Category: Wall of Fame Assholes

Everything is Permitted

I do enjoy those rare glimpses into the unfiltered minds of our overlords. Usually they are careful with what they say and hide their depravities behind a veil of officialdom. But every now and then their facade cracks and they reveal their trust selves to the world. Rudolph Giuliani just did exactly that:

Giuliani said Trump does not necessarily want the United States to extract the oil itself but wants to “leave a force back there and take it and make sure it’s distributed in a proper way.”

“That’s not legal, is it?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked, as the Geneva Conventions forbid seizing the natural resources of a sovereign nation after invading it.

“Of course it’s legal. It’s a war,” Giuliani said, laughing. “Until the war is over, anything’s legal.”

Suddenly the perpetual state of war makes more sense. So long as the war continues the State believes it can excuse any of its depravities.

What Giuliani has expressed isn’t unique to him, he was just dumb enough to say it publicly. But if you look at the extensive list of atrocities that have been committed by the United States in this never ending war such as bombing wedding parities, killing children, and raping prisoners and you see that punishments are never doled out you realize that the political class believes everything done is legal. What makes matters worse is that there is no relief for the civilians living in the areas the United States is bombing. Since the war on terror has no concrete set of parameters that constitute winning the war has no defined end. It can be waged perpetually and the State has no motivation to end it since it believes war gives it an avenue to do anything without consequences.

DEA Decides to Generate More Revenue

While the government claims the war on drugs is being waged to protect the people, anybody with a brain realizes that it’s about generating revenue. Many of the drugs prohibited by the war, such as cannabis, are far less dangerous than the drugs that remain legal, such as alcohol. However, the war on drugs has opened the door for civil forfeiture, an exponential increase in slave labor, widespread surveillance, and heavily armed revenue generators law enforcers.

New drugs are being added to the prohibited list every year. Each one of those new drugs is another opportunity for the State to steal more wealth and kidnap more slave laborers. This year the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) wants to add kratom to Schedule I:

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is moving to place the herbal supplement kratom on its list of Schedule I drugs, effectively banning a naturally occurring psychoactive substance that some say holds promise as a therapy for opioid addiction.

The DEA, in a notice published in the Federal Register this week, said it wants to include two active kratom ingredients in its most restrictive classification of drugs with high potential for abuse and no known medical benefit, signaling that the government considers the plant as dangerous as heroin. The scheduling move would last for two years, with a possible extension of an additional year, and would go into effect at the end of September.

Kratom, like cannabis, is a plant, not some chemical concoction that has to be synthesized. This means that the DEA is effectively waging another war on nature. The advantage of this, to the DEA, is that it can’t win a war against nature so the struggle against the kratom menace would be a perpetual revenue stream for the agency. Also like cannabis, kratom is used medicinally:

Kratom is made from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa, a Southeast Asian tree related to coffee, and has been consumed in Asia for millennia, typically as a tea or powder. The herb contains alkaloids that appear to activate opioid receptors in the brain and reduce pain. Although most opioids have sedative qualities, low to moderate doses of kratom serve as a mild stimulant.

The advantage of targeting a medicinal plant is that people who use kratom to treat their pain are likely to ignore the prohibition so they can continue living a less painful existence. That means the DEA has a good pool of victims it can exploit for cash and slave labor.

Of course the DEA is citing the usual crap about addiction, health effects, etc. However, all of those things apply to alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs that aren’t prohibited. Furthermore, Asian countries have been using kratom for ages to no widespread negative effect. And even if kratom has serious side-effects they’re far less deadly than law enforcers burning babies with flashbang grenades, shooting family pets, and beating people to within an inch of their lives.

Obedience Won’t Save You

People pay taxes because the alternative is ultimately death. Yes, the State will go so far as to murder you if you don’t fork over the “protection” money it demands. The threat of death convinces most people to pay their taxes. Furthermore, as if hoping to curry favor with the State, many people perform a great deal of virtue signaling by proclaiming how much they enjoy paying taxes. But obeying the State’s expropriation tax laws and virtue signaling won’t save you. Even if you obey and pay the State will try to steal more of your wealth if it thinks it can get away with it:

Over the years, we received guidance from Irish tax authorities on how to comply correctly with Irish tax law — the same kind of guidance available to any company doing business there. In Ireland and in every country where we operate, Apple follows the law and we pay all the taxes we owe.

