Wall of Fame Assholes – Page 41

Stanley McChrystal Wants to Bring Back Slavery

Former General Stanley McChrystal recently came out in support of slavery:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander of international forces in Afghanistan, said this week that the United States should bring back the draft if it ever goes to war again.

“I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn’t be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population,” McChrystal said at a late-night event June 29 at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. “I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game.”

Yes, drafts are slavery. Slavery, by definition, is being forced to labor for another under the threat of violence and a draft is nothing more than the state threatening to kill you if you don’t go kill its enemies. His wording is interesting as well, he believes when a nation goes to work that “every town, every city needs to be at risk.” Couldn’t you accomplish that simply by bombing them yourself? Instead of enslaving the population why not randomly bombard a town every week? Wouldn’t that accomplish your goal of putting every town at risk?

What’s most worrisome about McChrystal’s statement is that this psychopath was in charge of the Afghanistan war. Is it any wonder why foreign nations hate ours so much?

That’s Quite the Rap Sheet

It’s good to see that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) manages to find time to deal with real criminals like Matthew Swaye and Christina Gonzalez who have the audacity to film police officers being tyrannical dicks:

The flyer featured side-by-side mugshots of Matthew Swaye, 35, and his partner Christina Gonzalez, 25, and warned officers to be on guard against them. It was spotted by multiple people, including the couple, when it was taped to a podium outside a public hearing room in the 30th Precinct house last Thursday, where residents met for precinct council meeting.

“Be aware that above subjects are known professional agitators,” read the flyer, which bears the NYPD shield and a seal of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. It also gave the home address of the couple.

“Above subjects MO is that they video tape officers performing routine stops and post on YouTube,” the sign said. “Subjects purpose is to portray officers in a negative way and too deter officers from conducting there [sic] responsibilities.”

How dare they film public officials, who are paid by the individuals through taxes, while they’re performing their work in public places! If citizens start holding the police accountable for their misdeeds the police state could be put at risk.

In all seriousness I find it funny that the NYPD are putting so much effort into “warning” officers about these two instead of realizing what the officers are doing is deplorable and should be stopped. The police have no right to stop and frisk individuals and any officer performing such action should themselves be arrested. Imagine what would happen if you stopped a police officer, threatened force against him if he didn’t submit to your authority, and began frisking him.

Good on Matthew Swaye and Christina Gonzalez, I hope other individuals follow in their footsteps. I would love to see police officers under constant surveillance by the people.

The Effects of Subsidies

It touched briefly on subsidies in my earlier post today but I came across a story that demonstrates my point all too well:

Every day some 3,000 Indian children die from illnesses related to malnutrition, and yet countless heaps of rodent-infested wheat and rice are rotting in fields across the north of their own country.

It is an extraordinary paradox created by a rigid regime of subsidies for grain farmers, a woeful lack of storage facilities and an inefficient, corruption-plagued public distribution system that fails millions of impoverished people.

Once again the state not only allows thousands of downtrodden individual to die but they actively increase the number of starving by artificially increasing the price of foodstuff. Why doesn’t the state just give the unused grain to the starving? Simple, the receivers of the grain may being to trade it in exchange of other needed goods. This trade would increase the supply which would decrease the price. As the price decreases the farmers make less and therefore have less for the state to take.

Gratitude

I post a lot of stories about police officers acting like total dicks but once in a while the tables are turned and it’s the police officer who is in the right and the average person who is acting like a total dick:

he was grabbed by a desperate parolee and who held her with a knife to her throat in Woodbridge Center Mall until a police officer shot and killed the man.

Good on that police officer, he likely saved the woman’s life. Obviously she’s grateful for the police officer’s actions… or not:

Now the woman, Ellen Shane, 62, of Carteret, plans to sue the township for $5 million, claiming it failed to protect public safety and that she was injured as a result of the officer’s acts.

Both Shane and her husband, Ronald Shane, “are suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome and both have been dramatized from this incident,” according to the tort claim notice filed by their lawyer, David Corrigan of Eatontown.

