Chronicling the depravities of the State.
I guess it needs to be said again. Ferguson is not in a state of anarchy. What Ferguson is in is a state of, well, statism. Due to the fact that the same entity that controls the police also controls the courts there is a severe lack of trust amongst the people. This is an inevitable side-effect of any system where one group of people hold power over other people. Eventually the subjugated people feel as though they have no options so they lash out.
Coercive hierarchy is a bitch.
The Constitution is holy scripture to many Americans. Within its pages lies the secrets everlasting freedom, prosperity, and happiness according to its worshipers. I’m not one of those worshipers. I used to be. But then I actually read the document and thought about what it actually said. Two clauses I like to point out as examples of the Constitution not being a government limiting document are Article III, which establishes the Supreme Court, and the Taxing and Spending Clause, which gives Congress the power to tax.
The Supreme Court has the final say in all legal arguments about interpretations of the Constitution. Because of that the document only means what the Supreme Court, which is part of the federal government the Constitution supposedly restrains, says it means. And the power to tax means Congress can ensure the federal government has as much money as it needs to do whatever it wants. Before the Constitution there were the Articles of Confederation, which didn’t grant the federal government the power to tax. That meant that the states had to voluntarily fund the federal government and gave them a convenient way to starve the beast should it get too big.
The wonderful writers over at The Art of Not Being Government wrote an excellent article, or as many constitutionalists will call it heresy, refuting some of the claims made about the Constitution. Especially noteworthy are the myths regarding the origin of the document. Many people mistakenly believe that the Constitution was created to protect individual liberty and create a small federal government. In reality it was a massive power grab perpetrated by individuals who really missed having a king to rule over all, as the Taxing and Spending Clause shows.
I recommend you click on the link and read the article. Especially if you are a constitutionalists. It makes some very good points that are seldom covered in any class or course on the Constitution.
During the election i594 passed in Washington, which requires all gun transfers to be performed through a federally licensed dealer. As you can guess gun owners are pissed. After all, what parent wants to pay a middle man just so they can give their child his or her inheritance to them? Who wants to pay a middle man just to get permission to sell a firearm to a friend? It’s a stupid law, it’s unenforceable, and it appears that Washington’s gun owners are planning to give their rulers a rightfully deserved gigantic middle finger:
Tens of thousands of Connecticut gun owners chose to become overnight felons rather than comply with that state’s new gun registration law. The defiance spurred the Hartford Courant editorial board to impotently sputter about rounding up the scofflaws.
New York’s similar registration law suffers such low compliance that state officials won’t even reveal how many people have abide by the measure—a desperate secrecy ploy that the New York State Committee on Open Government says thumbs its nose at the law itself.
Now Washington state residents pissed of about i594, a ballot measure inflicting background check requirements on even private transactions, plan an exercise in mass disobedience next month.
According to the event’s Facebook page they plan to gather en masse at the Washington State Capital and exchange firearms without involving any middle men. Since only federally licensed dealers can access the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to perform a background check these transfers will be in violation of the law.
I’m a big fan of civil disobedience because it shows how impotent the state is. Assuming half of the 6,100 people (as of this writing) marked as going show up it will be impossible for law enforcement agents to arrest them all. Even if they did manage to round them all up they probably wouldn’t have enough cages to keep them in. The state’s power is predatory in nature. It attempts to isolate individuals and attack them. But when it faces masses of people it must either back down or use violence on all of them, which quickly erases its legitimacy in the eyes of many.
This even will, in all probability, also cause many gun control loons to reveal their true faces. I’m sure social media outlets will be jam packed with comments by anti-gunners who claim to want peace demanding the police execute these unruly gun owners. Nothing brings out an anti-gunner’s violence nature like disobedient gun owners. I look forward to reading their rants for the LULZ.
I give modern policing a lot of shit on this blog. Oftentimes people mistake those rants as some kind of deep seated hatred for police officers. Truthfully I don’t hate police officers, at least not all of them. There are a lot of decent people who have, for some reason unknown to me, chosen to take up a life of crime. But their intentions are good and they generally remain good people. More importantly I don’t believe anybody is beyond redemption. Even the most vile individual can have a change in heart (although it’s rare). Counter Current News has an interview that proves this very fact. It’s with Raeford Davis a former officer of the Beavercreek Police Department. He went from being an enforcer of the state’s whims to one of the good guys:
One of those former “good cops” is Raeford Davis, and today he is an anarchist.
