News You Need to Know – Page 74

Something to Get the Neocon’s Panties in a Bunch

If there are two things neocons hate it’s people who don’t show blind obedience to the state and people who don’t fit the traditional Christian idea of gender and sexuality. Fortunately the universe hates neocons and therefore trolls the living shit out of them from time to time:

Defence secretary Chuck Hagel has approved gender treatment for Pte First Class Manning, who was formerly known as Bradley.

The move came after the bureau of prisons rejected the Army’s request to transfer her from a military facility.

Needless to say this has some of my neocon acquaintance very upset because, you see, “Our tax dollars are paying for this!” Of course the very people bitching about our tax dollars going to provide Chelsea her treatment are the ones who demanded the situation be created in the first place. When Chelsea did the world a huge favor by making public the war crimes being committed by the United States military it was the neocons who were the loudest in demanding her head. Well they got exactly what they wanted. She’s will be rotting in a cage for 35 years, which makes her medical needs the state’s responsibility.

Maybe if those neocons had recognized Chelsea’s act for what it was, a necessary release of information needed to keep the military honest, they wouldn’t have demanded this very situation be created.

I can’t even begin to express how happy this decision makes me. If for no other reason then it jabs those neocon fuckwits in the side for demanding she be punished for doing the right thing. While this isn’t justice it’s at least something.

Not Everything You Read Online is True

This is going to come as a shock to some people but not everything you read on the Internet is true. Now that I’ve shattered your world let me discuss something that should raise red flags whenever you read it: anything that looks like propaganda. Propaganda can be easily recognized as it will make one side of an issue look perfect and the other as evil as possible. The reason I’m bringing this up is because there is a lot of people in the shooting community have, shall we say, a negative view on Muslims. While I can’t see wisdom in shoehorning approximately 2.2 billion people into a single caricature but I digress. Not too long ago news was circulating that Isis had handed down a decree that all girls between the ages of 11 and 46 be subjected to genital mutilation. This spread like wildfire and I heard plenty of variations on “See! Muslims are a bunch of barbarians!” As it turns out this story, like many stories that put a group into a very negative light, is probably bullshit:

top UN official quoted from a statement saying that Isis wanted all females aged between 11 and 46 in the northern city to undergo the procedure.

Jacqueline Badcock said the decree was of grave concern.

But media analysts say the decree seen on social media may be a fake.

It has typos and language mistakes and is signed by “The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”, a name the group no longer uses, instead referring to itself as the Islamic State.

Some bloggers suggest that the alleged fatwa, which has been circulated on social media for about two days, may have been aimed at discrediting Isis.

Isis is a bad gang and can be easily discredited without fabricating stories. It is a bad enough gang that the story about female genital mutilation is believable. But just because something is believable doesn’t mean it’s true. And that brings us to today’s lesson. If it sounds like propaganda take it with a grain of salt. Try to verify the information through credible (or at least pseudo-credible) sources before you begin writing your epic hate-filled Internet rant on random message forums.

Federal Government Gave Local Gangs Military Equipment

Fellow denizens of Minnesota, and me neighbors in North Dakota, we are facing a major problem. The federal government has been caught providing military equipment to local gangs:

The department got the 3-ton Humvee about three years ago through a federal program that provides local police departments and state agencies with military weapons and equipment no longer needed or used in the global war on terror.

A total of 1,549 weapons or other equipment — with an estimated value of about $3 million — has been distributed in North Dakota over the past decade by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency. More than 8,500 items have gone to law enforcement agencies in Minnesota.

The equipment ranges from night vision goggles and gun silencers to mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicles, better known as MRAPs.

I’m not sure what the federal government’s thinking here. Arming violent gangs who are eight times more likely to kill you than terrorists is not an effective method to fight terror. It is however a good way of perpetuating terror. Having a bunch of thugs roll up to your house in a Humvee at two in the morning, kick in your door, shoot your dog, and kidnap you is certainly a terrorizing situation and one that happens far more frequently than attacks by foreign terrorists.

Also, as a side note, when the fuck will I legally be allowed to buy a suppressor in this forsaken state? If people with a history of performing violent acts can have them then why can’t nonviolent people like me have them?

