Politics – Page 37 – A Geek With Guns

America No Longer Has a Monopoly on Reinterpreting Constitutions

For the longest time it seemed that no challenger existed to the United States’ monopoly on reinterpreting its own Constitution. Thankfully some competition has arisen as Japan has learned how to reinterpret its own constitution:

Under its constitution, Japan is barred from using force to resolve conflicts except in cases of self-defence.

But a reinterpretation of the law will now allow “collective self-defence” – using force to defend allies under attack.

Obviously this is good news for the United States. One of the biggest mistakes America made after World War II was disallowing Japan the ability to initiate force against foreign countries. This has prevented the island nation from joining us in many of our foreign excursions. Because we have been unable to access Japan’s first-hand experience at empire building we’ve been forced to muddle about as we try to learn how to play the game.

In addition to learning how to reinterpret its own constitution it appears as though Japan’s war mongering prime minister has also learned the American way of selling such shenanigans to his people:

PM Shinzo Abe has been pushing hard for the move, arguing Japan needs to adapt to a changing security environment.

“No matter what the circumstances, I will protect Japanese people’s lives and peaceful existence,” he told journalists after the change was approved.

Don’t worry citizens it’s all in the name of national security. While this reinterpretation of the constitution may seem like the wrong course of action trust me when I tell you that the barbarians at the gate will get you in your sleep if I don’t make this change. Now return to your jobs and wait until I declare war on a foreign nation (whose name will totally not be China) and force all of you to die in the name of our (and by “our” I mean my) glorious crusade!

Slaying Net Neutrality Under the Guise of Cyber Security

It has become obvious to our overlords in government that us slaves are rather fond of the way the Internet has worked since day one. But its corporate partners have dictated that they desire legal permission to throttle traffic selectively and what the government’s corporate partners want they get. So it’s time to play that wicked game again where the government slips in what it wants to do under the guise of something else. Net neutrality is now being sold as cyber security:

The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a “cyber threat,” which would allow them to throttle the streaming service’s delivery to customers.

[…]

The bill, as it’s written, allows companies to employ “countermeasures” against “cybersecurity threats,” but both terms are extremely broadly defined, and video streaming could easily fall within the purview of the latter.

“A ‘threat,’ according to the bill, is anything that makes information unavailable or less available. So, high-bandwidth uses of some types of information make other types of information that go along the same pipe less available,” Greg Nojeim, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “A company could, as a cybersecurity countermeasure, slow down Netflix in order to make other data going across its pipes more available to users.”

You would think with a Senate full of lawyers that net neutrality could be force fed down our throat in a slightly more subtle way. This strategy just reeks of laziness in my opinion. There is only a handful of things I expect the government to do well: killing people, expropriating wealth from the people, pretend that it’s benevolent, and slyly sneak in its corporate partner’s agenda in a way that we don’t readily recognize.

But there you have it, net neutrality is now part of cyber security. And while cyber security hasn’t received much love from the slaves it’s easier to force feed to them because it’s part of OH MY GOD NATIONAL SECURITY!

Hillary is Turning Out to Be the Ideal Republican Candidate

I feel bad for whoever gets the Republican Party presidential nomination next election. Not only will they have the misfortune of being the nominee for the more incompetent of the two parties but they will most likely be going up against the perfect Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton. Hillary has proven to be the neocon’s neocon. She revels in killing leaders of countries in the Middle East, has a legacy of war mongering, can’t managed finances, and is extremely insensitive regarding rape:

Hillary Clinton’s successful 1975 legal defense of an accused rapist has surfaced again with the victim, angered over a tape of Clinton chuckling over her courtroom tactics in the case, lashing out at the potential Democratic presidential candidate.

“Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” the victim told the Daily Beast in an emotional interview published today. The woman said that if she saw Clinton today she would say, “I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I heard you on tape laughing.”

The name of the woman, who is now 52, was withheld for privacy reasons. She decided to speak out after hearing never-before-heard audio tapes released by the Washington Free Beacon earlier this week of Hillary Clinton talking about the trial. In the recordings, dubbed the “Hillary Tapes,” Clinton is heard laughing as she describes how she succeeded at getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was guilty.

“He took a lie-detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton said about her client on the tapes, which were initially recorded, but never used, in the early 1980s.

Good luck finding a more perfect neocon, Republican Party.

But what will make this race even more interesting than the fact that the Democratic Party will almost certainly field a Republican candidate is how the social justice warriors will respond to this. Obviously the social justice warriors want a woman president, which will incline them to support Hillary. But they’re also against, what they call, the rape culture. I’m not scholar on rape culture but I would imagine getting a rapist off on a lighter sentence would certainly qualify. So what will the social justice warriors choose? Will they opt to support Hillary because they want a woman president or will they opt to oppose Hillary because she promoted the rape culture? Only time will tell.

