Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals – Page 47

Who Needs a Warrant When You Can Fabricate a 911 Call

Warrants are such a pesky formality for police officers. When they want to search a house and the owner isn’t stupid enough to just let them walk right in the police have to make a phone call to a judge, wait a few minutes for him to issue a warrant, and finally search the home. Some cunning officers in North Carolina have apparently come up with a way to bypass that inconvenient formality:

A North Carolina police chief has officially barred officers from making up phony 911 calls in order to gain access to private residences without a search warrant.

Several officers with the Durham Police Department lied about 911 hang-up calls to convince residents to consent to searches of their homes, an officer said under oath in late May, a local ABC affiliate reported.

The allegations prompted Police Chief Jose Lopez to send out an internal memo barring the practice.

“It has recently been brought to my attention that some officers have informed citizens that there has been a 911 hang-up call from their residence in order to obtain consent to enter for the actual purpose of looking for wanted persons on outstanding warrants,” he said in the memo, Raw Story reported. “Effective immediately no officer will inform a citizen that there has been any call to the emergency communications center, including a hang-up call, when there in fact has been no such call.”

Statists often tell me that my anarchist views are crazy because we need government to protect our rights. I find it peculiar to charge the biggest violator of rights with the task of protecting rights and this story demonstrates why. The state has written up its own set of rules, which it claims protects our rights, and then bypasses those same rules, meaning it must be violating our rights.

They’ve Got Us By the Net Neutrality Balls

I have bad news everybody. In the battle for net neutrality no matter who wins we all lose. I’ve discussed the issue of net neutrality as it pertains to libertarianism before. The main problem is that no actual competition exists in the market of providing Internet access. This near monopoly situation is the product of the state, which used its regulatory powers to protect its favored Internet Service Providers (ISP) from competition. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the state has set itself up to win no matter what.

Members of the Democratic Party have primarily been advocating to give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory power over ISPs to “protect” net neutrality. Meanwhile the Republican Party has been busy discussing the need to take power away from the FCC to protect the “free” market:

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wants to make sure the Federal Communications Commission never interferes with “states’ rights” to protect private Internet service providers from having to compete against municipal broadband networks.

Twenty states have passed laws making it difficult for cities and towns to offer their own broadband Internet services, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has pledged to use his agency’s authority to “preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband.”

Since ISPs have a state granted near monopoly no free market exists so Mrs. Blackburn’s claim that she is working to protect it is absurd. But this story does demonstrate on concerning fact: in the chess game of net neutrality we are one move away from being checkmated.

Tom Wheeler, the currently appointed chairman of the FCC, was a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries before being given his current position. He has already shown his hand by ruling that ISPs can provide fast and slow lanes for Internet traffic. So we know if the FCC gains the power to regulate ISPs it will kill net neutrality.

On the other hand if the FCC isn’t given more power to regulate ISPs the individual states, 22 of which have already moved to protect the handful of ISPs’ near monopoly, will allow their corporate partners like Comcast to destroy net neutrality by destroying their competition.

No matter who wins we lose. There is one last glimmer of hope but it’s not going to be easy. We need to work on cutting out the ISP middleman. I’ve briefly discussed the work I’ve been involved in to get mesh networks running in the Twin Cities. Building mesh networks is probably the only move that will save use from being checkmated. Because the state has set the board up in such a way that we’ll lose regardless of what powers the FCC has.

Salon Goes Full Retard Again

You writers at Salon are like an enteral fountain of stupid ideas. That’s probably because…

More to the point, you’re all a bunch of state worshiping socialists. As far as you’re concerned the only problem in this world is that we don’t have a state boot stomping on our faces quite enough yet. And that leads you to say really stupid things like this:

They’re huge, they’re ruthless, and they touch every aspect of our daily lives. Corporations like Amazon and Google keep expanding their reach and their power. Despite a history of abuses, so far the Justice Department has declined to take antitrust actions against them. But there’s another solution.

Is it time to manage and regulate these companies as public utilities?

No. No it’s not. And I’m going to tell you why it’s not by using your own stupid arguments against you. You see, every argument you use against Google and Amazon can be equally applied to the state.

Big Tech was created with publicly-developed technology.

Publicly-developed technology are built by private companies. Think of the state’s major technologies. Fighter jets, bombers, tanks, drones, missiles, and aircraft carriers are all built by private companies. The technology that runs the Internet? Yup, it’s all made by private companies such as Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM (which has quite a history of building things for governments). When the state wants something it throws money at private companies that actually build it. Without private companies there would be no “publicly-developed” technology.

Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society.