The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process. The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes. This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals. We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe them any more than we’ve already paid.

Apple has a massive team of lawyers whose job is to ensure it complies with the laws of the regions it operates in so it can avoid the State’s wrath. The European Union decided that this dedication to obedience wasn’t enough and chose to demand billions of dollars more from the largest tax victim in its territory. In the eyes of the European Union Apple and every other organization and individual are little more than giant Automated Teller Machines. When it decides it wants more cash it claims the wealthy didn’t pay enough taxes and demands they either pay more or else.

This should be a lesson to all the people hoping to avoid the State’s wrath by publicly proclaiming how much they enjoy paying taxes. Apple has a long history of touting its efforts to be a “responsible citizen”, which includes publicly stating its desire to pay its “fair share”. But the European Union still went after Apple for more. Don’t fool yourself into believing the State will let you live your life so long as you kowtow to it.

Do You Want to Help Your Neighbors? You Better Pay Off the State First.

The floods in Louisiana have received very little press coverage. This isn’t surprising since Louisiana is a poor southern state and those are undeserving of coverage according to most major media outlets. Joining major media outlets, the State has also provided precious little help so far. This has forced the members of the community to step up efforts to help one another (as they always end up having to do because the State doesn’t care about them). There’s just one problem. Most of these good Samaritans haven’t paid off the State and that makes it very angry:

NEW ORLEANS – The Good Samaritan who rescued hundreds, maybe thousands, of people during the ‘Great Flood of 2016‘ said he was not happy after a state lawmaker announced he wants to introduce legislation around future actions by citizen heroes.

Some of these citizen heroes, a loosely-organized group called the ‘Cajun Navy,’ gained national attention for their rescue efforts last week, but that attention is nowhere near the pushback lawmakers are discussing when it comes to a lawmakers proposal to require permits for citizen rescue groups.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, the State wants a piece of the action. It doesn’t care if people end up dying while you’re wasting time filling out paper work so you can pay the State for permission to help the people it’s not helping. It doesn’t even care if all of your belongings were just destroyed in a flood. If you don’t scrounge up money to pay off the State it will send men with guns to kidnap or possibly kill you.

To the Gulags, Slaves

The centrally planned paradise of Venezuela is falling apart. People are starving. Animals are starving. And President Maduro keeps making the situation worse by ordering even more central planning. His latest decree, a socialist favorite, is to allow the government to force people to work in the fields:

International human rights activists are complaining that new laws have introduced forced labour in Venezuela.

“A new decree establishing that any employee in Venezuela can be effectively made to work in the country’s fields as a way to fight the current food crisis is unlawful and effectively amounts to forced labor,” Amnesty International said in a statement released on Thursday.

President Nicolás Maduro signed a decree at the end of last week that gives powers to the labor ministry to order “all workers from the public and private sector with enough physical capabilities and technical know-how” to join a government drive aimed at increasing food production.

They can be required to work in the agricultural sector for a 60-day period that can be extended for another 60 days “if the circumstances require it.”

I’m sure mandatory field work can be extended for an infinite number of 60-day periods.

President Maduro is either ignorant of history or a sadistic son of a bitch. The Soviet Union tried collectivizing agriculture and forcing people to work fields and the country never fully recovered from it. Bread lines were the norm until they were replaced by starvation. If you’re a student of history you know that making people slaves does not motivate them to work harder. Instead they work as little as possible to avoid being beaten too severely because they’re not getting anything for their efforts. I guarantee that the poor Venezuelans that are forced to work in the fields will produce very little foodstuff. And why should they? They don’t want to be there, they’re not knowledgable in the skills of agriculture, and they have every right to resist since they’re being coerced.

