Category: Wall of Fame Assholes

It’s Not Your Property

One of the easiest mistakes to make in the United States is assuming that you can own property. If you could own property you wouldn’t have to pay rent and you could do whatever you wanted with it so long as your activities didn’t harm your neighbors or their property. But here in the United States you have to pay rent, usually referred to by the euphemism “property taxes,” and you can only do approved activities on what is mistakenly referred to as your property:

A Pennsylvania family thought building a hockey rink in the backyard was the solution for keeping the kids active during the winter — until town officials told them to tear it down.

“We want a space for them to… just get outside and get some exercise and kind of bring back the old school fun that we had when we were kids,” Terry Beam told Fox News.

This is the second winter the Beam family made a hockey rink Beam says, but it didn’t sit well with South Middleton Township authorities this year. In a letter to the family, the township engineer said the rink was a violation.

“A drainage easement is located on your property,” the letter noted. “By placing objects and fences that block the water, such as the skating rink constructed on your property, the amount of storage available is reduced, and the basin will not function as designed.”

I’m sure somebody will note that hindering a drainage basin could cause harm to neighbors’ properties. But the ice rink isn’t being removed because their was evidence that it was hindering the purpose of the drainage basin, it’s being removed because the government said so.

When the government says something it doesn’t care if its statement is logical, truthful, or supported by evidence. All it cares about is its authority. Slaves will either obey whatever the government says or it will punish them. This attitude means that the idea that government serves the people is a myth and that the idea that an individual can own property is also a myth.

Shut Up, Slave

When a slave by the name of Delvon King failed to stop talking in Robert Nalley’s courtroom, the muumuu-clad judge ordered one of his thugs to shock the shit out of the slave. Nalley’s thug, of course, dutifully complied:

And then the judge took a smoke break:

Courtroom video shows Delvon King—who despite the judge’s orders won’t stop talking—falling to the ground and screaming in pain during a hearing about what questions should be submitted to prospective jurors. According to the video of the 2014 episode, the judge told the courtroom deputy, “Mr. Sheriff do it, use it.”

King then hit the floor and screamed in agony, according to the video.

“All right we’re gonna take five and I’ll be back,” the judge said before he left the courtroom. All the while, King was on the ground and moaning.

This incident demonstrates yet again that there are separate rules for slaves and the king’s men. If I shocked the shit out of somebody in my place of business because they failed to stop talking I’d be brought up on charges. Such behavior is not acceptable for lowly slave like me. But when you’re adorned with the king’s muumuu, you can get away with such behavior because you get to play by a separate rulebook.

The judge’s thug also deserves criticism here. Upon hearing an order to shock somebody for talking too much, a decent person would have told the man giving order to go pound sand. Violence is not an acceptable response to somebody running their mouth. But that officer isn’t a decent person. At best he’s a mindless automaton who follows whatever orders he’s given. At worst he’s a sadist who sought the position of police officer so he could legally inflict pain.

Without Government Who Would Punish the Victims

Let’s say that you’re in an interracial marriage. Now let’s say a rather unpleasant individual spray painted a racial slur on your garage door. Under the circumstance you’d expect the government to step in to find the vandal and arrest them, right? What would you say if the government decided to fine you for the graffiti through?

The N-word was written on the couple’s garage door over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, but so far, no one has been arrested for the crime.

Heather Lindsay, who is white, said they won’t scrub it off until authorities “do their job” and “not just cover it up and sweep it under the table as they have done in the past.”

The Stamford, Conn., officials have slapped the couple with a blight citation, which carries a $100 daily fine.

The first thing worth noting is the fact that Mrs. Lindsay feels the need to leave the graffiti up in order to motivate the police to do their supposed job. Unfortunately, police are generally disinterested in enforcing property crimes because the State doesn’t stand to rake in a ton of cash off of them. Second, what Mrs. Lindsay does with her own property should be her own business. If she wants to leave the graffiti up then she should be able to leave it up. Third, and this is the most important point in my opinion, Mrs. Lindsay shouldn’t be held responsible for removing the graffiti, the perpetrator should be.

Under any sane justice system the perpetrator is the only person required to right their wrong. Under statism the victim is just as likely to suffer as the perpetrator. This is especially true when the crime that was committed wasn’t one that is generally profitable to the State. I guess the State has to make its profit somewhere.

Without Government Who Would Attack the Homeless

According to statists, the State is necessary to provide a social safety net for those with nothing. Like all statist beliefs it exploits that unease people feel when they are uncertain about their ability to provide for their needs. Why do statist beliefs have to exploit our unease? Because they’re entirely fictitious.