Then why ruin it by giving it over to the state? The only thing the state does competently is steal and break shit. While it does throw some money at private companies to build substandard roads much of its resources are invested in militarizing the police so they can better murder our pets, building more efficient ways for our military to blow up people overseas, and protecting the politically connected private companies from its not as well connect competitors.

If Google and Amazon were nationalized the would use them to collect even more data on you and I. Gmail would exist to allow the state to know when we’re communicating about something illegal and our purchases on Amazon would be scrutinized to see if some tangible connection to terrorism could be made. Google Maps would probably be used to drop Hellfire missiles on whoever used it as well.

They’re at or near monopoly status – and moving fast.

The state is a monopoly. In fact it is the monopoly that makes all other monopolies possible.

They abuse their power.

And what does the state do? Let me think. It sends heavily armed men to kick down people’s doors at two in the morning, shoot their dogs, and kidnap them for possessing a fucking plant. Then you have the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the state’s apparatus for spying on our phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, and other communications. When it finds a little free time it also likes to put people to death even though the evidence supporting those people’s guilt is nonexistent. I haven’t even gotten to the number of foreigners it slaughters.

They got there with our help.

So did the state. It acquires its resources by stealing them from us. Sometimes it’s in the form of taxes other times its in the form of fines and other times its in the form of slave labor (which it rather humorously refers to as prison labor).

The real “commodity” is us.

Guess what? The state’s commodity is us. We’re nothing more than tax cattle and cannon fodder to it.

Our privacy is dying … or already dead.

Edward Snowden really brought this point to light. The NSA has been spying on our digital communications for years. While I dislike many of the data collection policies used by Google and Amazon there is a major difference between what they do and what the state does with my data. Google and Amazon use my data for personal profit and to find more shit for me to buy from them. The state uses my data to decide whether or not it will send armed thugs to my home at two in the morning so they can shoot my pets and kidnap me. I’d say that’s a pretty big difference.

Freedom of information is at risk.

Are you referring to the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA)?

The free market could become even less free.

And your solution is to preemptively restrict it by putting Google and Amazon under the state’s direct control? That’s not a solution to the hypothetical problem of the free market becoming less free; that’s making the hypothetical problem a reality.

They could hijack the future.

So could the state. The difference, of course, is that Google and Amazon hijacking the future doesn’t lead to people being locked in cages, bombed, and otherwise brutalized.

St. Paul’s Finest

Wednesday the heroes of the St. Paul Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team executed two dogs during a brave no-knock raid:

It was 7 a.m. when police executed what is known as a no-knock search warrant. Arman said he and his two children were sleeping on a mattress when armed members of the SWAT team barged through the front door. The next thing he remembers is seeing the family’s long-time dogs stagger and fall.

Of course the brave men and women of the St. Paul SWAT team claimed that the dogs were coming right for them and they had to gun the vicious beasts down for officer safety. Because knocking on the door and giving the owners a chance to secure their dogs was totally out of the question because, well, reasons. And pepper spray? Why the fuck would they use that? It doesn’t kill anything and being on the SWAT team isn’t fun unless you to get kill things!

This shit pisses me off because it’s entirely avoidable. All the officers have to do is knock on the fucking door and say “Police, we have a warrant to search the premises.” But they didn’t because of their exaggerated fear of people shooting through the door. Such an occurrence is exceedingly rare because most people are as violent as police officers, but logic doesn’t matter when the words “officer safety” are muttered. How about this, if you’re worried that somebody might react violently because you’re a police officer don’t because a fucking police officer. Enforcing the state’s decrees is dangerous work.

Or better yet how about we just end the war on unpatentable drugs and the police can simply leave people who are using drugs and harming nobody else alone.

People are Very Upset About Imaginary Lines

OK, I lied. Here’s some content for today. Never let it be said that I’m not benevolent. Following Hobby Lobby’s stranglehold on the news last week the topic of “illegal” immigration has been bombarding every fucking news source I have this week. I was just going to leave the topic alone. After all everybody who is bitching about it this week will cease caring next week since this is America and we have the attention span of goldfish. But all of the outrage has lead me to believe that talking about “illegal” immigration is good for page hits. Also people are making some very strange assumptions that I feel need to be addressed.

Let’s consider what “illegal” immigration is. There exists a bunch of imaginary lines. I know that these lines are imaginary because I can’t see them when I go to where the map supposedly says they exist. Supposedly when somebody crosses one of these nonexistent lines without first receiving permission from some petty bureaucrat in a far away marble building it’s an illegal act. That’s a very strange concept to me.

