News You Need to Know – Page 82

Vegan Suppressor

I have to give some credit to the person who finally found a use for squash:

Investigators say a person suspected of robbing a Charleston County gas station used a squash to silence shots fired at the business.

To this day I have not found a decent use for squash. Every time I try to incorporate it into a recipe I end up getting something that is basically flavorless. I’m glad to see that squash can be put to productive uses. While I obviously won’t test this because that would likely violate the National Firearms Act (NFA), and I’m all about obedience to the state, I will find somebody who has tested this first hand and ask them how it worked.

We’re All Criminals Now

This post is for all of those people who believe this country needs to be tough on crime. While severely punishing criminals sounds like an effective idea the problem with such an attitude is that we’re all criminals. There are over two centuries of laws on the books at a federal level. Hawaii, the newest state in the United States, has over half a century of laws on the books while every other state has even more. It’s not just the laws that make us criminals but previous court decisions also create more criminals. In fact nearly 50 percent of black males and 40 percent of white males are arrested before they reach 23 years of age:

A large number of American men have already been arrested by the time they’re in their early 20s, according to a new report.

The study, published on Monday in the journal Crime & Delinquency, found that nearly half (49 percent) of African-American men and 40 percent of white men have been arrested by the age of 23, “which can hurt their ability to find work, go to school and participate fully in their communities,” according to a press release.

When everybody is a criminal the label criminal loses its meaning. That’s the point we’re at in our society. The average American unknowingly commits three felonies a day. If we became tough on crime or enforced the laws already on the books every single one of us would be in a cage.

This is something you should consider the next time one of your friends or a politician blabbers on about the need to be tougher on crime.

Expected Behavior from a Politician

What happens when you give firearm to a person who is used to having immunity from the consequences that arise form their actions? They act negligently with it:

FRANKFORT, Ky. — A Kentucky lawmaker said Wednesday that she accidentally fired a gun in her Capitol Annex office on the first day of the legislative session this week, prompting a police investigation. No one was hurt.

Democratic Rep. Leslie Combs of Pikeville issued a statement saying the shot was fired unintentionally Tuesday and that state police assigned to the Capitol found no evidence to indicate any portion of the discharged round left her office.

Combs did not offer details, but a House colleague who said he was in her office at the time described it as an accident.

“She was emptying the weapon and she thought that it was empty and pointed it away and down and pulled the trigger and it went off,” said Rep. Jeff Greer, D-Brandenburg. “Thankfully, no one was hurt. I know she feels terrible about it. … It’s just an unfortunate event.”

She is in a position where she issues orders that negatively impact the lives of everybody living in Kentucky. The fact that she was negligent in her handling of a firearm isn’t surprising but it is probably bar less dangerous that her actions as a oligarch.

Still, the lesson we should take away from this event is that you really need to double, triple, and even quadruple check that your firearm is unloaded when you want to work with it in an unloaded manner. Whenever I disassemble my Glocks I always take a deliberate moment to ensure both the magazine is removed and the chamber is cleared. There’s now point in rushing that check and failing to be thorough can lead to a bad day.

When You Don’t Have a Laser Pointer

What can you use in lieu of a laser pointer? If you’re an idiot and government official (but I repeat myself) you just pull out your handgun and use its laser site as a pointing device:

Jerome M. Hauer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s director of homeland security, took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. It happened Oct. 24 in Albany at the highly secure state emergency operations center below State Police headquarters.

You would think a director of homeland security, a person supposedly tasked with keeping people safe, would have some rudimentary understanding of the four rules of firearm safety.

Taking Out the Trash

I believe most people reading this post are aware of the rate of corruption that exists in Mexican police forces. In many place the drug cartels effectively own the police. When you think about it it makes sense. Drug cartels are generally composed of psychopaths who have no quarrel with hurting people as are police departments. A strategic alliance between the two seems inevitable. Unfortunately, if you’re not a member of the government or the drug cartels, you’re in a pretty bad position. You must make a choice between submitting to the police-cartel alliance or taking out the trash:

Small groups of local vigilantes took up arms and joined forces to storm Paracuaro, headquarters of the Knights Templar gang, where they arrested police officers and seized control of the town in a blaze of gunfire.

They drove into the town in black armoured vehicles shouting ‘Don’t be frightened, we are vigilantes’, before expelling drugs traffickers, whom they accuse of kidnapping people and bribing them to make money. Several gun battles were reported, leaving at least one dead.

Police officers, whom the vigilantes accuse of being in league with the cash-rich drug gangs, were rounded up by machine-gun toting locals, along with others suspected of associating with gang members, and a checkpoint was set up at the entrance to Paracuaro.