Davis was a police officer for six years. While troubled by many aspects of government law enforcement at the time, he explains that he was committed to the cause. Later, over a period of years, he began to understand the morality or lack thereof, behind policing the community as an arm an agent of the State.
Davis became immersed in the concepts of voluntarism, anarchism, the non-aggression principal and how destructive the current manifestation of law enforcement is to proper human interaction.
If one can go from a cop to an anarchist then there’s hope for anyone.
He’s going to be interviewed at 21:00 Central Time Zone tonight on Cop Block Radio. I’m sure it will be an interesting interview and will try to tune in.
Voting isn’t really my thing anymore since I’m not in the market for a master. But I have many friends that still play political games. Many of those friends aren’t entirely gullible and play political games for less evil political parties (often referred to as third parties). This means that they are subjected to constant accusations by people playing in the more evil political parties (the Democrat and Republican parties) of spoiling election. Republican will accuse people who vote Libertarian of letting the Democrats win (no, seriously, they actually claim that there’s a difference between the two parties) and Democrats will accuse people who vote Green of letting the Republican win (again, without any irony, claiming that there is a difference). But in reality it’s not people voting third party that spoils elections, it’s people voting for first parties:
The reason libertarians don’t vote for candidates from the two major parties is not because they suffer from a false consciousness that leads them to misapprehend their own political preferences. The reason they don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats is because—brace yourself now—they don’t want either Republicans or Democrats to win.
As far as libertarians are concerned, the 2 percent of Americans who vote libertarian don’t spoil an election. Rather, the 98 percent of Americans who don’t vote libertarian are the ones who spoil it for everyone else.
Republicans tend to blame Democrats for all of the country’s woes and Democrats tend to blame Republicans for the same. What we do know is that these two parties have been in power for a long time whereas third parties haven’t. Therefore it would seem that these two parties are responsible for the country’s woes. That being the case it would seem smart, if you’re going to play political games, to play political games for the parties that still don’t have a track record of fucking us all in the ass with a retractable baton.
Once again the centralized nature of today’s Internet is biting us in the ass. In addition to Internet Service Providers (ISP) already throttling traffic we now have one wireless provider actively preventing its customers from using STARTTLS:
But the second example Golden Frog provides is much scarier and much more pernicious, and it has received almost no attention.
In the second instance, Golden Frog shows that a wireless broadband Internet access provider is interfering with its users’ ability to encrypt their SMTP email traffic. This broadband provider is overwriting the content of users’ communications and actively blocking STARTTLS encryption. This is a man-in-the-middle attack that prevents customers from using the applications of their choosing and directly prevents users from protecting their privacy.
[…]
This is scary. If ISPs are actively trying to block the use of encryption, it shows how they might seek to block the use of VPNs and other important security protection measures, leaving all of us less safe. Golden Frog provides more details of what’s happening in this case:
Golden Frog performed tests using one mobile wireless company’s data service, by manually typing the SMTP commands and requests, and monitoring the responses from the email server in issue. It appears that this particular mobile wireless provider is intercepting the server’s banner message and modifying it in-transit from something like “220 [servername] ESMTP Postfix” to “200 ********************.” The mobile wireless provider is further modifying the server’s response to a client command that lists the extended features supported by the server. The mobile wireless provider modifies the server’s “250-STARTTLS” response (which informs the client of the server’s capacity to enable encryption). The Internet access provider changes it to “250-XXXXXXXA.” Since the client does not receive the proper acknowledgement that STARTTLS is supported by the server, it does not attempt to turn on encryption. If the client nonetheless attempts to use the STARTTLS command, the mobile wireless provider intercepts the client’s commands to the server and changes it too. When it detects the STARTTLS command being sent from the client to the server, the mobile wireless provider modifies the command to “XXXXXXXX.” The server does not understand this command and therefore sends an error message to the client.