Now let’s consider the thing that has most peoples’ panties in a bunch: costs. The main criticism I hear about the state failing to enforce immigration laws is that us Americans have to pay to care for these “illegal” immigrants. Apparently the people making this criticism believe that they will be required to pay less taxes or that their tax dollars will be used for better purposes if the state does a better job of enforcing its immigration laws. Guess what, that’s now how things work here.

First we need to acknowledge that the state doesn’t use actual money it uses debt. None of the money Obama has requested to deal with this situation exists. Second if we want to be honest with ourselves we should accept that our taxes wouldn’t decrease if people entirely stopped crossing the imaginary lines without permission. The state is already taking less from us than it’s spending so it’s not going to suddenly take even less. And the amount of money being spent on immigration related issues is a microscopic drop in the bucket. Third, even if we assume the money being used to care for “illegal” immigrants is real, we need to understand that money won’t be redirected for anything helpful if “illegal” immigration suddenly went away. It would just be moved to fund other parts of the police state we live in. Cops would get more armored personnel carriers to use on no-knock raids, the military would get more bombs to drop on the Middle East, and the politicians’ cronies would get more money to build worthless shit that doesn’t work.

Basically what I’m trying to get at is that arguing about “illegal” immigration is pointless. It’s a non-issue. Nothing would change if “illegal” immigrants suddenly disappeared tomorrow. This is just another fairytale created up by the state and it’s corporate media partners in an attempt to split us into two warring camps and distract us from the actual problems we’re suffering from.

The only thing I take solace in is knowing that nobody will care next week when our media overlords issue us our next weekly crisis.

If You Don’t Like it Move to Somalia

If you’re an anarchist, or even if you’re a statist libertarian, you’ve probably been at the receiving end of reductio ad somalium numerous times. According to statists Somalia is the prime example of anarchy (and they ignore the fact that Somalia today is better off than it was under its former federal government [PDF]). Of course such claims are bullshit. Somalia now has a federal government, which was merely an evolution of its United Nations backed transitional government. If there weren’t enough to prove Somalia is far from anarchy there are also United States troops in the country causing unknown amounts of havoc:

(Reuters) – U.S. military advisors have secretly operated in Somalia since around 2007 and Washington plans to deepen its security assistance to help the country fend off threats by Islamist militant group al Shabaab, U.S. officials said.

The comments are the first detailed public acknowledgement of a U.S. military presence in Somalia dating back since the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and add to other signs of a deepening U.S. commitment to Somalia’s government, which the Obama administration recognized last year.

The deployments, consisting of up to 120 troops on the ground, go beyond the Pentagon’s January announcement that it had sent a handful of advisors in October. That was seen at the time as the first assignment of U.S. troops to Somalia since 1993 when two U.S. helicopters were shot down and 18 American troops killed in the “Black Hawk Down” disaster.

Somalia isn’t an example of what happens in the absence of government. It’s an example of what happens when multiple governments intertwine themselves in a single geographic region. If anything Somalia is an example of too much government. Between the United States mucking about and the United Nations mucking about it’s easy to see why Somalia is still in a state of chaos after the collapse of its former federal government.

Hobby Lobby

The Nazgûl managed to stir up a bunch of political drama by ruling that privately held companies whose owners hold strong religious beliefs can be exempted for providing funding for certain contraceptives:

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby on Monday that for-profit employers with religious objections can opt out of providing contraception coverage under Obamacare.

The ruling deals directly with only a small provision of Obamacare and will not take down the entire law but it amounts to a huge black eye for Obamacare, the administration and its backers. The justices have given Obamacare opponents their most significant political victory against the health care law, reinforcing their argument that the law and President Barack Obama are encroaching on Americans’ freedoms.

As you can expect the Internet has exploded. Feminists are decrying this as a direct strike against women’s rights and the religious are hailing this as a great victory for religious freedom. Both sides, in their fervor to be louder than the other side, are missing the big picture. This battle isn’t one of women’s rights versus religious freedom, it’s the inevitable outcome of this country’s state-employer-insurer complex. Or as I like to call it the trinity of fuckery.

The state really made this entire fiasco possible. Today most people receive health insurance as part of their employee benefits package. Have you ever wondered why health insurance is tied to your employer? It’s because employers needed a way to provide higher wages during a time when the state implemented wage controls. Since the state said that employers couldn’t pay employees a higher wage employers decided to offer benefits, including health insurance, to bypass the controls. Today the state has further solidified the unity between health insurance and employment by mandating almost every employer provider employees with specific types of health insurance. That last part, requiring specific types of insurance, is the real kicker because it mandates certain types of contraceptives that many religious individuals oppose.