What demographic has less than the homeless? Homeless individuals generally have about as close to nothing as one can get without actually having nothing. Since the State provides a social safety net that means it is providing the homeless with clean water, food, clothing, and shelter, right? Wrong. The State doesn’t give a shit about people who have nothing to steal so instead of providing the homeless with a social safety net it is waging war against them:

Enforcement of new regulations targeting homeless people who live in their vehicles will start today, reports KPCC. The new rules dictate where people living in RVs and cars can park. For example, parking “for habitation purposes” on residential streets from 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. is now banned.

And, living in a vehicle is prohibited at all times within one block, or 500 feet, of schools, pre-schools, daycare facilities, and parks.

Results from the 2016 homeless count found more than 7,000 people live in their cars in Los Angeles, says KPCC.

Politicians create regulations like this in the hopes that they will make the lives of homeless individuals so miserable that they’ll go somewhere else and thus become somebody else’s problem. They aren’t even particularly coy about it. Yet people continue to buy into the statists’ bullshit claims.

Finishing the Job

The Obama administration had a hard-on for bombing people with drones. Its fetish was so strong that it even went so far as to assassinate an American citizen and his 16-year-old son with a drone. Although Hillary made it clear that she planned to continue Obama’s reign of terror, Trump didn’t make his position as well known. This caused some suckers to believe that he might curtail the war a bit. Not only has he continued bombing people, he’s trying to finish what Obama started:

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, Nawar, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.

Every despot knows that if you don’t take out you opponent’s entire family they’ll just grow up and seek revenge on you!

Nawar wasn’t even the first 8-year-old murdered by the United States and almost certainly won’t be the last. And that pisses me off. What pisses me off even more is that those hypocrites who call themselves the anti-war left didn’t give a shit about dead children until now. For four years the children of the Middle East can enjoy the fact that when they’re murdered some Americans will at least pretend to give a damn. After that, whether they’re remembered or not will depend on who wins the election because most people in this country don’t have principles.

Heroes Out Doing Hero Things

I know many of you are probably tired of reading stories about cops killing somebody needlessly. I’m certainly getting sick of writing posts about them! But issues aren’t fixed by sweeping them under the rug. With that out of the way, we have yet another incident where officers gunned down somebody needlessly and then apparently lied about it:

The video shows multiple police officers cornering James Hall, 47, in the back of a Chevron gas station mini-mart, where police and the man engage in a brief standoff.

Hall appears to shift his weight between two counters near a soda fountain just before an officer shoots and he collapses to the tiled floor.

The grainy surveillance images appear to partly contradict the initial account of the Fontana Police Department, which described Hall as armed with a knife and advancing on officers before police shot him dead.

Shifting his weight? Armed with a knife and advancing? Who could tell the difference?!

Police officers should be judged on the same use of force rules as anybody else. Had I shot a gun at somebody who wasn’t advancing on me I’d probably spend a few years in a cage. But a lot of people are willing to give officers are pass because they “have a hard job” and “just want to go home to their families at night”. Both excuses, of course, apply to almost everybody but for some unknown reason only seem to hold weight when applied to those with magic badges.

In Order to Save the Children We Must Damn the Children

People love to bitch about the government indoctrination centers public education system. And with good cause. If you believe that the purpose of public schools is to educate children then you can’t help but admit that they’re doing an abysmal job. When I see people bitching about public schools I sometimes like to amuse myself by asking them what the solution is. Unless the person I’m asking is a libertarian the solutions proposed are almost always some variant of “We need to provide more funding to public schools!” While I find the idea of throwing even more money into the pit to fix a fundamental failure absurd, I at least understand why somebody might come to that conclusion. However, I came across a proposed solution that is so absurd that I can’t fathom how the proposer came up with it:

For Hannah-Jones, sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. “It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it’s also upheld by individual choices,” she says. “As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children … we’re not going to see a change.”

The only way to fix public schools is to damn every child to them!

This proposal is nothing less than collective punishment. Collective punishment is a statist belief that I find especially heinous. But in this case it’s more heinous than usual because the people being punished, children, had no involvement in creating the problem whatsoever. Why should every child be condemned to a poor education when it was adults that created the horrible public education system in the first place? If you’re going to punish somebody, why not punish those adults instead?

I consider myself an open minded person. But collective punishment and collective suicide, which is what dumbing down every child in the nation is, are two beliefs I cannot bring myself to even entertain.

Crime Pays

That’s a nice piece of property you have there. It would be a same if anything were to happen to it.

We usually associate such extortion with the mafia or other nongovernment gangs but they’re petty crooks when compared to local municipalities. The City of Minneapolis raked in over $1.7 billion with this scheme:

The city of Minneapolis issued more than $1.7 billion in building permits last year, the fifth year in a row that the city has burst the billion-dollar bubble.

