Tag: 1984 was a Warning not a Blueprint

The State Makes Hypocrites of Its Supporters

Stephen King wrote an article that has the entire progressive movement cheering his name. In the article King expresses his desire to have the state tax him more. While I give a great deal of credit for the comedic value in this article (seriously, I never knew King was such a vicious writer, kudos to him) I have to take that credit away from him due to his total lack of understanding of the nature of the state. His closing paragraph says it all:

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

King wants the government to tax him more so they can pay for maintaining roads, education, repairing the faltering infrastructure, and caring for the sick and poor. Unfortunately that’s not what the state will do with the extra money. What will the state do? Buy more bombs.

This is something I don’t get, a vast majority of my friends who demand the rich be taxed more also claim oppose the police state and war. They’ve been duped into holding hypocritical beliefs. On one hand they decry any expansion of the police state and military intervention but on the other hand they advocate people give more money to fund the same beast that’s implementing the police state and killing innocent people overseas. Giving the state more money enables it to buy more military hardware such as drones, tanks, bombs, and bullets. The more money they have at their disposal the more they can spy on you here and the more people they can kill overseas. During the Vietnam War people actually advocated tax protests in an attempt to starve the beast that was sending American men and women to die needlessly in a foreign country that never attacked us. What does it take to get these people to wake the fuck up? Do we have to kidnap their children and send them off to war? Do we have to install spy cameras in their homes?

Let’s address King’s next claim of “American responsibility.” He claims that charity and private investment cannot fix environmental issues (he specifically states global warming but I would like to give him a little more credit than just using a random talking point). What’s the solution than? Give the state more money? The very same state who causes most of our environmental problems in the United States by granting legal protection to polluters? Yeah, that’s worked out well so far. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an organization that exists solely to protect wealthy polluters. Terry Anderson wrong an excellent book titled Political Environmentalism that goes over some of more egregious instances of environmental cronyism. Instead of protecting the environment the EPA protects its cronies by ensuring the business environment is hostile to competition while allowing the emission of as much pollutants as their cronies demand. Does King really want to give the primary instigators of our environmental problems the power to further intervene on environmental matters? That would be akin to handing a serial killer a chainsaw and telling him has full immunity from legal prosecution for any murders he commits with that chainsaw.

The state has mastered duping people. They can get the same people who demand the banks be allowed to fail support a bank bailout. How the fuck did they get so good at fooling people? Is the average person so lacking in the department of critical thinking that they’re unwilling to stop and consider issues more deeply than the talking points they’re fed by the 10 o’clock news? Do these people not actually read bills before stating their support of them? These aren’t even clever scams, anybody who spends 15 minutes looking into them can see what is really going on.

It’s amazing how the state gets so many suckers to back mutually exclusive demands. Are you against war? Demand more taxes to fund the war machine! Do you want the banks to fail? Support a bank bailout! Want the environment cleaned up? Fund the political machinery that allows polluters to dump toxic waster into the water and air from lawsuits! Do you believe two plus two equals four? Believe it equals five instead!

If You Don’t Succeed Try Again, Preferable when the Serfs aren’t Watching

Remember all the uproar about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)? There was an Internet blackout to raise awareness and eventually passage of the bill became toxic to political careers. Obviously we won a great victory for liberty with that one! Or did we? The rule of thumb with politics is this: if there is money backing a bill it will be passed. Meet the HR 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA is the new SOPA. This time the critters in Congress were smart and decided to leave out any mention of piracy in the bill’s name and, as expected, the serfs have remained relatively quiet and therefore passing it will be a walk in the park:

The House on Thursday approved cybersecurity legislation that privacy groups have decried as a threat to civil liberties.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, sponsored by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), passed on a vote of 248 to 168.

Its goal is a more secure internet, but privacy groups fear the measure breaches Americans’ privacy along the way. The White House had weighed in on Wednesday, threatening a veto unless there were significant changes to increase consumer privacy. The bill was amended to provide more privacy protections, but it was not immediately clear whether the Senate or the White House would give the amended bill its blessing.