As Golden Frog points out, this is “conceptually similar” to the way in which Comcast was throttling BitTorrent back in 2007 via packet reset headers, which kicked off much of the last round of net neutrality concerns. The differences here are that this isn’t about blocking BitTorrent, but encryption, and it’s a mobile internet access provider, rather than a wired one. This last point is important, since even the last net neutrality rules did not apply to wireless broadband, and the FCC is still debating if it should apply any new rules to wireless.
The article is arguing from a net neutrality angle but I see this as a technical issue. This is only made possible because Internet access is centrally controlled and end-to-end encryption wasn’t in the original design. Decentralizing Internet access would be a major win because it would prevent any single organization from weakening Internet security by blocking encrypted traffic. And if end-to-end encryption was in the originally design (which, I understand, was not technically feasible at the time) this wouldn’t be possible because blocking encrypted communications would block any communications.
Net neutrality will not save us. After all the government, especially the National Security Agency (NSA), probably has a literal hard-on for this idea. Again I reiterate that the only way to save the Internet is to wrestle control over it away from the state and its corporate partners that are providing our Internet access. I will again point out that mesh networks are a pretty neat idea for accomplishing exactly this. Instead of howling for the government to step in and save us from itself I believe we should be investing our energies in trying to decentralize Internet access as much as possible.
Net neutrality is back in the limelight again thanks to one idiotic senator and one idiotic president. First there is Ted Cruz, who seems entirely unaware of how the Internet currently works:
"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014
Cruz spokeswoman Amanda Carpenter echoed the senator in her own tweet, writing, “Net neutrality puts gov’t in charge of determining pricing, terms of service, and what products can be delivered. Sound like Obamacare much?”
The Internet in this country already moves at the speed of government thanks to the regulatory atmosphere that gives a handful of Internet Service Providers (ISP) a practical monopoly on providing Internet access. And Cruz’s spokeswoman isn’t much smarter since net neutrality doesn’t put the government in charge of pricing, terms of service, or what products can be offered. It’s just a fancy term for the status quo, which is all traffic being treated with equal priority. What would give the government control over such matters is if we went with what the government considers net neutrality, which is an even more heavily regulated market than the one that already exists.
But the Republicans weren’t the only ones to field an idiot to speak about the Internet this week. The Democrats fielded none other than Obama:
President Obama today urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reclassify broadband service as a utility and to impose rules that prevent Internet service providers from blocking and throttling traffic or prioritizing Web services in exchange for payment. Obama also said utility rules should apply both to home Internet service and mobile broadband.
Treat the Internet like a utility? That’s just urging ISPs to charge customers by the byte instead of charging by access speed. Furthermore it would give local governments more power to further monopolize Internet access. Many municipalities already grant one or two companies control over utilities such as water and electricity. Case in point, the government of Minneapolis has granted monopoly electricity contracts to Xcel Energy and monopoly natural gas contracts to Centerpoint Energy. Imagine if the Internet becomes a utility. Then municipal governments such as Minneapolis could grant monopoly contracts to the likes of Comcast. Not only would you potentially be paying by the byte but you probably wouldn’t even have the almost nonexistent choice between ISPs that you have today.
So long as rely on the state to solve this problem we’re going to get fucked hard. The only long-term solution is to decentralize Internet access provision. That’s why I’ve been working on mesh networking initiatives. Mesh networks provide a decentralized network that would be very difficult for the state to regulate if designed correctly. I’m sure other options exist for decoupling the Internet from the state and I would love to hear about them.
Zerg539 was good enough to tweet me a very interesting article by none other than Frank Serpico. In it he discusses what is probably the biggest problem in policing: a total lack of accountability:
y personal story didn’t end with the movie, or with my retirement from the force in 1972. It continues right up to this day. And the reason I’m speaking out now is that, tragically, too little has really changed since the Knapp Commission, the outside investigative panel formed by then-Mayor John Lindsay after I failed at repeated internal efforts to get the police and district attorney to investigate rampant corruption in the force. Lindsay had acted only because finally, in desperation, I went to the New York Times, which put my story on the front page. Led by Whitman Knapp, a tenacious federal judge, the commission for at least a brief moment in time supplied what has always been needed in policing: outside accountability. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. But the commission disbanded in 1972 even though I had hoped (and had so testified) that it would be made permanent.
