors the reigns. Since political power never actually solves the problems facing the people — and in fact is often the cause — entire nations of people end up trapped in a vicious cycle of flip flopping rules.

Consider the situation Rowling discussed. A lot of people in the United Kingdom support black listing Donald Trump from entering. On the one hand I can see their power. Trump is a fascist. But black listing him would set a precedence and that precedence could be used in a very different way at a future time. If the current party in power black listed Trump a future party could use that act as a justification to black list somebody else (for you Bernie Sanders supporters out there, a conservative party could come into power and black list him).

Handing the State more power always carries longterm consequences. If you hand it the power to censor bigots today it could very well use that power to censor political dissidents who are fighting bigotry in the future. The freedom of speech, like all freedoms, should be absolute.

Airport Security Isn’t The Only Security The TSA Sucks At

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) sucks at providing airport security. But the agency isn’t a one trick pony. Demonstrating its commitment to excellence — at sucking — the TSA is working hard to make its computer security just as good as its airport security:

The report centers on the the way TSA (mis)handles security around the data management system which connects airport screening equipment to centralized servers. It’s called the Security Technology Integrated Program (STIP), and TSA has been screwing it up security-wise since at least 2012.

In essence, TSA employees haven’t been implementing STIP properly — that is, when they’ve been implementing it at all.

STIP manages data from devices we see while going through security lines at airports, namely explosive detection systems, x-ray and imaging machines, and credential authentication.

[…]

In addition to unpatched software and a lack of physical security that allowed non-TSA airport employees access to IT systems, the auditors found overheated server rooms and computers using unsupported systems — and much more.

The observed “lack of an established disaster recovery capability” noted by the OIG is particularly scary. If a data center was taken out by natural disaster, passenger screening and baggage info would be rendered inaccessible.

Not only that, but there was no security incident report process in place, and there was “little employee oversight in maintaining IT systems.” And, auditors were not pleased at all that non-TSA IT contractors maintained full admin control over STIP servers at airports.

At what point do we write the TSA off as a failed experiment? I know, it’s a government agency, it’ll never go away. But the fact that the TSA continues to fail at everything and is allowed to continue existing really demonstrates why the market is superior to the State. Were the TSA forced to compete in a market environment it would have been bankrupted and its assets would have been sold to entrepreneurs who might be able to put them to use.

It’s time to ask the million dollar question. What will happen now? One of the reason government agencies fail to improve their practices is because there’s no motivation to do so. A government agency can’t go bankrupt and very rarely do failures lead to disciplinary action. In the very few cases where disciplinary action does happen it’s usually something trivial such as asking the current head of the agency to retire will full benefits.

Meanwhile air travelers will still be required to submit to the TSA, which not only means going through security theater but now potentially means having their personal information, such as images from the slave scanners, leaked to unauthorized parties.

The War On Drugs Breeds More Dangerous Drugs

Imodium may be the new over-the-counter scary drug but it appears that W-18 is the new illicit scary drug (which is in desperate name of a marketing department to give it a better name):

For the second time in a year, police in Alberta have uncovered a drug called W-18, a synthetic opioid that’s 100 times more powerful than fentanyl — and 10,000 more powerful than morphine.

Police in Edmonton announced Wednesday they seized four kilograms of the substance in powder form during a raid carried out in December during a fentanyl investigation. The powder was then sent to Health Canada, which confirmed on Tuesday that it was W-18.

Staff Sergeant Dave Knibbs told a press conference that this amount of powder could have produced hundreds of millions of W-18 pills.

A stronger substance that people can voluntarily put into their bodies? The horror!

In all seriousness though, W-18 is likely a more dangerous drug than fentanyl but it is also a byproduct of the war on drugs. The iron law of prohibition states that the potency of a prohibited substance increases along with the enforcement of the prohibition:

Super potent pot is not a market failure. It is simply the result of government prohibition. In fact, it is one of the best examples of the iron law of prohibition. When government enacts and enforces a prohibition it eliminates the free market which is then replaced by a black market. This typically changes everything about “the market.” It changes how the product is produced, how it is distributed and sold to consumers. It changes how the product is packaged and in particular, the product itself. The iron law of prohibition looks specifically at how prohibition makes drugs like alcohol and marijuana more potent. The key to the phenomenon is that law enforcement makes it more risky to make, sell, or consume the product. This encourages suppliers to concentrate the product to make it smaller and thus more potent. In this manner you get “more bang for the buck.”

During alcohol prohibition (1920-1933), alcohol consumption went from a beer, wine, and whiskey market to one of rotgut whiskey with little wine or beer available. The rotgut whiskey could be more than twice as potent of the normal whiskey that was produced both before and after prohibition. The product is then diluted at the point of consumption. During the 1920s all sorts of cocktails were invented to dilute the whiskey and to cover up for bad smells and tastes.

Therefore, the current high potency of marijuana is not a market phenomenon, nor is it a market failure. It is primarily driven by government’s prohibition and the odd incentives that this produces on the sellers’ side of the market. Under these conditions consumers may prefer higher potency marijuana, ceteris paribus, but it is not primarily a consumer driven phenomenon.

W-18 is the byproduct of stronger enforcement of opioid prohibitions. Since law enforcers are concentrating their efforts on opioids such as heroine and fentanyl the producers are responding by making a more concealable version (as the product is more potent less is needed for the desired effect) that is easier to transport under the watchful eye of the badged men with guns.

This is just another example of how the war on drugs has actually made the drug market more dangerous. In addition to adding the risk of men with guns kicking down the doors of drug users at oh dark thirty and shooting their family pets, the war on drugs has also made the substances themselves more dangerous by creating an environment that motivates producers to increase the potency. So long as the war on opioids continues we will see more potent forms. In a few years W-18 will likely become a footnote in history; just another less potent version of a new opioid. This trend will continue until the war on drugs is ended and producers are no longer encouraged to make ever increasingly potent substances.