Obama is threatening a veto. Remember when he threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)? His supporters claimed he was threatening to veto the NDAA because he was a proponent of civil liberties when in fact he merely wanted more power. When his desire for power was fulfilled he signed the bill without hesitation. I’m guessing CISPA has something that reduces his power so he’ll threaten to veto the bill until Congress adds in a clause to increase Obama’s power and the bill will get signed right away.

Now my question is this: where is the outrage? When SOPA was making its way through Congress we had a veritable uprising on the Internet. SOPA was one of the few bills that actually got responses from the general population. Shouldn’t the populace be doing the same thing against CISPA? Yes, but this time the bill title doesn’t mention piracy so nobody cares. Much like the Student Loan Forgiveness Act, CISPA has a warm fuzzy title that promises security but is really something far more sinister.

NDAA Slight of Hand

You have to love politicians. First they create a problem and when everybody gets into an uproar they claim to have a fix for the problem but the fix really isn’t a fix at all. This is exactly what’s happening with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA):

Late yesterday, Congressman Scott Rigell and 26 other members of Congress introduced a bill, H.R. 4388, which he is trying to sell to the American people as a “fix” for the National Defense Authorization Act. But in fact, it is a useless bill that might actually end up causing harm.

That’s right. The plan in the House of Representatives seems to be to try to fool Americans into thinking that they are fixing the indefinite detention problems with the NDAA and the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, when in fact, they are doing nothing good.

Don’t be fooled!

Here’s how they hope their trick will work. H.R. 4388, which was sneakily mistitled as the “Right to Habeas Corpus Act,” states that no one in the United States will lose their habeas rights under the NDAA. That might sound like something good, but it’s meaningless.

The question with the NDAA was never whether habeas rights are lost. Instead, the question is whether and when any president can order the military to imprison a person without charge or trial. The NDAA did not take away habeas rights from anyone, but it did codify a dangerous indefinite detention without charge or trial scheme. And nothing in the proposed bill by Rigell would change it. The Rigell bill won’t stop any president from ordering the military lockup of civilians without charge or trial.

I’m sure nobody is too surprised by this hand waving. Much like the Student Loan Forgiveness Act is actually a bank bailout hidden in a warm fuzzy name the Right to Habeas Corpus Act is a bill that actually does nothing to fix the NDAA as its sponsor promises.

Silence Citizen

People often believe we live in a free country where the freedom of speech is respected. It’s not true, the United States censors people all of the time but isn’t as blatant about it as some states. Instead of outright censoring political dissidence the United States uses various laws and procedures claimed to be in place for safety reasons to determine who can and can’t speak as on blogger found out:

The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Isn’t that a nice little scam to censor speech? First you require anybody practicing dietetics or nutrition to be licensed and then you make the act of providing nutritional “counseling” without said license illegal. Since counseling is a pretty good catch-all term that can be applied to any advocacy you can effectively prevent individuals from speaking about a topic unless they’re approved by the state.

More Scare Mongering

If the state loves one thing it’s scare mongering. Agents of the state realize regular individuals wouldn’t be willing to put up with many of the more draconian measures used to beat down the citizenry so they package them up as solutions to fight terrorists. Since the United States hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack in some time the state periodically tries to remind the citizenry that certain death is just around the corned and if we don’t comply with the state we won’t survive. That’s all this little stunt is, an attempt at fear mongering:

Nearly 40,000 Twin Cities residents will go to their mailboxes on Sunday, May 6, to find an unusual delivery: An empty pill bottle representing a powerful antibiotic that would be delivered in the event of a bioterrorism attack in Minnesota.

The exercise, dubbed “Operation Medicine Delivery,” has united the Minnesota Department of Health with the U.S. Postal Service to answer questions that have plagued public health officials since the terror attacks of 9/11. What if an airborne anthrax attack struck the Twin Cities? How would millions of Minnesotans get the medicine to survive?