What an ungrateful little prat. A random goon puts a knife to her neck, the police officer shoots the knife wielding asshole, and now that woman is suing the city because she suffered “post traumatic stress?” Would she have been happier if her throat had been slit? Post traumatic stress syndrome sucks but being dead sucks a whole lot more. You also have to love this:

Court papers filed with the township state Garcia told the officer he would harm Ellen Shane if not allowed to leave.

“Instead of attempting to resolve the situation, Barrett took out his gun and shot the suspect while he was holding Mrs. Shane,” the paper states.

Actually, I’d say the officer resolved the situation rather effectively.

They Have to Keep the Voters Happy

At the beginning of this year I discussed the state of North Carolina’s plan to pay the victims of its forced sterilization program $50,000 each. Although I found the story disgusting before it has managed to get worse:

Victims of forced sterilisation in the US state of North Carolina will not get compensation, after a payout plan failed in the state Senate.

A plan to give $50,000 (£31,800) to each victim passed the House but was rejected in the Senate. Republicans said the state did not have the funds.

[…]

“The state has no money anyway and the teachers would like to have a pay raise, and state employees would like to have a pay raise and you’re dealing with a $250 million shortfall in Medicaid,” Senator Austin Allran said.

It must be nice being the state. First you get to forcefully sterilize those you don’t approve of, then you get to control the court that determines how evil your actions were, and then you get to throw that court decision out the window because you need to buy votes in the upcoming election.

How are they buying votes with this action? Easy, they openly mentioned that there are state employees who would like to have raises. In any private business if a court decision lead to a payout that hampered employee raises it would me the employees would simply have to go without raises that year. The state doesn’t have to worry about such minor details because they can choose to ignore court rulings and give their employees pay raises so those same employees don’t vote the current crooks out of office.

This is how the system works, what’s politically convenient is allowed to happen and what’s politically inconvenient is stopped from happening.

The New Wave of Government Transparency

After the use of executive privilege to coverup Fast and Furious there has been a lot of talk about Obama and transparency. During his campaign Obama promised to ring in a new age of government transparency, he promised to throw out the Bush administration’s police of keeping everything secret from the public. People are not claiming he broke that promises but I believe everybody simply misunderstood what Obama meant when he promised more government transparency.

Everybody assumed he meant there would be transparency in the political process. That is to say legislation would be more open, people would be better able to discuss issues with their so-called representatives, and that legislation that didn’t receive popular support wouldn’t be rammed down our throats at some random congressional session at 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve.

It appears what Obama really meant was the corruption and psychopathy would become more transparent. Instead of pussyfooting around the government would not wield its power openly. The illusion of due process would be tossed out the window and the state would just start assassinating those it wanted dead. Using the CIA to damage other countries from the shadows would be a strategy of the past, instead the United States government would begin openly bombing those countries with unmanned drones.

If the latter is what Obama meant then he certainly kept his promise.

Everything is Illegal

I haven’t reported on the Funnyjunk vs. The Oatmeal Internet battle because battles involving websites usually isn’t that interesting to me. That changed with the publishing of this story. Matt Inman, the man behind The Oatmeal, accused Funnyjunk of stealing material. In response Charles Carreon, Funnyjunk’s asshole (I’ll get to that in a bit) lawyer, demanded The Oatmeal pay $20,000 to compensate his client for defamation. Inman managed to raise $140,000 by crowd sourcing for funds then gave Carreon the middle finger and donated the wad of cash to charity. Now Carreon is butt hurt and apparently doesn’t understand the law:

In his 20 years as a lawyer, he says, he’s written hundreds of letters like the one he sent Inman, but the response to this one was unique.

“So someone takes one of my letters and takes it apart. That doesn’t mean you can just declare netwar, that doesn’t mean you can encourage people to hack my website, to brute force my WordPress installation so I have to change my password. You can’t encourage people to violate my trademark and violate my twitter name and associate me with incompetence with stupidity, and douchebaggery,” he says. “And if that’s where the world is going I will fight with every ounce of force in this 5’11 180 pound frame against it. I’ve got the energy, and I’ve got the time.”

