Freedom at the Republican National Convention

The Republican Party likes to market itself as the party of freedom. Here is a sign listing items prohibited from the Republican National Convention (RNC) this year:

rnc-2016-no-freedom-allowed

The first thing that probably pops out to most of you is the prohibition against weapons. While the Republican Party likes to pay lip service to gun rights its actual support is far less enthusiastic than advertised. When I point out this common restriction at Republican Party events many people are quick to tell me that the Secret Service, which many Republican Party politicians use for protection, dictates that rule. However, nobody is required to utilize Secret Service protection. If these Republicans actually cared about the right of the people to keep and bear arms they would tell the Secret Service to buzz off unless it utilized a ruleset that also respected the rights of individuals. But they don’t care about gun rights beyond lip service.

Some of the other restrictions are just bizarre. No umbrellas? If it rains I guess convention goes can just suck it up and deal with being wet. No strollers? I guess I agree that politician conventions are no place a responsible parent would take their small child. But political types always want to start brainwashing children at a young age so this prohibition seems out of place. No whole fruit? Does that mean sliced fruit is okay? What about whole vegetables?

I think the sign speaks volumes about the Republican Party in general.

You Can’t Own Property, Man

Pop quiz time. Can you own property in Minneapolis? The answer is no. You can rent property in Minneapolis but that rental is subject to paying property taxes and utilizing the land in a manner that is expressly approved by the city council. If that last part sounds a bit strange it’s because you down own a surface parking lot. You see, the city council of Minneapolis has a dream. In that dream Minneapolis looked like Mega City I from Judge Dredd. Surface parking lots can’t pack in a million people so they’re on the list of properties to be axed.

So far the city council has been playing a cautious game but that looks like it may change:

It was a routine briefing of a Minneapolis City Council committee on a seemingly unrelated topic, but it offered the chance to rouse a long-simmering issue in Minneapolis:

What can the city do to rid itself of the acres of surface parking lots in and around downtown?

While development activity has seen many of those lots disappear, many remain — too many, according to Council Members Lisa Goodman and Jacob Frey, who used the May 11 briefing to press city assessor Patrick Todd to do something about it.

Like what? Goodman thinks the city should use state requirements that require property be assessed on its “highest and best use” — and not on its current use — to incentivize owners to either develop the land or sell to someone who will.

Because parking is scarce in Minneapolis a person can make pretty decent money with a surface parking lot. That really bothers certain council members such as Lisa Goodman. It bothers her so much that she wants to change the rules to make them unprofitable. That rule change is a simple one. Instead of assessing a parking lot as a parking lot for property tax purposes she wants to assess them as if they were being used for her vision of their best use. Since her vision is high density apartment complexes the assessment would jack up the property taxes to, she hopes, a level the owners can’t sustain. In fact she flat out says that they must not be paying enough taxes:

“If they’re making enough money by selling parking downtown,” she said, “then they’re not being taxed high enough, and they’re certainly not being taxed high enough for a potential Class A office use.”

Do you know what those surface parking lots were taxed enough for? Funding a study to decide on how best to destroy them:

In 2013, amid planning for the new Vikings Stadium, the group HR&A Advisors conducted a $40,000 study of ways to reduce the number of surface lots in Minneapolis. Several council ordinances have sought to force beautification of parking lots, something that could have also increased the costs associated with operating them. And a bill introduced by state Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, would allow Minneapolis and St. Paul to impose a per-stall fee on parking, with revenue going to public plazas, transit lines, bike facilities and pedestrian improvements.

This is another reason you should avoid paying whatever taxes you can. When you pay taxes they are often used to fund your destruction.

What we have here are central planners run amuck. Consumers have already spoken and they want surface parking lots. How can I say this since there hasn’t been any kind of vote? Unlike voting, the market actually indicates what consumers want. Because there are enough consumers paying to use these surface parking lots to make them profitable we know for a fact that those lots are in demand with consumers. Goodman doesn’t like them and instead of offering to buy those lots herself she’s using tax dollars to fund studies to determine the best way to destroy them… in a manner that requires the denizens of Minneapolis pay for it.

In the end I predict that the city council will get its way because it will just keep cranking up the taxes until it bleeds surface lot owners dry. Then those lots will sit empty because if developers really wanted those lots they’d have already bought them.

You Have to Appreciate His Honesty

The Republican and Democratic parties seem to disagree on many things but they can agree on one thing: they both hate Muslims. But the Republican Party is far more overt about its hatred. Still, like most racists, the party usually tries to keeps its hatred tucked under a burqa thin veil of justifications that aren’t related to religion or race.