More than 300 mail carriers will participate in the test, fanning out across four neighborhoods in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Robbinsdale and Golden Valley. They plan to reach 37,000 households in four ZIP codes: 55101, 55102, 55411 and 55422.

The overall goal of the exercise would be to deliver preventive doses of medication to most people within the first 48 hours of a bioterror attack, though much of that would happen through local medicine dispensing sites run by area public health organizations. During an actual bioterror crisis, the couriers would be alerted through an automated phone message.

Let me get this straight, in case of a biological attack on the Twin Cities medication will be delivered through standard mail delivery? So you will have to wait 48 hours (unless it’s a weekend, the Post Office doesn’t do Sundays and they don’t want to do Saturdays either) until you get medication necessary to save your life? That’s not even a solution. You know what a better idea would be? Getting the hell out of the Twin Cities if it comes under attack. Fortunately I live and work in the suburbs so if Minneapolis or St. Paul are attacked I’m on the outer edge already and therefore can make a rapid escape. Of course attacking the Twin Cities would be a complete waste of time since nobody else in the Union gives a crap about Minnesota.

I Love it When Politicians are Honest

I love those rare occasions where politicians are actually honest. Usually they try to keep the appearance of the people holding power but once in a great while a politician comes out and simply says, “Shut up slave, you do what we tell you to!” “Representative” Mike Rogers just had one of these moments:

It appears that Congress still doesn’t get it. Rep. Mike Rogers, the sponsor of the bad CISPA bill that puts your privacy at risk, really doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the protests that have been happening online this week. He referred to them as being “like turbulence on the way down to landing” for the bill. He also said that he fully expects the bill to easily pass next week when its brought to the floor.

For those of you unaware, Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA is basically the return of SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Politicians are crafty individuals with a great deal of patients. If a bill one of their constituents (who are the major donors to their campaign funds, not you or me) wants passed is meeting with resistance they pull it back, rename it, and introduce it against later hoping nobody will notice. Politicians know they can get any bill passed so long as it’s named property, introduced at the right time, and the opponents to the bill are demonized thoroughly.

It’s nice to see Rogers stated that these protests are nothing more than turbulence during landing, which indicates this bill is mostly a done deal and it will happen.

TSA Doing what Government Agencies Do

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is following in the footsteps of every government agency before it by continually expanding its power:

A new program in Houston will place undercover TSA agents and police officers on buses whose job it will be to perform bag searches, watch for “suspicious activity” and interrogate passengers in order to ‘curb crime and terrorism’.

Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee unveiled the program, labeled Bus Safe, during a press conference on Friday. According to a Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO) press release, agencies involved in the scheme will, “ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior.”

If you still don’t believe the United States has become a police state you’re not paying attention. It seems you can use any mode of transportation without worrying about some government goon treating you like a potential criminal.

A Scary Trend

We hear numerous stories about police officers who are gunned down but what we don’t hear much about is this disturbing trend:

Ten times more civilians were killed by cops than cops were killed by civilians in 2008, but you won’t find that information in Tuesday’s New York Times story on the “disturbing trend” of officers killed by perps.

[…]

There’s arguably an even bigger problem with the Times’ story, and that’s the absence of any data about how many civilians the cops have killed, even though that information is widely available, as demonstrated by the Advocacy Center for Equality and Democracy:

  • From 2003 to 2009, 4,813 people died in relation to an arrest in “all manners of deaths.” Each year ranged from 627 (2003) to 745 (2007). Source – Andrea M. Burch, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,Arrest-Related Deaths, 2003-2009 – Statistical Tables, November 2011.
  • Of those, 2,913 (about 6 in 10) were reported as “homicide by law enforcement.” Each year ranged from 375 (2004) to 497 (2009). See Burch.
  • In the only year in which the NYT article and the Bureau of Justice Statistics report overlap, 2008, law enforcement killed roughly 10 times the number of people during arrests (404) than officers killed (41). See Burch.
  • Since 2001, at least 500 people have been killed as a result of being tasered by officers in the United States alone.

