News You Need to Know – Page 77

The State Loves Soldiers Until It Doesn’t

The New York Times finally realized that police departments in modern American are beginning to resemble militaries. The article doesn’t contain much of interest if you’ve been following this militarization for any amount of time but there was a nugget worth mentioning:

In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.

“You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.’s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,” Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told the local Fox affiliate, referring to improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs. Sergeant Downing did not return a message seeking comment.

This brings up the state’s hypocritical view of military personnel. We the people are constantly propagandized about how great the United States military is. According to this propaganda American soldiers are heroes who deserve devout worship. As civilians we’re supposed to thank any soldiers we come across for protecting our “freedoms”. But that’s only while soldiers are deployed overseas. Once they come back and leave the military they’re suddenly dangerous monsters that must be watched careful at all times and put down when they fail to do what they’re told.

I’m not sure why anybody would enter the military these days. It’s a shitty job that involves a great deal of risk. They pay isn’t great and the benefits are pretty nonexistent. And once your time in the military is completed you get to suffer a substandard medical system (it somehow manages to be worse than the standard medical system the rest of us are inflicted with) and be viewed like a threat from your former employer.

Solving the World’s Problems

A lot of people spend a lot of time discussing ways to fix the world’s problems. Usually the solutions involved government programs. Somehow people fail to recognize that every government program has ended up being a wealth transference between the people and the oligarchs. Fortunately I’m here with real solutions. To fix the world’s problems we simply need more metal:

Though heavy metal originated amist working class youths in the U.S. and U.K., new socioeconomic trends have shown a relationship between the number of heavy metal bands and a country’s wealth and standard of living. According to The Atlantic’s City Lab and the Martin Prosperity Institute, the number of heavy metal bands in a given area is positively associated with, “economic output per capita; level of creativity and entrepreneurship; share of adults that hold college degrees; as well as overall levels of human development, well-being, and satisfaction with life.”

Because this isn’t some bullshit research paper meant to push an agenda it does note that correlation does not imply causality. But I think it’s pretty fucking obvious in this case that the number of metal bands in a country causes it to be more metal and countries that are more metal are simply better.

I will continue to help in this glorious mission of making the world a better place by posting metal songs to this blog (usually on Monday mornings).

A Wonderful Problem to Have

Sometimes you have to look on the bright side of things. For example, an increasing percentage of our species suffers from being overweight:

In 1980, there were 857 million overweight and obese people on the planet. Today that number is 2.1 billion, which means that nearly 30 percent of the world’s population is obese or overweight, concludes a study published in The Lancet yesterday. And what’s more worrisome is that no nation has managed to significantly decrease its obesity rates in the last 33 years.

The horror! 30 percent of the population is overweight, which puts a burden on our socialized healthcare systems! Overweight people obviously hate society!

OK, let us step back for a moment and consider the problem. Having one third of our species overweight is actually an incredible problem to have. Consider what it means. It means that a considerable amount of our species no longer has to invest every waking hour into obtaining enough food just to survive. In fact for those people food is so plentiful that they have to swap some of the time that used to be necessary to obtain food to deal with the side effects of having too much food. Instead of complaining incessantly about people being fat we should be celebrating how far we’ve come as a species. We’re damn lucky to have reached a point where we have to deal with these sorts of problems.

Don’t Be This Guy

Most people realize that violence is a last resort option. But there are some who seem to believe that might makes right and will resort to violence or threats thereof alarmingly fast:

The father told Fox 9 News he’s still shaken by the encounter. He explained that when he and his daughter got down to the cul de sac, Drake began yelling from his porch. When the father responded to say, “I’ve got it,” Drake allegedly said, “If you don’t like my advice, get off the street.”

At that point, Drake appeared to get angrier — but as the father and daughter prepared to leave the area, Drake allegedly went inside his home, grabbed a Remington 870 shotgun, pointed it at the father and threatened to kill him.

Drake’s wife eventually came out and pulled the gun away, but police said he didn’t appear repentant when he was booked. In fact, he allegedly told officers, “Maybe next time. I should have shot him.”

Mr. Drake played a dangerous game and got off lucky. His threat certainly provided a reasonable belief of immediate great bodily harm or death to his neighbor. Under Minnesota law the neighbor would have almost certainly been legally justified in using deadly force. I doubt Mr. Drake understands how fortunate he is to be alive today because when you write a check in violence they will often be paid in blood.

I’m not sure what went through the neighbor’s head. Being threatened with a shotgun is a scary enough prospect but having his 7 year-old daughter with him at the time probably made for the worst situation he could imagine.

Schools Reflect Prisons More and More Everyday

American schools and prisons become more of a mirror image every day. Prisons now contain classrooms, art centers, computer labs, libraries, and other things we would expect to find in a school. Schools are now surrounded by chain link fencing, guards and metal detectors are posted at entrances, and students are prohibited from having mechanisms that could conceal anything that they’re carrying:

A New York high school is the latest in the nation to ban backpacks following several bomb threats, and has even taken extra steps, including sealing up students’ lockers.

For the last two weeks of the school year, students at Wantagh High School — located about 34 miles east of New York City — are being forced to carry their books and belongings in plastic bags, sign in and out to use the bathroom and submit to searches when entering the building. But the sealing up of lockers took school security to a new level.

When I was in high school there were whispers of backpack bans but they were similar to the whispers about instating school uniforms: they are brought up every now and then only to be shot down by people who aren’t completely stupid. But now, from my understanding, backpack bans aren’t unheard of but the sealing up of lockers is new to me. Depending on the school an average student may have anywhere from four to eight classes. Trying to lug around everything you need for those classes all day is annoying to say the least. But schools are often spend a great deal of time making students’ lives miserable while paying lip service to making a safe learning environment.