You’re a Terrorist and You’re a Terrorist and You’re a Terrorist; We’re All Terrorists

Since it’s existence was confirmed people have been wondering exactly a person had to meet to be added to one of the government’s terrorist watchlists. The most transparent government in history has remained tight lipped about the criteria claiming it would be a threat to national security. So we’ve been left to guess and ponder. That is until now:

The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.

The Intercept managed to get a hold on a complete copy of the guidebook and release it in its entirety to the public [PDF]. It’s a sizable document and I haven’t read through the entire thing. What I have read indicates that it’s a legalese justification for basically putting anybody on the terrorist watchlist without worrying about pesky things like due process or evidence. In fact it’s an easy list to get onto but not an easy list to get off of:

The difficulty of getting off the list is highlighted by a passage in the guidelines stating that an individual can be kept on the watchlist, or even placed onto the watchlist, despite being acquitted of a terrorism-related crime. The rulebook justifies this by noting that conviction in U.S. courts requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas watchlisting requires only a reasonable suspicion. Once suspicion is raised, even a jury’s verdict cannot erase it.

The only way you’re leaving this list is in a box. Just kidding, even being dead isn’t a good enough reason to be removed from the list:

Not even death provides a guarantee of getting off the list. The guidelines say the names of dead people will stay on the list if there is reason to believe the deceased’s identity may be used by a suspected terrorist–which the National Counterterrorism Center calls a “demonstrated terrorist tactic.” In fact, for the same reason, the rules permit the deceased spouses of suspected terrorists to be placed onto the list after they have died.

What this leak does is confirm most of the suspicions us crazy libertarians have had for a while now: the United States is without a shadow of a doubt a police state. Secret lists of people of interest that require no due process to get on and are practically impossible to get off of (after all, the government wouldn’t suspect you of wrongdoing if you weren’t doing something wrong) have been a favorite tool of especially tyrannical states since, most likely, the beginning of states.

Papers Please

One of my biggest gripes with the whole “illegal” immigrant issue is that those arguing for stronger enforcement against people born outside of this country are necessarily arguing for the establishment of a police state (which we already have so they’re really arguing for an even more tyrannical police state). In order to ensure only citizens and “legal” immigrants are in this country there needs to be a way to identify them and a way to verify their identities. That necessity leads to shit like police checkpoints where everybody has to present their papers for inspection:

The speed limit drops to 35 mph, the first warning of the upcoming checkpoint. All vehicles must stop. Drivers must use low beams. Wray pulls up along a string of neon-orange cones. “Slow down, slow down,” she says. “Hmm. I don’t see anybody. Today might be a lucky day. I don’t see anybody. Maybe they are in the car? Oh, there they are.”

A stocky uniformed man emerges from a shaded hut on the edge of the road and crosses to Wray’s window.

“How you doing?” he says, peering into the pickup.

“Doing good,” she says.

“U.S. citizens here?” the Border Patrol agent questions.

“U.S. citizens,” Wray says.

The agent nods, steps back and beckons us onward.

Wray exhales deeply, loosens her grip on the steering wheel, and presses on the gas.

A frontier war is being waged in southern Arizona, but it’s many miles north of the Mexico border. People are fed up with the immigration checkpoints. A round-the-clock U.S. Border Patrol presence at the checkpoints means that American citizens must endure inspection when they commute to work or run errands; every major road has one of these blockades.

I’m old enough to remember when people used the existence of checkpoints in the former Soviet Union as evidence that the nation was suffering under a tyrannical regime. Now we have the exact same shit here. Between citizenship checkpoints, sobriety checkpoints, and random police checkpoints setup when officers are looking for a suspect we have plenty of opportunity to emulate Soviet citizens by presenting our papers to thugs with badges. I guess checkpoints have gone from tyrannical to free now that we have them because I don’t hear as many people bringing them up as evidence of tyranny anymore.

Some people less apt to bow down to authority figures my contest the legality of these citizenship checkpoints. But Tuscon exists in the “Constitution free zone” where we have even fewer privileges than normal. In all probability these checkpoints are completely legal due to where they are because this is the land of the free.