Every now and then one of the Republicans slips off of his leash and blatantly states their views on Islam. Funny enough, that view almost always reflects how the Nazis views the Jews:

An Oklahoma lawmaker personally propagated an article over the weekend calling for a “final solution” regarding “radical Islam,” arguing that the 1,400-year-old faith is not a religion and should not be protected under the first amendment of the Constitution.

On Sunday, Oklahoma State Rep. Pat Ownbey re-published an article to his Facebook page entitled “Radical Islam – The Final Solution.” The article was originally published on the personal blog of Paul R. Hollrah, an Oklahoman who touts himself as a “retired government relations executive,” but Ownbey appears to have copy-pasted the piece and reposted it in its entirety, citing Hollrah.

[…]

“And since the 95% of Muslims who are described as either ‘moderate’ or ‘un-radicalized’ appear unwilling to play an active role in keeping their radicalized brethren in check, we have no long term alternative but to quarantine them… prohibiting them from residing anywhere within the civilized nations of the Earth,” he writes.

The Nazis felt that the Jews had to be quarantined as well. That’s not even a case of Godwin’s Law, that’s historical fact. Likewise, they called their plan the final solution.

A lot of people argue that the State is necessary to defend against bigotry such as racism, religious prejudice, and sexism. While that sounds good on paper the reality is that the State is usually the biggest enabler of persecution. It was, after all, the United States government that legally required citizens and individual states to help capture and return escaped slaves. It was the United States government that rounded up people of Japanese decent and put them in concentration camps. passed and enforced by state and municipal governments. In other words, the worst forms of bigotry are created and enforced by the State. Without an apparatus as big and as powerful as the government of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust would not have been possible. That’s why it’s far scarier when members of the State talk about persecuting people than when individuals do. It’s also why defending against bigotry doesn’t require the State but the abolition of the State.

John Brennan is an Idiot

You probably read the title of this post and wondered what Brennan did this time to piss me off. Truthfully he didn’t really piss me off this time. What he did was make a public statement that really requires being an idiot to make.

Everything old is new again. As before, the United States government is busy debating whether or not mandatory backdoors should be included in civilian encryption. Security experts have pointed out that this is a stupid idea. Crypto-anarchists have pointed out that such a law would be meaningless because the Internet has enabled global communications so finding foreign encryption algorithms that don’t include a United States backdoor would be trivial. Hoping to refute the crypto-anarchists, John Brennan made this statement:

Brennan said this was needed to counter the ability of terrorists to coordinate their actions using encrypted communications. The director denied that forcing American companies to backdoor their security systems would cause any commercial problems.

“US companies dominate the international market as far as encryption technologies that are available through these various apps, and I think we will continue to dominate them,” Brennan said.

“So although you are right that there’s the theoretical ability of foreign companies to have those encryption capabilities available to others, I do believe that this country and its private sector are integral to addressing these issues.”

Theoretical ability? Let’s have a short discussion about the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES is one of the most prolific encryption standards in use today. Most full disk encryption tools, many Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections, and a load of other security tools rely on AES. Hell, many devices even include hardware acceleration for AES because it’s so heavily used. AES was originally a competition held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to find a modern encryption standard. In the end an algorithm called Rijndael won. Rijndael was created by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. If those two names sound foreign it’s because they are. Joan and Vincent are Belgians. So one of the most common encryption algorithms in use today, an algorithm chosen by an agency of the United States government no less, was created by two foreigners. I’d say foreign encryption tools are a bit beyond theoretical at this point.

Adding insult to injury, let’s discuss Theo de Raadt. Theo, for those who don’t know, is the creator and lead developer of both OpenBSD and OpenSSH. OpenBSD is an operating system known for being security and OpenSSH is probably the most common secure remote connection tool on the planet. Both of them are developed in Canada:

It’s perhaps easy to forget, but the cryptographic landscape was quite different in 1999. A lot has changed since then. Cryptographic software was available, but not always widespread, in part due to US export controls. International users either had to smuggle it out printed on dead trees, or reimplement everything, or settle for the 40 bit limited edition of their favorite software. Many operating systems originated in the US, so it was difficult to integrate cryptography top to bottom because there needed a way to build the export version without it. OpenBSD had the advantage of originating in Canada, without such concerns. The goto public key algorithm of choice, RSA, was encumbered by a patent for commercial use. The primary symmetric algorithm was still DES. You could use blowfish, of course, but it wasn’t officially blessed as a standard.

Again, the availability of foreign encryption tools is more than theoretical. I would think the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is supposedly tasked with spying on foreign countries, would be very aware of that. But the CIA has a long history of failure so it being unaware of very real encryption tools originating in foreign countries isn’t really that surprising.