And today the Blue Wall of Silence endures in towns and cities across America. Whistleblowers in police departments — or as I like to call them, “lamp lighters,” after Paul Revere — are still turned into permanent pariahs. The complaint I continue to hear is that when they try to bring injustice to light they are told by government officials: “We can’t afford a scandal; it would undermine public confidence in our police.” That confidence, I dare say, is already seriously undermined.
[…]
But an even more serious problem — police violence — has probably grown worse, and it’s out of control for the same reason that graft once was: a lack of accountability.
[…]
Today the combination of an excess of deadly force and near-total lack of accountability is more dangerous than ever: Most cops today can pull out their weapons and fire without fear that anything will happen to them, even if they shoot someone wrongfully. All a police officer has to say is that he believes his life was in danger, and he’s typically absolved.
Serpico was one of those rare officers who tried to do the right thing and hold his profession accountable to the public. For his sins against the thin blue line he was basically made persona non grata at the New York Police Department where he worked and other departments throughout the country. And when you become persona non grata amongst police it often results in your being killed when you fellow officers refuse to render you assistance when it’s needed most (Serpico, fortunately, survived when his fellows decided not to act as backup when his life was in peril).
Many people are quick to dismiss any advocacy of private policing. Critics say that private policing would guarantee that the wealth enjoy police protection while the poor would end up under their boots. Truth be told we already live in the distopia that those critics warn us about. It’s the inevitable outcome of hierarchy. The police, who are the state’s weapon of choice when wielding its monopoly on coercion, ensure that the people live under the boot of the politicians and their corporate partners. Because of their monopoly we the people have no real recourse. If we take issue with the actions of police officers we are free to bring them up to the police officers and they will choose whether or not to investigate themselves. Usually these self performed investigations lead to the accused officer(s) receiving a paid vacation before they are found innocent of all wrongdoing. They can stomp on us and there’s nothing we can realistically do to stop them (at least within the system).
What Serpico’s story shows us is that the lack of accountability exists internally as well. People, especially when referring to politics, talk about changing the system within. In the case of policing the internal system guards against such attempts. So policing is entirely unaccountable. Externally we the people can’t do anything because the police have been granted a legal monopoly on coercion and we have no. Internally genuinely good officers can’t do anything because the wicked police officers will ostracize the good and even put their lives in jeopardy.
For a few years now there has been a lot of outrage of Columbus Day. Some regions in the United States have even begun renaming the day Indigenous People’s Day to avoid associating the holiday with Columbus.
I don’t understand why people are surprised, shocked, or outraged by the fact that the federal government declared a holiday to celebrate Columbus. Christopher Columbus sailed to a random plot of land, stuck a flag in it, declare the land and its inhabitants property of the Spanish crown, and started killing them and taking their shit. Let’s face it, this single man embodies everything that a government wants to do.
Even today the United States government tries to emulate its hero, Columbus, by sailing aircraft carriers around the world, sticking American flags in Middle Eastern land, declaring the land and its inhabitants the property of whatever puppet government the United States actually controls, and killing those inhabitants and taking their oil. The only thing that surprises me is that Columbus’s face isn’t on the flag of the United States.
Regardless of the laughable claims made by an author at Daily Kos, market anarchism is showing how practical its rhetoric is once again. This time the place is Venezuela, the problem is currency controls and economic collapse, and the solution is Bitcoin:
(Reuters) – Tech-savvy Venezuelans looking to bypass dysfunctional economic controls are turning to the bitcoin virtual currency to obtain dollars, make Internet purchases — and launch a little subversion.
Two New York-based Venezuelan brothers hope this week to start trading on the first bitcoin exchange in the socialist-run country, which already has at least several hundred bitcoin enthusiasts.
While the Venezuelan government continues its attempt to control its population through economic controls its power is quickly fading as its economy collapses and more people turn to the “black” market for basic necessities. This is similar to what happened during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Once the state’s controls have been circumvented its death is inevitable.