Many people will likely be quick to point out that the town merely swapped one set of rulers, the police-cartel alliance, for another set of rulers, the vigilantes. That may be true but it’s also likely that the vigilantes won’t be as ruthless as an alliance between two psychopathic organizations. I would also say that the vigilantes were likely members of the local community who became fed up with the alliance and simply wanted to rid their town of violent offenders and not claim rule over it.

As things continue to deteriorate in the here United States I won’t be surprised if we begin seeing actions like this. Many police departments, such as the ones in Los Angeles and New York, are known for their brutality and violation of civil rights. As economic matters continue to worsen these departments will likely try to take advantage of the situation by increasing the rate of arrests so property can be confiscated. A breaking point will eventually be released and the people will decide to so the cops out and establish a superior, and far less violent, system of neighborhood protection.

Warrantless Searches of Electronic Devices Ruled Constitutional

Do you believe, under the legal framework of the United States, that the people who guard the imaginary lines we refer to as borders should require a warrant to search your electronic devices? According to a United States District Judge a warrant is not necessary under such circumstances:

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. border agents should have the authority to search laptop computers carried by news photographers and other travelers at international border crossings without reasonable suspicion, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Friday.

In a written decision, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman granted a government motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by civil rights attorneys that claimed the practice was unconstitutional and sought to have it halted.

Korman found that the plaintiffs hadn’t shown they suffered injury that gave them standing to bring the suit. He also cited previous rulings finding that the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches doesn’t apply to the government’s efforts to secure international borders from outside threats.

It’s hard to rule something unconstitutional when it is constitutional under the language of the Constitution. According to the Constitution:

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

So the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction with the exception of restrictions placed on it by Congress. As Congress has, as far as I know, made no restrictions against the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction it has the ultimate say on whether or not something is lawful in the United States. The Supreme Court has ruled that warrantless searches on the imaginary lines that surround this country aren’t violations of the Fourth Amendment. Therefore it’s pretty easy to claim any warrantless search within the boundaries of said imaginary lines are constitutional according to the Constitution.

This isn’t a demonstration of the Constitution being violated but of how vaguely worded the Constitution really is. The Constitution’s predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, didn’t grant the federal government much power and made its existence dependent on the charity of the individual states. Hoping to establish a strong federal government, advocates of the Constitution wanted the federal government to have the power to tax and to rule in court decisions. It really was a document written to take power from the individual states. As a result we now live in a society where the Bill of Rights are easily violated without violating the Constitution itself. So long as the Supreme Court says an act isn’t a violation of the Bill of Rights and Congress hasn’t placed any restrictions on the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction it can legally do whatever the fuck it wants.

Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You

Back in the day you could call a person paranoid when they claimed that the government was spying on everybody. Today, thanks to Edward Snowden, such paranoid has proven to be justified:

And while the NSA story alone undoubtedly gives the “paranoid” plenty of reasons to say “I told you so,” a slew of other reports from this year gave them even more reasons to retreat into the wilderness and start subsistence farming.

[…]

For instance, the ACLU released a cache of documents showing that police around the country are collecting license plate scanner information that could be used to track physical locations of many Americans without consistent retention policies.

[…]

Speaking of being tracked, an enterprising hacker discovered that the E-Z Pass he used to make paying tolls simpler was being read all around New York City. Turns out, the city had been tracking E-Z Passes for years as a way to measure traffic patterns.

[…]

Speaking of technology with obviously exploitable surveillance capabilities: Someone might be watching you through your laptop’s webcam – without even activating the warning light.

[…]

Oh, and to top it all off: There was suspicious aerial activity going on at Area 51. Although no admissions of alien activity have emerged, much to John Podesta’s dismay, recently released documents reveal that the CIA tested its first drones at the Nevada military base.

2013, above most other years, has demonstrated how widespread surveillance has become. The Orwellian present we find ourselves in has been made possible through advancing technology. This has lead many people to blame technology and seek a Luddite existence that they believe will keep them safe from surveillance. While technology has made widespread surveillance possible it is also the tool that allows us to fight widespread surveillance.

Cryptography allows us to conceal our communications from prying eyes and even to conceal the source and destination of communications. Tor allows you to access the Internet anonymously (so long as you use it correctly). Tails is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive that attempts to anonymity all of your online activity. GnuPG allows you to encrypt the contents of your e-mail so those bastards at the National Security Agency (NSA) can’t see what you and your correspondent are discussing. Off-the-Record Messaging does the same thing for instant messages. Many other tools exist that allow you to maintain anonymity and privacy.