The 2016 tally, announced Friday, is the second highest Minneapolis has seen since 2000. The only year to dwarf it was 2014, when the city issued $2 billion in permits with the construction of the new U.S. Bank Stadium and surrounding development.

Who says crime doesn’t pay?

Building permits are useful for illustrating two things. First, that local municipalities can make a killing on permit fees even though each individual permit may seem fairly cheap. Second, that you can’t own property in this country. You can rent it from the State, which will allow you to use it in approved manners so long as your rent is paid up. But if you fail to pay your rent or seek the landlord’s blessing anytime you want to use it you may find yourself facing a man in a muumuu who will either send you to a cage or extort more money out of you (or both).

How Fake News Happens

Fake news has remained one of the big boogeyman ever since Hillary Clinton failed to win the presidential election. But what is fake news? At one time fake news was referred to as tabloids. Then fake news became known as Onion articles. Now fake news seems to mean whatever news one disagrees with. But there is actual fake news and it usually stems from so-called legitimate media outlets:

The original article was posted online on the Washington Post’s website at 7:55PM EST. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can see that sometime between 9:24PM and 10:06PM the Post updated the article to indicate that multiple computer systems at the utility had been breached (“computers” plural), but that further data was still being collected: “Officials said that it is unclear when the code entered the Vermont utility’s computers, and that an investigation will attempt to determine the timing and nature of the intrusion.” Several paragraphs of additional material were added between 8PM and 10PM, claiming and contextualizing the breach as part of a broader campaign of Russian hacking against the US, including the DNC and Podesta email breaches.

Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior.

Yet, as the Post’s story ricocheted through the politically charged environment, other media outlets and technology experts began questioning the Post’s claims and the utility company itself finally issued a formal statement at 9:37PM EST, just an hour and a half after the Post’s publication, pushing back on the Post’s claims: “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding.”

Fake news tends to be the result of journalists jumping the gun instead of performing a investigation. In this case a journalist or journalists at the Washington Post received information about malware being found on a laptop at a power station. Instead of investigating the story further the journalist(s) wove a story about Russian hackers attacking the United States’ power grid. Had they waited for a response from the power company they would have known that the laptop wasn’t even connected to the network and was therefore a nonissue.

We see this happen with every breaking story. In fact it happens so often that I now consider the term “break story” to mean “incoming bullshit.” The talking heads on your moving picture boxes, the writers for news websites, and your friends on Facebook all crave attention. In the case of the former two attention equals money and in the case of the latter attention equals an ego boost. Either way, the people reporting about a breaking story have no information to go on so they’re just speculating. Furthermore, because journalists are often ignorant about the technical matters surrounding the story they’re reporting on, their speculations tend to be fantastical.

While tabloids are often advertised by their creators as real news almost everybody with the ability to think critically knows they’re bullshit. The Onion straight up admits to being a satire site. So-called legitimate journalists don’t have an excuse to be propagating false information. In fact, the job of journalism once involved investigating stories so true information could be reported. Yet they end up being the biggest propagators of false information time and again.

If you really despise fake news you should be demanding that journalists do their job by waiting until they have some factual information to report before reporting.

The Streisand Effect

The Internet doesn’t lend itself well to censorship. In fact, attempts to censor information usually lead to a great deal of public scrutiny. Take Ham Radio Deluxe, for example. Until a few days ago I hadn’t heard of the software or the company that creates it. But then the company tried to make a negative review posted by a user go away. Now I’ve not only heard of the company but I know that it’s a company that I won’t ever do business with:

This tactic, however, is a new twist on the old “punish customers for negative reviews” game. A user of Ham Radio Deluxe wasn’t too happy with its apparent incompatibility with Windows 10. He posted a negative review of the software at eHam.net, calling out the company for its seeming unwillingness to fix the underlying issue.

[…]

The “customer support” at HRD Software then pointed the user to its terms of service, stating that it had the right to do what it had just done. HRD Software reserves the “right” to “disable a customer’s key at any time for any reason.” Then it told him the blacklisting would be revoked if he removed his negative review. Bonus: mention of a capital-A “Attorney” for added seriousness, I guess.

If you remove the eHam review, which was blatantly false, we will remove the blacklist from you call. You are not buying software, you are buying your callsign’s access to the software. the so called bug you reported is not one in HRD, but one in the CAT commands of the FT­3000 radio, which have been verified with yaesu. Again refer to section 8 of the TOS, which was written by our Attorney.

There are many ways to deal with negative reviews. Usually the best option is to ignore them. Not everybody is going to have a good experience with your product so you need to accept that some users will give negative reviews. If a particular negative review is hurting business you can either act on that review by improving your product or you can issue a rebuttal if the review is based on false information. What you should never do is try to coerce the reviewer into deleting their review. That looks scummy to everybody watching.