The GOP Stupid Train; The Only Train in America the Run On Time

Will you look at the time, it’s almost Republican Candidate Says Something Stupid O’clock! Oh, and here’s the GOP stupid train right on time:

This week, an Oklahoma magazine discovered that last summer, Tea Party state House candidate Scott Esk endorsed stoning gay people to death: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” he said in a Facebook post. Esk went on to add nuance to his position:

That [stoning gay people to death] goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.

If you go to the source link you will see that this isn’t one of those instances where Slate took something a GOP candidate said way out of context. No. Mr. Esk actually said this shit! And then he calls himself largely libertarian.

But this is par for the course. The Republican Party has a long history of candidates who say really stupid shit in public.

Support Your Local Neighborhood War Criminal

It’s almost certain that the next presidential race will involved a wishy washy Republican candidate going head to head with an honest to God war criminal, Hillary Clinton. There’s a political action committee (PAC) by the name of Ready for Hillary that is collecting money to encourage the wicked war monger who literally laughs about killing people to run for president. Best of all, this PAC is coming to town:

A group of DFL heavyweights including Gov. Mark Dayton, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Reps. Rick Nolan and Betty McCollum and others are hosting a fundraiser for a super PAC aimed at helping Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president.

The fundraiser, held at the office of DFL donor Vance Opperman on June 18, will raise money for the Ready for Hillary PAC. The invitation obtained by MPR News also said it will launch the Minnesotans Ready for Hillary organization.

The invitation embedded at the link notes two levels of donating: $100.00 and $250.00. So if you have a minimum of $100 lying around and you really want to see a certified war criminal run for president (which is kind of rare because our presidents don’t usually become war criminals until they become president) here’s your chance. Or if you’d like to head over there and protest a war criminal’s fund raiser you can certainly do that.

Net Neutrality for Libertarians

Net neutrality is a hot topic in libertarian circles. May libertarians mistakenly see net neutrality as another unwelcome intrusion of the state into the free market. It’s not that uncommon of a trap for libertarians to fall for. When they see a battle that appears to be private enterprise versus government they instinctively side with private enterprise. But net neutrality isn’t a debate between private enterprise and government regulations. It’s merely government regulations versus government regulations.

The mistake lies in seeing businesses like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as private enterprises. In reality they are where they are today thanks to special privileges granted to them by the state. AT&T and Verizon, for example, have government granted monopolies over a lot of wireless spectrum and Comcast enjoys near or outright monopolies in many areas thanks to government control over who can build networking infrastructure where. Many states even have restrictions against municipalities providing Internet service because of Internet service provider (ISP) lobbying efforts.

But that’s not all. At one time telephone companies were the primarily ISPs. But ISPs have become content providers and content providers have become ISPs. I believe this is what really sparked the net neutrality war. Companies with monopolies on a great deal of copyrighted material suddenly found a way to further exploit that monopoly by controlling what their ISP customers can access. Comcast can leverage its licensed monopolies on a lot of entertainment content by charging competitors such as Netflix an inflated rate that makes it untenable for Comcast customers to utilize Netflix. And if you just download the content from alternate sources (such as BitTorrent) you’re in violation of the law because you don’t have a license for that monopolized content.

What more libertarians should focus on is the fact that there is no free market in providing Internet access. Only those granted permission by the state can do so. And much of the content that makes the Internet valuable is controlled by a handful of ISPs that will happily withhold said content unless you’re getting Internet access through them.

In other words no matter who wins we lose. Losing net neutrality won’t be a win for the free market and keeping it will mean more government control over something that has had too much government control over it. What is truly needed is the destruction of the monopolies on content and infrastructure, which isn’t going to happen through the political process (since the content providers/ISPs have such effective lobbying efforts).

My Six Point Plan to Address America’s Political Problems

Whenever I write something critical about playing party politics there is also some very serious person who asks some variation on “What’s the alternative?” In the past all alternatives I’ve provided have been scoffed at. If I mention voting for third-party candidates they will tell me that third-party candidates can’t win (it’s almost as if they understand the problem of oligarchy but don’t want to quite face it). They claim that agorism, the common alternative I provide, cannot topple the government or if it can the lack of government will lead to chaos. But I’ve finally come up with a six point plan to address this country’s political issues:

Drink a lot of beer
Start a death metal band
Become famous for especially brutal music
Tour the world
Do a lot of hookers and blow
Watch the United States suffer its inevitable collapse from Iceland

This country is fucked. We might as well have a good time and try to watch the fireworks from afar.

Judge Ensures Campaign Dollars Continue to Flow Unabated

In April the Supreme Court ruled that caps on campaign contributions were unconstitutional. This ruling was most conveniently timed as the political season is ramping up, which means both incumbents and would-be politicians can reap the maximum benefit from this unhindered cash flow. Here in Minnesota there was a separate law that determined how much politicians can accept and a federal judge just shot that down:

A federal court judge has ordered that a campaign finance law that limits how much money candidates can accept from wealthy donors be suspended.