The only way to stop the widespread surveillance apparatus of the state and corporations is to use technology to counter their technology. Hiding in a hole may sound effective but the surveillance state can watch you even if you don’t carry a cellular phone, use a computer, or drive a car. Cameras are everywhere in our society and you can’t avoid their soulless stare unless you board yourself up in your home and refuse to come out (and even then your home could be bugged). But we can make the cost of surveillance so high that it bankrupts the spies.

Impressive

I think the headline of this article explains everything:

Oregon Man Allegedly High On Meth Fights Off 15 Cops While Masturbating

And the headline wasn’t just hype:

Andrew Frey, 37, made a series of outbursts and then began masturbating in Iggy Bar & Grill on Saturday.

Police were unable to subdue Frey with a Taser. It took 15 officers to finally take him into custody.

Frey later told authorities that he took methamphetamine and couldn’t remember the obscene incident, according to the Marion County Sheriff’s office.

That’s impressive!

2013’s Best Drug Propaganda

Reason put together its five favorite drug scares of 2013. These are real gems because they demonstrate that 99 percent of what we’re told about unpatentable drugs is bullshit. Out of the list my two favorites were the e-cigarette:

Last September the CDC noted with alarm that the percentage of teenagers who had tried electronic cigarettes doubled between 2011 and 2012. “Many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and conventional cigarettes,” CDC Director Tom Frieden worried. In a Medscape interview a few weeks later, Frieden suggested that fear had already materialized, asserting that “many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes.”

The CDC’s data, which came from the 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), did not support that claim. In fact, nine out of 10 high school students who reported vaping in the previous month were already cigarette smokers, suggesting that the increase in e-cigarette consumption might signal successful harm reduction. Last month the CDC reported additional NYTS data that further undermine Frieden’s claim, showing that smoking among teenagers fell as vaping rose.

Of course none of this matters because the media will latch onto the fear in the hopes of netting some ratings. Speaking of fear mongering let’s discuss krokodil:

Recently various media outlets have been hyping a drug that cuts out the middleman and does the flesh eating all on its own: krokodil, a homemade version of desomorphine that originated in Russia as a heroin substitute. Last September health officials in Arizona reported two cases of krokodil use there, which gave USA Today an excuse to recycle accounts of the drug’s icky side effects under the headline “Flesh-Rotting ‘Krokodil’ Drug Emerges in USA.”

[…]

The effects described in these accounts are not caused by desomorphine, which was patented in 1932 and marketedas a painkiller in Switzerland under the brand name Permonid, with nary a report of rotting patients from the inside out. Rather, the abscesses and necrosis are caused by a combination of caustic contaminants and unsanitary injection practices. What drives Russian heroin addicts to take such risks? According to USA Today, “krokodil became popular in Russia because heroin can be difficult to obtain and is expensive.” Meanwhile, codeine, the opiate used to produce krokodil, is relatively cheap and available over the counter there.

Since neither of those conditions holds in the United States, where heroin is plentiful and codeine can be legally purchased only with a prescription, why would krokodil ever gain a following here? It almost certainly hasn’t. One krokodil sighting after another has proven to be spurious.

It’s amazing the type of bullshit the state will drum up in order to eliminate competition to patentable drugs. What’s even more amazing is that media outlets go long with the state’s bullshit because they believe ratings are directly correlated to fear. In actuality more people are turning away from traditional media outlets and it doesn’t matter how much fear they drum up, viewers aren’t coming back.

It’s not Wise to Disturb Elves

The Icelandic people are wiser than most other people. For example, in Iceland the threat of disturbing the local elven population is a good enough reason to halt a highway construction project:

Elf advocates in Iceland have joined forces with environmentalists to urge authorities to abandon a highway project that they claim will disturb elf habitat, including an elf church.

The project has been halted until the supreme court of Iceland rules on a case brought by a group known as Friends of Lava, who cite both the environmental impact and the detrimental effect on elf culture of the road project.

The group has regularly mobilised hundreds of people to block bulldozers building a direct route from the tip of the Álftanes peninsula, where the president has a property, to the Reykjavik suburb of Gardabaer.

Issues about Huldufolk (Icelandic for “hidden folk”) have affected planning decisions before, and the road and coastal administration has come up with a stock media response for elf inquiries, which states in part that “issues have been settled by delaying the construction project at a certain point while the elves living there have supposedly moved on”.

This is the first time elves have prevented or delayed construction projects in Iceland. I think the Icelandic people know that trespassing on the land of elves can only end in misery as the creatures are known for their mischief.

I have a deep interest in mythology and folklore. One of the reasons Iceland interests me is because the island still holds onto their myths and folklore. While blocking the construction of a highway because of elves may seem ridiculous to most people I find it quite charming. It demonstrates a deep connection with the past and the last, which is something I feel is lacking in most developed nations.