Venezuela is fucked. It should go down in the history books as yet another demonstration of the futility of central planning.

Report Wrongthinking Children to the Ministry of Love

How dangerous are small children? Most rational adults would say that small children are’t very dangerous. The State, however, thinks that every child is a potential terrorist. Because of its irrational paranoia it often uses its public indoctrination camps schools to monitor children for wrongthink:

Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

[…]

Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

While there’s no similar government-imposed duty on American schools, U.S. CVE initiatives are based on the Prevent model. Due to this, a core component of the U.S. CVE plan tasks teachers, social workers, and school administrators with monitoring and reporting to law enforcement on children in their care. An FBI document released earlier this year tells teachers to spy on their students’ thoughts and suggests that administrators essentially turn schools into mini-FBI offices. Rights Watch’s report shows what might happen if American schools actually follow the FBI’s proposals.

I wonder if teachers who turn in students receive a reward like people who call one of those crime tip lines?

When I express hatred for public schools I’m usually accused of wanting a world where only wealthy children can afford an education. It’s a straw man argument because I’ve never expressed an interest in restricting education to wealthy children. In fact, I’ve pointed out that education today is cheaper than ever before. My problem with public schools, besides the fact that they suck at providing education, is that they’re used as government indoctrination centers.

I remember a lot of my time in school was wasted with mindless flag worshipping. Until I entered middle school we were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. It was our mandatory morning prayer to the religion of statism. History was almost always focused on the United States and it wasn’t viewed with any critical thinking. The United States was almost always in the right and always the greatest country in human history. Geography wasn’t much different. We spent a tremendous amount of time learning the geography of the United States. Beyond that we covered a few European countries here and there and maybe one or two South American countries. What little economics education we received was, of course, nonsense Keynesian bullshit. You know the usual. A gold-based currency cannot work, inflation is good and deflation is terrible, only governments have the right to create money, etc. And there was D.A.R.E. Supposedly a program to keep kids off of drugs, D.A.R.E. was really a program to trick children into trusting the police. I still remember several police officers coming to the school under D.A.R.E. to tell us that the police are our friends (yet anything you say to them can and will be used against you).

More concerning than the indoctrination though was the pursuit of wrongthinkers. I was one of those wrongthinkers and was therefore specifically targeted. Were I going through high school today I’m sure my principal would have reported me to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) instead of the local police department and my entire existence would have been surveilled for the remainder of my life.

If you put your children into the public education system the State is going to do its damnedest to turn them into unthinking patriotic boot lickers. If your children fail to take to the programming they will be labeled wrongthinkers and may get themselves an FBI record before they’re old enough to buy a beer. Keep your kids out of the fucking public indoctrination camps if at all possible. They won’t get an education there but they will come to the attention of Big Brother.

Police Blast Yet Another Nonthreatening Person

In addition to having a carry permit while black, being a therapist while black is also grounds for being shot in the United Police States of America:

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, told WSVN television he was helping a patient who had wandered away from a facility.

Mobile phone video shows Mr Kinsey lying down with his hands in the air, and his patient sitting in the road with a toy truck.

The latest shooting follows weeks of violence involving police.

North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said officers were called out on Monday, following reports of a man threatening to shoot himself.

Police ordered Mr Kinsey and the patient to lie on the ground, he told The Miami Herald.

The video shows Mr Kinsey lying down while trying to get his patient to comply.

It seems therapists lying on the ground trying to help mentally disabled patients who have toys trucks is grounds for an office fearing for his life now. These officers are either the biggest cowards on the face of the planet or they’re the most psychotic. Either way, they shouldn’t be given power over others.

The progression we’re seeing is as interesting as it is alarming. Before this year the people being gunned down by the police tended to have a criminal history for boot lickers to use to justify the shooting. But now the police are becoming so brazen that they’re gunning down people who have little or no criminal background to speak of. Since they’re not being punished for their actions they’re also not motivated to stop escalating situations to deadly force.