Meet the New Narrative

I remember not too long ago when everybody was beautiful. At least that’s what we were told to say. We were told to say this because eating disorders were becoming a thing of concern, predominantly with girls who believed they were fat. But the narrative has changed. Now we’re all a bunch of fat fucks who are too stupid to buy food without being patronized by our grocery carts:

The panel came up with six preferred strategies: discount coupons for SNAP recipients; rebates of up to $60 for healthy purchases on EBT cards; buy one get one free deals for SNAP recipients; a targeted marketing plan to promote healthy food; a USDA loyalty card; and new specialized shopping carts.

The “MyCart grocery cart” would provide dividers for shoppers to make sure they are selecting enough items in each “MyPlate” category, the USDA’s food icon.

“MyCart is a nonfinancial approach that would use behavioral economics to encourage healthier purchases by any consumer, including SNAP participants,” the report said.

The cart would be color-coded, physically divided, and have a system installed so that when the shopping cart reaches its healthy “threshold” it would congratulate the customer.

“The algorithm would group the purchases to classify them using the MyPlate designations and to provide consumers with a message of support or encouragement (e.g., “You achieved a MyCart healthy shopping basket!”),” the report said.

As with most things, this idea is being aimed first at people on government assistance. It’s an easy category to target since the government can justify its targeting by claiming that it’s footing the bill. But it also knows that grocery stores aren’t going to ask customers if they’re shopping with food stamps and, if so, give them a different cart. Instead grocery stores would be more apt to just make every cart a “MyCart” or whatever other stupid patronizing name the government comes up with for its program.

I often wonder if the government’s sudden push to call us all a bunch of fat fucks is causing or will cause an uptick in the number of people with eating disorders. Maybe that’s the plan. After all, the government only cares about the statistics. It doesn’t matter to the bean counters if there are less obese people due to healthier eating and more exercise or anorexia.

Prepare to Pay More for Your Subjugation

Fellow slaves I have some unfortunate news. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which enjoys a monopoly on airport security (either directly or by having to approve any alternative security system), has decided to raise its prices:

— Airline passengers at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and airports across the U.S. are going to have to pay a little more starting Monday.

KNX 1070′s Ed Mertz reports the Transportation Security Administration fees tacked on to tickets are going up to $5.60 for all flights.

After Monday $5.60 of your ticket will go towards funding the TSA’s programs to confiscate any containers that can store over 3 oz. of liquids, steal things from your checked baggage, have perverts look at your naked body with a scanner, sexually assaulting you if you don’t want to go through a scanner, and verbally harassing you if they believe you look suspicious or an agent is just having a bad day.

While $5.60 doesn’t sound like much it is an absurd charge once you actually consider what that money is going towards.

I’m Not the Only One Who Thinks Hillary is Interchangeable with Most Republicans

Let’s say you had some financial conference where George W. Bush was planned to be your keynote speaker. Now, for whatever reasons, let’s say Georgie couldn’t make it. Who would you get to replace him? Perhaps Dick Cheney? Too frightening. Maybe John McCain. But he’d just waste everybody’s time talking about how he wants to butcher every man, woman, and child in the Middle East. There’s always Mitt Romney. Then again you never know what he’s going to say with how often he changes his mind on things. I guess that leaves one well-known politician who exhibits everything that is the Republican Party; Hillary Clinton:

Former President George W. Bush was supposed to give a speech to Ameriprise Financial conference in Boston next week but had to bow out because he’s recovering from surgery on a bum knee. But the financial services firm was able to secure a prominent substitute speaker: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s speech, confirmed by two sources familiar with the event, is the latest in a series of paid speaking-circuit gigs for the former secretary of state and likely 2016 presidential contender, who charges upward of $200,000 to deliver remarks or take part in question-and-answer sessions.

$200,000 dollars? And she is bitching about being broke? Talk about fiscal irresponsibility, which is yet another reason she’s the perfect Republican.

But, seriously, if anybody wants a keynote speaker to talk about bombing people in the Middle East and terrorizing people at home I’d be willing to do so for much less than $200,000. I might even be willing to do it so for the price of my expenses alone if I could record it and post it on YouTube later. I’d even dress up as a fascist for full effect. My e-mail address is on the left-hand side of this blog. If you’re interested drop me an e-mail.

Federal Judge Rules California’s Death Penalty Unconstitutional

In a strange twist of fate a federal judge has ruled that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional, unless it’s being performed by a police officer at the scene. But what really got me was the justification:

LA QUINTA, Calif. — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that California’s death penalty system is so arbitrary and plagued with delay that it is unconstitutional, a decision that is expected to inspire similar arguments in death penalty appeals around the country.