“Libertarian” Vice Presidential Candidate

Supposedly the Libertarian Party tries to get libertarians elected into offices. The party has a funny way of going about that goal though. For example, the party hasn’t nominated an actual libertarian presidential candidate for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to vote. This year’s ticket is no different.

Gary “Ban the Burqa” Johnson was nominated to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate this year. Although the Libertarian Party doesn’t allow presidential candidates to outright pick their running mates, the party voters are usually willing to roll over and approve whoever their presidential candidate wants. Johnson wanted Bill Weld and the Libertarian Party, apparently deciding it didn’t want any libertarians on its presidential ticket, was happy to comply.

After the shooting in Orlando Weld decided to show his anti-libertarian colors:

Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts now running as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president, called today for a 1,000-agent task force to combat Islamic State adherents in the United States, and for a tip line where Muslims could inform on radicalism.

“Let’s face it: The United States is under attack right now by ISIS and ISIS copycats,” Weld said. “They have a deep pool to pull from. There are over 3 million Muslims in the United States — maybe Mr. Trump will want to deport them all, but the better approach is to work with the community.”

Weld, who served as U.S. attorney and then assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s criminal justice division, suggested that the DOJ could take a cue from a program that worked in Massachusetts. The “Drop-a-Dime Project,” a nonprofit tip line created by community leaders, was used by law enforcement to pursue tips about crime in Boston’s black neighborhoods and to achieve breakthroughs in drug investigations.

“We’d get all kinds of tips,” Weld said. “The residents of Dorchester and Mattapan were only too happy to help. There may be some people out there leaning toward ISIS, people who would want to shelter the people going around killing other people. But for every pair of ears that would be sympathetic, there will be pairs that will not be sympathetic.”

I thought the Libertarian Party was all about shrinking government, not growing it. I guess this is what happens when the party doesn’t nominates a libertarian for its vice presidential candidate.

I know the Libertarian Party, especially now that it’s pulling people from the Republican Party, has a lot of statists within its ranks so this idea may sound appealing to them. Let’s consider the effectiveness of such a program. I’ll start by once again quoting Bruce Schneier, “If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.” This is something libertarians tend to inherently understand. If you setup a program where average Joes are expected to rat out their neighbors you will get a lot of noise and very little, if any, signal.

How do you tell if somebody expressing sympathies for the Islamic State (IS) is merely angry at the way the United States and European countries have treated the Middle East or is planning to commit acts of murder in the organization’s name? Most people can’t tell and that’s the problem with this kind of tip line. It would be flooded with “tips” from people who think somebody speaking out against the United States dropping bombs on wedding parts is sympathizing with IS. Many of the “tips” would likely come from people who just don’t like their Muslim neighbors and see the tip line as a way to get the State to harass them. Well’s proposal would create a 1,000-agent (you do have to appreciate how all of these proposals involve an arbitrary number of agents that is almost always cleanly divisible by 10) task force that does nothing productive (in other words, it’ll be just like every other government agency).

I’m glad I don’t play politics anymore. If I did I’d be depressed this election cycle because there are exactly zero acceptable candidates running for office.

Equal Slavery Shouldn’t Be the Goal

A lot of debate has occurred on the topic of equality, especially equality between men and women. Equality can mean many things but to the State the only form of equality that matters is slavery:

The New York Times reported today:

“The United States Senate voted to pass a defense bill today that would require young women to sign up for a potential military draft for the first time in U.S. history.”

This issue was bound to come up eventually, as women have recently been allowed to compete for combat positions on the front line. Captain Kristen Griest’s recent completion of Army Ranger School and assignment as an Infantry officer is evidence of this shift in both policy and culture.

The accepted logic goes that if women have equal access to all jobs in the military, they ought to have equal responsibility with respect to the draft. And make no mistake: even though there has not been a draft since the 1970s, the ultimate purpose of Selective Service registration is precisely to enable a draft when deemed necessary.

Many are applauding these changes as an important step towards “equality” and recognition of women’s capabilities. But the focus on equality is masking the underlying injustice of the law in the first place. The more important issue is that forcing anyone to register for Selective Service is unjust because it is based on coercion (and has the potential to place otherwise peaceful people into violent situations). Let’s examine why.

Equal slavery shouldn’t be the goal. The complete abolition of slavery should be the goal. Let’s not mince words, the draft is slavery. It is a mechanism where the State can force you, at the point of a gun, to join its ranks so it can send you off to murder people who you’ve never met and have in all likelihood caused you no harm. Instead of debating whether women should be equally subjected to enslavement, the people of the United States should have been demanding Selective Service registration be abolished.