At this rate they might as well just house students in prisons.

The Pointless Finger Pointing Continues

In addition to California’s “weak” gun laws, mental illness, misogyny, and white privilege the shooting in California is now also the fault of America’s gun culture! But that’s not all! As an added bonus the shooting was also the product of toxic masculinity! As I said everybody is running as fast as they can towards this shooting to exploit it for their personal gain. I’ve not seen a flock of vulture this ravenous since Sandy Hook.

I’m still waiting for the article that blames this incident on Republican created “anarchy”. If anybody reading this comes across such an article please send it my way posthaste.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Or if you’re in France fuck measuring altogether:

The French train operator SNCF has discovered that 2,000 new trains it ordered at a cost of 15bn euros ($20.5bn; £12.1bn) are too wide for many regional platforms.

The BBC’s Christian Fraser in Paris says that it is an embarrassing blunder that has so far cost the rail operator over 50m euros ($68.4m; £40.6m).

How does something like this happen? The concept of measuring things isn’t something that our species has only recently stumbled across. We’ve been measuring things for millennia. In fact it’s often one of the first things we do when we’re building something. The fact that nobody thought to take a tape measure to these new trains to determine whether or not they would actually fit in the terminals is almost beyond my ability to comprehend.

At this rate we won’t need to cryogenically freeze somebody for them to experience this:

The Greenwald Orbital Ion Cannon

Depending on how comprehensive this list is this latest release by Gleen Greenwald could effectively be the orbital ion cannon strike in the war against the National Security Agency (NSA):

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.

“One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.

I’m imagining a list a million names long and am really hoping my name appears somewhere in it. But the list will likely be much shorter than that and may just contain the names of the “important” people the NSA is spying on. Either way it will be interesting to see who’s one it and, hopefully, determine some of the criteria the NSA uses to select targets for espionage.

Regarding the Shooting in California

Another piece of shit decided he wanted to go out with a bang but didn’t have the common courtesy to go it alone. He took the lives of six people before taking his own and now everybody is clamoring for answers.

Predictably a lot of people are blaming America’s “weak” gun laws. The fact that this occurred in California should who how silly such arguments are. Others are blaming the lack of mental illness screenings. When somebody discovered an effective test for predicting future homicidal behavior please let me know. Until we have such tests the whole idea of mental illness screenings is pretty sketchy. I even found an article that blames the whole incident on misogyny. Because, you know, misogyny leads to murder sprees, or something.

The point is everybody is latching onto whatever piece of the puzzle be helps them push their agenda. But boiling this event down to pet issues misses the big picture, which is unfortunately so complex we’ll likely never fully understand it. All we know for certain is that the events of this murderer’s life combined with his unique mentality made for a lethal combination. I doubt any form of mental illness screening would catch somebody like this solely because the mentalities we consider to be illnesses often don’t show visible signs until a horrible deed has already been committed.

I know it’s a natural reaction to want to do something to prevent horrible deeds from happening in the future. But events perpetrated by a single individual are hard to stop because the dangerous factor is a single individual. As there are roughly seven billion individuals on this planet it’s almost impossible to create a mechanism to stop the darker inhibitions of each and every one of them. Some will claim that such a statement is defeatist in nature and it probably is. But there are things that we as a species cannot do. We cannot propel ourselves to the moon under my own power and we cannot stop individuals for doing heinous things. It sucks but it’s reality.

The Conspiracy Theory that Annoys Me the Most

Conspiracy theories are fun even when you don’t buy into them hook, line, and sinker. I enjoy reading about all of the wonky theories people have come up with, especially if that theory involves lizard people. But amongst the conspiracy theories out there the one that annoys me the most is that the government is all omnipotent. This theory is very prevalent in libertarian circles, which is ironic considering that most libertarians view the government has being entirely incompetent. Whenever I try to discuss tools to secure one’s self against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance apparatus there are usually a few people who start making up bullshit and claiming that using such tools with either make you a target, are backdoored by the NSA (even if the project is open source and the code has been thoroughly reviewed for such shenanigans), or that the NSA has magical super computers that can instantly break all encryption protocols.

Unlike most conspiracy theories, which usually contain some kernel of factual information that wild theories are based off of, the claim that the government NSA can render all computer security tools impotent is entirely baseless. As Bruce Schneier pointed out in a recent blog entry the NSA isn’t magic:

I am regularly asked what is the most surprising thing about the Snowden NSA documents. It’s this: the NSA is not made of magic. Its tools are no different from what we have in our world, it’s just better-funded. X-KEYSCORE is Bro plus memory. FOXACID is Metasploit with a budget. QUANTUM is AirPwn with a seriously privileged position on the backbone. The NSA breaks crypto not with super-secret cryptanalysis, but by using standard hacking tricks such as exploiting weak implementations and default keys. Its TAO implants are straightforward enhancements of attack tools developed by researchers, academics, and hackers; here’s a computer the size of a grain of rice, if you want to make your own such tools. The NSA’s collection and analysis tools are basically what you’d expect if you thought about it for a while.

The NSA is little more than the combination of well known hacking tools, massive funding, and privileged positions on the main infrastructure. Edward Snowden has said numerous times that encryption works. Anybody who claims that the NSA can render all known encryption protocols impotent is literally making shit up. It’s no different than the conspiracy theory that lizard people secretly control all of the governments of the world. Zero evidence exists supporting the claim.

My theory is that people who claim nobody should bother using encryption because it’s futile are simply too lazy to learn how to use the tools and don’t want to admit it. To make themselves feel better they justify their actions by claiming doing otherwise is pointless.