This situation also demonstrates that the boot lickers’ claim that people won’t get shot if they obey the orders of officers is false. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air as the officers had ordered him to do and they still shot him. When you use threats of violence as a compliance mechanism and you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, that is to say you still attack your victim even if they do comply with you, you wreck what little trust you have between yourself and your victim. That makes future scenarios more difficult. Your new victims may decided to fight back instead of complying because they believe you’ll kill them either way but they might possibly survive if they resist. By shooting a complying person the officer increased the danger of future situations involving officers using threats of violence as a compliance mechanism.

The problem of police brutality will only continue to get worse since few seems to have the will to take action to curtail it.

Submit, Slave

Remember what I said in the previous post about the police not liking any of our government granted privileges? Here’s another example:

[Waterbury Conn.] Police Chief Vernon L. Riddick Jr. brought a message of cooperation with police to a mostly African-American crowd of more than 200 people at Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church on Wednesday night.

If an officer stops your car, if they ask to search your person or vehicle, if they demand entry into your home, comply and then complain later to the department’s internal affairs office and police chief’s office if you feel your rights have been violated, Riddick said.

In other words, when an officer asks to search your vehicle or home you should just roll over and be a good little slave.

The exact opposite is true however. If an officer requests to search your property the only response you should give them is, “Come back with a warrant.” Officers asking to search your property are on fishing expeditions. They’re asking permission because they don’t believe they have enough grounds to get a warrant issued. Fishing expeditions can’t help you but they certain can hurt you. As police are required to tell you when reading you your Miranda warnings, anything you say can and will be used against you in court. Likewise, anything an officer finds during a fishing expedition can and will be used against you in court.

Always keep in mind that the police are out to get you. That’s their job. The politicians pass laws and then task the police with finding and dealing with anybody who breaks them. Many of these laws, such as traffic citations and drug offenses, include a nice kickback to the department that makes the arrest. So do yourself a favor and always exercise what few privileges you have against the police.

An Honest Cop

The Republican National Convention is happening in Cleveland this year. As part of the standard convention process of turning the city into a dystopian prison state, the head of the Cleveland Police Union wants open carry banned. The best part is how blatant his he about not caring whether or not such a ban is even legal:

“We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something — I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point,” Cleveland Police Union president Stephen Loomis told CNN.

Law enforcers are supposedly tasked with upholding the law. If Governor Kasich were to issue an unconstitutional, that is to say illegal, executive order then the police, if they were actually interested in upholding the law, should arrest his. But we have the president of the Cleveland Police Union stating in no uncertain terms that he’s okay with the governor breaking the law. Once again we see that laws only apply to us little people, not to the State.

The Minneapolis Police Department is a Bit Red in the Face

The Minneapolis Police Department is well known for its high speed, low drag attitude. Instead of deescalation and conflict avoidance the MPD prefers throwing down with anybody it can create an excuse to throw down with. In fact the department is so cocksure that it didn’t even try to hide its love of violence in its recent recruiting video. However, many people weren’t amused by the video so the MPD was a bit red in the fact and decided to abuse the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an attempt to erase the video from the Internet:

Less than a week after an officer from a nearby force shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, leaving him to die in front of his child and girlfriend (and the world on livestream) the Minneapolis Police Department has perjured itself in issuing a copyright takedown notice to Youtube in order to suppress a controversial recruiting video that depicted the jobs of MPD officers as being a firearms-heavy shoot-em-up.

The video had attracted alarm and criticism by officials and the public, who saw it as indicative of a deep culture of violent, shoot-first policing in the Minneapolis police.

When you start repeating a lie often enough you also start to believe it. The MPD believes that their job is to be domestic soldiers. Who are they at war with? The people. At least that’s the only enemy that exists in Minneapolis because the city isn’t really known for being in a state of civil war. That leads the department to choose violence before deescalation. At this point the attitude is so prevalent that the department’s recruiters can’t even make their recruitment videos looks like anything other than an Army recruitment video. When their videos are finally criticized by the public the MPD resorts to its default tactic, government violence, by threatening anybody hosting the video with a DMCA takedown notice.