The simply act of calling somebody out as being a douche bag doesn’t qualify as encouraging people to hack a website. Inman never said, “Everybody, go hack Carreon’s site, bring the site to its knees!” He merely told his readers what was happening and asked for money to help. The individuals who hacked Carreon’s site did that of their own accord. As I’ve said before, the Internet has defensive capabilities. When you act like a jackass (as far as Internet culture goes) you can guarantee a very harsh response. It’s almost automated, nobody has to encourage the behavior, in fact there is no way one can even insinuate Inman encouraged such behavior… wait, what:

He may have a very difficult time proving that Inman “instigated attacks,” as he said on his website, but he’s certain he can find some legal recourse for what’s going on right now – “California code is just so long, but there’s something in there about this,” he says.

Emphasis mine. Wow… that’s pretty ballsy for an attorney to say. He basically said, “I know that everything is illegal, I just need to find an obscure law that has been long forgotten and was never meant to be used in this context then I’ll have Inman by the balls.” It’s the lawyer equivalent of admitting to wanting to hurt somebody just to hurt them.

Carreon’s statement demonstrates much of what is wrong with our so-called justice system. There are so many laws on the books that everything is illegal. Even if Carreon can’t get a charge to stick he can attempt to use a strategy favored by losing lawyers, keep the litigation process going until the opposition is bankrupted. We can only hope that Carreon’s statement can be used as evidence to dismiss any case he brings against Inman, although the chances of that happening in California are even slimmer than most places.

Interesting Use of the Word Accomplishment

A Democratic website has been keeping track of Obama’s accomplishments but, as Charles Davis points out, half the list is composed of people Obama has ordered killed. How one can consider killing an accomplishment is beyond me. Even if I was put into a situation where I had to kill somebody to protect myself or somebody I care about I wouldn’t consider it an accomplishment. A necessary action to protect life? Yes An accomplishment? No.

I miss the good old days when Bush was in office and the Democrats opposed war. Sadly they stopped being anti-war as soon as their guy was the one calling the shots. It demonstrates everything I hate about party politics. Everything, including death, is seen as nothing more than political rhetoric to be used in making a case for your side and opposing the other side. Many of the people who opposed the wars when Bush were in office didn’t actually care able the people dying, they only cared about the fact that a Republican was in office and they wanted a Democrat there instead. If you were one of these people let me just say this: fuck you.

The War on Dogs Comes to Minneapolis

Even Minnesota isn’t safe from the state’s war on dogs:

A north Minneapolis woman whose dog was shot 10 times and whose house was ransacked by Minneapolis police officers has sued the department, alleging that the incident earlier this year was set off after a failed police pursuit of her fugitive brother.

They shot the dog 10 times? Obviously this was a vicious uncontrolled animal that threatened the lives of all involved:

As Anderson’s husband met the officers in the front yard, the family’s 8-month-old pit bull appeared. Anderson’s husband said he would collect the dog and called for it, but the officers called out “Pit bull!” and began shooting, striking the dog in the head, legs and body and fatally injuring it, the suit said.

Or it could have been entirely harmless and was merely minding its own business, that was my second guess. At least karma his the police square in the leg:

A bullet or bullet fragment struck one of the officers in the leg, and another dog also was shot and wounded.

Serves those murdering sons of bitches right. The gun control zealots keep talking about taking guns from lawful individuals but are entirely OK with allowing costume-clad government thugs to continue having them. Last I heard the average individual wasn’t going around shooting family pets for no reason.

Why People No Longer Help One Another

I’ve said it before, the reason less people are willing to help one another is because doing so is illegal:

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days? Would you give that person some food? Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live. Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America. Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become “out of reach” for most average people.

The article lists examples in Philadelphia, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas, and New York City (which I’ve covered before) of the state interfering with individuals helping those in need.

When the state decides to get itself involved in a service they quickly move to establish a monopoly. One of the first things the state did when it decided to move into the welfare market was to legislate mutual aid societies out of existence . Without a means for groups of people to come together in mutual aid individuals moved to help those in need by themselves. Needless to say the state is now working to make such actions illegal and thus ensure monopoly status on welfare.

The next time you hear somebody trying to blame capitalism, materialism, or the lack of religion for today’s apathy for mutual aid kindly inform them that the state is the real culprit.