The state has placed hundreds of people on death row, but has not executed a prisoner since 2006. The result, wrote Judge Cormac J. Carney of United States District Court, is a sentence that “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

That sense of uncertainty and delay, he wrote, “violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”

So it’s cruel and unusual punishment to sentence somebody to death and then never kill him? It seems to me that sentencing somebody to death and then fucking killing him would be more cruel (although not unusual in this country).
I know if I was on death row I’d be totally cool with not being executed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad this ruling was handed down since I don’t believe an organization crime syndicate such as the state has the right to execute somebody. But the reason given is just bizarre in my opinion.

Salon Goes Full Retard Again

You writers at Salon are like an enteral fountain of stupid ideas. That’s probably because…

More to the point, you’re all a bunch of state worshiping socialists. As far as you’re concerned the only problem in this world is that we don’t have a state boot stomping on our faces quite enough yet. And that leads you to say really stupid things like this:

They’re huge, they’re ruthless, and they touch every aspect of our daily lives. Corporations like Amazon and Google keep expanding their reach and their power. Despite a history of abuses, so far the Justice Department has declined to take antitrust actions against them. But there’s another solution.

Is it time to manage and regulate these companies as public utilities?

No. No it’s not. And I’m going to tell you why it’s not by using your own stupid arguments against you. You see, every argument you use against Google and Amazon can be equally applied to the state.

Big Tech was created with publicly-developed technology.

Publicly-developed technology are built by private companies. Think of the state’s major technologies. Fighter jets, bombers, tanks, drones, missiles, and aircraft carriers are all built by private companies. The technology that runs the Internet? Yup, it’s all made by private companies such as Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM (which has quite a history of building things for governments). When the state wants something it throws money at private companies that actually build it. Without private companies there would be no “publicly-developed” technology.

Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society.

Then why ruin it by giving it over to the state? The only thing the state does competently is steal and break shit. While it does throw some money at private companies to build substandard roads much of its resources are invested in militarizing the police so they can better murder our pets, building more efficient ways for our military to blow up people overseas, and protecting the politically connected private companies from its not as well connect competitors.

If Google and Amazon were nationalized the would use them to collect even more data on you and I. Gmail would exist to allow the state to know when we’re communicating about something illegal and our purchases on Amazon would be scrutinized to see if some tangible connection to terrorism could be made. Google Maps would probably be used to drop Hellfire missiles on whoever used it as well.

They’re at or near monopoly status – and moving fast.

The state is a monopoly. In fact it is the monopoly that makes all other monopolies possible.

They abuse their power.

And what does the state do? Let me think. It sends heavily armed men to kick down people’s doors at two in the morning, shoot their dogs, and kidnap them for possessing a fucking plant. Then you have the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the state’s apparatus for spying on our phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, and other communications. When it finds a little free time it also likes to put people to death even though the evidence supporting those people’s guilt is nonexistent. I haven’t even gotten to the number of foreigners it slaughters.

They got there with our help.

So did the state. It acquires its resources by stealing them from us. Sometimes it’s in the form of taxes other times its in the form of fines and other times its in the form of slave labor (which it rather humorously refers to as prison labor).

The real “commodity” is us.

Guess what? The state’s commodity is us. We’re nothing more than tax cattle and cannon fodder to it.

Our privacy is dying … or already dead.

Edward Snowden really brought this point to light. The NSA has been spying on our digital communications for years. While I dislike many of the data collection policies used by Google and Amazon there is a major difference between what they do and what the state does with my data. Google and Amazon use my data for personal profit and to find more shit for me to buy from them. The state uses my data to decide whether or not it will send armed thugs to my home at two in the morning so they can shoot my pets and kidnap me. I’d say that’s a pretty big difference.

Freedom of information is at risk.

Are you referring to the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA)?

The free market could become even less free.

And your solution is to preemptively restrict it by putting Google and Amazon under the state’s direct control? That’s not a solution to the hypothetical problem of the free market becoming less free; that’s making the hypothetical problem a reality.

They could hijack the future.

So could the state. The difference, of course, is that Google and Amazon hijacking the future doesn’t lead to people being locked in cages, bombed, and otherwise brutalized.