This is usually where some statist says, “What if somebody was invading the United States? Shouldn’t everybody be forced to fight for the greater good?” It’s a dumb question. Nobody should be forced to fight for a collective ideal. If so few people are willing to fight the invading force that it stands to conquer the nation then it’s obvious that the people didn’t see the nation as worthy of saving. Isn’t that the will of the people? Isn’t that what this supposedly glorious democracy is all about?

Men and women should be equally free to pursue their wants. They should also be equally free from slavery.

The Libertarian Party is Becoming a Real Political Party

Everybody who knows me knows that I think the Libertarian Party is a joke. It’s not because they’re politically impotent, that is at least consistent with libertarianism. It’s because the party is striving to become like the two major political parties and in so doing is sacrificing libertarian principles. Case in point, the Libertarian Party is now purging dissenters from its ranks:

The Howell man whose impromptu striptease last month at the Libertarian Party’s national convention made headlines across the U.S. has been suspended from the party.

James Weeks II announced Sunday evening that Libertarian Executive Committee officials approved his suspension earlier in the day because of his actions.

Weeks, chairman of the party’s Livingston County branch and an announced party candidate for county sheriff, said “the reasoning behind this suspension is their disapproval of my use of free expression in lieu of a speech during my run for Libertarian Party chair at the national convention.”

Normally I don’t find dancing overweight men wearing a g-string appealing. But Weeks was the highlight of the Libertarian Party’s national convention. While all the super serious people were busy nominating somebody who isn’t a libertarian to be the party’s presidential candidate, Weeks went on stage to reminded everybody that the idea of a libertarian political party is a joke. John McAfee, the only frontrunner in the Libertarian Party’s presidential race that displayed genuine libertarian beliefs, had the best response to Weeks antics:

When James Weeks stripped at the LP Convention last Sunday there were widespread boo’s and general disapproval of Mr. Week’s exuberance. Rather than enjoying a respite from the grey blandness of the convention, people were muttering that the world would think that Libertarians were fools. Well, if we care about such tivialities, then we are indeed fools.

Libertarianism cannot spread if its proponents allow their actions to be guided by the people in power. When libertarians try to emulate those people in power, outside of being satirical, they must sacrifice their principles. Once the principles of libertarianism are sacrificed then there is no point in spreading them.

With The Zodiac Killer Out Of The Spotlight Everybody Needs To Watch Their Backs

Ted “The Zodiac Killer” Cruz has dropped out of the race, leaving Donald Trump as the last remaining candidate for the Republican presidential nomination (What? Kasich is still in? I’ve never heard of him.).

Unfortunately this means Peter King won’t be eating cyanide, which is a tremendous loss to the world. What is more concerning though is that the Zodiac Killer is now out of the spotlight so everybody needs to watch their backs.

Berning The Middle East Down

One thing that marks this presidential election is the complete absence of a mainstream anti-war candidate. In 2008 and 2012 Ron Paul was the predominant anti-war candidate for the Republicans and Obama pretended to be anti-war in his 2008 campaign. But this year not a single major candidate is even pretending to be anti-war. When I point this out somebody inevitably brings up Bernie Sanders but even he isn’t hiding his murderous desires:

QUESTION: Senator Sanders, you said that you think that the U.S. airstrikes are authorized under current law, but does that mean that the U.S. military can lawfully strike ISIS-affiliated groups in any country around the world?

SANDERS: No, it does not mean that. I hope, by the way, that we will have an authorization passed by the Congress, and I am prepared to support that authorization if it is tight enough so I am satisfied that we do not get into a never-ending perpetual war in the Middle East. That I will do everything I can to avoid.

(APPLAUSE)

But the President, no President, has the ability willy-nilly to be dropping bombs or using drones any place he wants.

HAYES: The current authorization which you cite in what Miguel just quoted which is the authorization to use military force after 9/11. That has led to the kill list. This President — literally, there is a kill list. There is a list of people that the U.S. government wants to kill, and it goes about doing it. Would you keep the kill list as President of the United States?

SANDERS: Look. Terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves. I think as Miguel said, though, it has to be done in a constitutional, legal way.

HAYES: Do you think what’s being done now is constitutional and legal?

SANDERS: In general I do, yes.

So he’s hoping, as president, he’ll receive authorization to continue doing what Bush and Obama have already been doing. But even more concerning is his support of the kill list.

I’ve discussed the kill list several times but I’ll summarize the problem with it for the benefit of newer readers. The names that appear on the kill list aren’t people who have been found guilty through due process. In fact we only know a little bit about the secret criteria used to justify adding names to the list and that information only came from an unauthorized leak. Sanders believes murdering foreigners without due process is both constitutional and legal.

To put this as diplomatically as I can, fuck Sanders. Anybody who claims he’s an anti-war candidate is either a liar or ignorant.