To serve and protect…

Get Them Started Early

The hardest part about implementing a police state is getting the people to fully submit to it. Sure we see mindless submission to the state left and right but if the state inconveniences the populace too much the populace will eventually give the state a jolly old send off. What you really need to do is get people used to the police state while they’re still young, which is what Texas has been doing:

He is looking down on a courtroom full of teenagers and their parents who are facing “Class C” misdemeanour offences for skipping school.

At the truancy courts of Dallas in Texas, absence from class or repeated late arrivals are punishable with fines of up to $500 (£316).

“A Class C misdemeanour is the lowest level of all the criminal offences, it would be the equivalent of a traffic ticket or not abiding by a stop sign on the street,” says Judge Sholden, who can also hand out sanctions like essays and book reports in his sentence.

The use of the court system to correct student behaviour is a popular policy used in schools across Texas.

A recent study put the number of Class C tickets issued to young people at around 300,000 per year.

Using the judicial system to punish students for skipping class? If that doesn’t scream police state what does? But wait, there’s more:

“I ran into a mother recently whose daughter wrote her name on a school desk in highlighter and she was given a felony conviction for that.

Felony. Conviction. Because a girl wrote here name on her desk with a highlighter she is barred the right to own firearms and vote (unless Texas expunges juvenile convictions, including felonies, when a kid becomes and adult but that is becoming rare). Back in my day (now I’m sounding old) we were merely made to clean off the graffiti and sent on our way. Instead of ruining the life of a student for nothing more than easily washed off graffiti we simply had to correct our wrong, which is how it should be.

Of course this kind of school disciplinary system has two benefits to the state; it gets students used to the police state and raises money. If skipping class can net you a fine of $500, how much money do you think is brought in through fines in the Texas school system? I’m guessing it’s quite a bit. After all, fines exist for the sole purpose of raising money for the state.

I’m guessing this method of dealing with transgressions by school kids will spread beyond Texas, it’s just too authoritarian not to.

The Unemployment Scam

Unemployment statistics, like everything else political, is entirely deceptive. When you see unemployment statistics released by the state you should know they are being manipulated to make the situation look better or worse, depending on what the state goons need. One of the most interesting massages to the unemployment numbers made by the state is taking anybody who has been unemployed for more than six months off of the statistics as they’re considered bums and no longer looking for work. Shadow Stats has a nice graph that shows the publicly announced unemployment numbers, the unemployment numbers according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the actual unemployment numbers.

Well color me skeptical but I’m guessing there is some kind of ulterior motive to the sudden claim of honesty being made:

A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate.

Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims.

Should the government measure unemployment with Hunter’s figure, the unemployment rate would be higher than the current rate of approximately 8 percent– a potentially devastating assessment for the White House, especially in an election year.

And I believe the actual ulterior motive was actively denied by Hunter himself:

The San Diego-based lawmaker contends that he did not introduce his bill to make the president look bad, since the number would reflect poorly on all individuals in charge of government.

On a recent interview with Fox News Channel’s Martha MacCallum, Hunter said, “it makes me look bad too when unemployment is sliding … it makes the Republican Congress, the president and the Democratic Senate – anybody who is an elected representative and in charge look bad. I don’t think it goes one way.”

Hunter isn’t an idiot, he realizes that all problems in the United States are blamed on the president. For example, people are currently blaming Obama for high gas prices even though the president has nothing to do with setting those prices. Whatever major crisis is being faced by the nation is blamed on the guy in the Oval Office, and if the unemployment numbers suddenly “spike” it to will be blamed on Obama.

Politics is a dirty business and any underhanded trick goes. While Hunter claims his move isn’t meant to make Obama look bad it really is, and it could pave the way for a Republican victory in November. Don’t be me wrong though, I’m all for most honesty coming out of the state, but I also realize such honesty only happens when it benefits agents of the state in some manner. What this bill pass, the news report about the sudden “spike” in unemployment, Romney get a narrow presidential victory, and a new bill changing the way unemployment is tracked back to the way it is today. It’s all a big shell game.