The order marks the local legal impact of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that removed overall caps from how much money donors could give to federal candidates.

The Minnesota branch of the Institute for Justice and four plaintiffs, including two current and former Minnesota lawmakers, used the Supreme Court’s ruling in the McCutcheon case to argue that the state’s limits on ”special source” donations prevent free speech.

Here in Minnesota judges are elected. I wouldn’t go so far as to insinuate that this federal judge was looking out for his state level cohorts but, never mind, I am insinuating that.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if members of the Minnesota Congress and judiciary met and determined who would take the popular opinion hit to shoot down this restriction on campaign finances during this election cycle. Since the state Congress has take several major hits already it was probably determined that the judiciary should take one for the oligarchy this time around. Either way this ruling really changes very little. The wealthy have always been the ones to buy elections. Now they just have to pay more for them.

The Republican Party Funding Problem

In the realm of American politics there are two go-to people to blame all of the country’s woes on. If you’re on the “left” you blame all of the country’s problems on the Koch brothers and if you’re on the “right” you blame all of the country’s problems on George Soros. Let’s consider the “left’s” go-to blame machine, the Koch brothers. Anybody who espouses neoconservative, conservative, or libertarian ideas will eventually be accused of being a paid Kochtopus shill. Apparently the Koch brothers are funding everything that isn’t neoliberalism (by the way guys, you must not have my new address since I’ve not seen a check since I moved several years ago). As it turns out, in the realm of political funding, the Koch brothers aren’t at the top of the list:

OpenSecrets.org tallied the top donors in federal elections between 1989 and 2014. Koch Industries — privately owned by the Evil Koch Bros — is on the list, to be sure, but doesn’t appear until the 59th slot, with $18 million in donations, 90 percent of which went to Republicans.

Unions, unions, unions

So who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Evil Koch Bros? Six of the top 10 are … wait for it … unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.

These are familiar names: AFSCME ($60.6 million), NEA ($53.5 million), IBEW ($44.4 million), UAW ($41.6 million), Carpenters & Joiners ($39.2 million) and SEIU ($38.3 million).

Obviously the author is trying to point out that the Koch brothers aren’t really evil and that unions are the secret political string pullers. What I got out of the article is that the Republican Party has a funding problem. This doesn’t surprise me considering the fact that the Republican Party is becoming more political irrelevant as the years go on. Who is going to invest major money into a party that can’t deliver?

This country is slowly turning into a true one party system (at the moment it’s two party in name only since there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties). The reason for this is almost entirely because of the stupidity of the faltering party. And stupidity is a self-feeding monster. As the Republic Party continues to be more stupid it’s going to attract more stupid people that will ensure it keeps acting stupidly and so on. Needless to say the stupidity cycle will also ensure big money donors go elsewhere to get their psychopathic desires fulfilled.

Now I Don’t Want the Ability to Remotely Disable My Phone

I live in Minnesota, the state partially made famous for its oddball political atmosphere. This state is both the source of some pretty decent legislation (the legislation regulating our ability to carry a firearm is surprisingly good) and some absolutely atrocious legislation. This is an example of the latter:

A first-in-the nation measure would require smartphone manufacturers to install mandatory “kill switch” technology to deter thefts became law with Gov. Mark Dayton’s signature Wednesday.

“This is a very important step forward for protecting young people and protecting people of all ages,” Dayton said.

The law mandates that smartphone manufacturers equip their phones with the technology by July 1, 2015. The “kill switch” enables a smartphone owner to remotely disable a smartphone or tablet if it is lost or stolen, rendering the devices useless.

I carry an iPhone, which has the ability to be remotely disabled via my provisioning server. For me it’s a desired feature because I would like to render the device unusable should somebody steal it and, due to the fact that I have the feature tied to my provisioning server, the feature is entirely within my control. With that said, I do not want the inclusion of such a capability to be mandatory. There are a lot of legitimate reasons why an individual wouldn’t want such a capability.

First and foremost is that the capability will most commonly be in the hands of the phone manufacturer. Having somebody’s finger on your phone’s kill switch is generally a bad idea. Second if the ability to remotely kill a device exists in any form it’s possible that an unauthorized third-party will find a way to gain access to that feature. Political dissidents performing a protest probably don’t want devices that can be remotely disabled since there is always the possibility that the state they’re protesting against will pressure the manufacturer into disabling the dissidents’ devices.

And because this is a Minnesota bill it had to include an extra heap of stupidity:

The law also prohibits retailers from paying cash for used phones, rather than electronic transfer or check.

In other words if you sell your phone the government wants to know about it. This is just another step in the state’s desire to track all financial transactions. Like every previous step this one is being marketed as a method of help the people. But the first part of this legislation, the mandatory kill switch, renders the second part irrelevant because no retailer is going to buy a useless phone. So this part is entirely unnecessary in regards to protecting people against cell phone thefts.