An employer with strongly held religious convictions is going to have problems funding coverage for certain types of contraceptives and abortions. Since they’re being mandated by the state to provide health insurance and that health insurance must cover some of the contraceptives they find objectionable they are using the only avenue left open to them: the courts. Hobby Lobby in this case decided to fight the contraceptive coverage and the state made an arbitrary decision, which sided with Hobby Lobby in this case. You can argue that the ruling was just or unjust until you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t matter what you believe. It only matters what the state believes.

Had the state never implemented wage controls and thus tied health insurance to employment we wouldn’t be in this mess. Assuming a lack of some other form of state meddling, employees would then be free to buy whatever health insurance plan worked for them. People with strong religious convictions against contraceptives could get a health insurance plan that didn’t cover contraceptives while people who want contraceptive coverage could get a plan that offered it. Their employer wouldn’t have a say in the matter since they wouldn’t be providing it. So the only viable solution is to break apart the trinity of fuckery.

The Statists Over at Salon Confuse Me

I have to say that the statists over at Salon really confuse me. Via Gun Free Zone I had the opportunity to read this attempt at fear mongering by Salon. The author tries to argue that gun owners are terrorizing the nation but his opening paragraph presents a different story:

Here is a truth so fundamental that it should be self-evident: When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger. And yet that is exactly what happened at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch this spring: An alleged criminal defeated the cops, because the forces of lawlessness came at them with guns — then Bureau of Land Management officials further surrendered by removing the government markings from their vehicles to prevent violence against them.

I’m not a big fan of Cliven Bundy. The guy comes off as a self-righteous asshole to me. But to claim he did anything wrong by trying to defend land against a marauding gang is pretty stupid. What the author claims to be a “legitimately constituted state authority”, a phrase that in of itself is oxymoronic, is nothing more than a gang of thugs roaming around claiming everything within an imaginary set of lines on a map as its own.

The author is trying to making the argument that Bundy, by managing to make the state reconsider its usual brutish tactics, terrorized America. But the “legitimately constituted state authority” has been terrorizing America, and the rest of the world, for over 250 years. George Washington himself marched an armed force against a handful of whiskey producers because they failed to pay Washington’s gang protection money. Today the tradition continues. If you do something the state doesn’t like it sends armed thugs after you in an attempt to intimidate you. Growing a little cannabis? You may find your home being raided by armed thugs at two in the morning who start by burning your child with a flashbang (an article in Salon about real terrorism) and shooting your dog. Exceeding the arbitrarily posted maximum speed? Expect a road pirate to pull you over, walk up to your car, and demand you pay his gang protection money or face potential kidnapping and imprisonment. And God help you if you’re homeless because the state is going to make your life even more of a living hell.

This is the problem with statists. They claim that the gang they support is legitimate. Anybody who crosses their preferred gang is terrorizing “the people”. It’s one of the most idiotic arguments that has ever been muttered because “the people” are being terrorized by the statist’s preferred gang.

Make Way for His Majesty

Hear ye, hear ye, all subjects of the realm. His majesty, our king, Barack Obama will be here in Minnesota for two days. In recognition of his gloriousness both parks that he’s speaking at will be entirely shutdown in addition to the roads he will grace with his presence:

For starters, access to the boat launch was shut down at 10 p.m. Wednesday. And starting early Friday, no boats will be allowed on the lake. That means people who have sailboats there won’t be allowed to access them.

A playground, a beach, the rose garden and trails will be closed, as well as the restaurant next to the Band Shell.

[…]

Obama arrives in the Twin Cities early Thursday afternoon and will take part in an invitation-only town hall about 2 p.m. at Minnehaha Park, which will also be essentially shut down. Several roads near both parks also will be closed.

That was me trying to poke a little fun at the fact that one man has the power to shutdown entire parks and inconvenience the people who are forced to pay for them. It’s annoying but not the end of the world. This part, well, this part crosses the line:

People who live near the Band Shell, where Obama will speak Friday, will have to be escorted to and from their homes that morning.

[…]

On Friday, police will escort homeowners on Queen Avenue S. between 40th Street and 42nd Street to and from their homes from early morning through the end of the event.

Every reader knows how I feel about violence. I abhor it. But if some piece of shit in a cheap suit thinks they are going to escort me to and from my home they’re going to get a rude awakening when my fist makes contact with their face. There are some lines you do not cross. Making me a prisoner in my own home and requiring me to beg for permission to come and go as I please is one of them. I will not tolerate such bullshit. Fortunately for the Secret Service I don’t live there because if I did I would make it a point to walk around my neighborhood without permission or an escort.

Welcome to the freest country on Earth.

Patent Office Off to a Good Start

Earlier this week the United States Patent Office invalided the trademarks for the Washington Redskins (it’s a handegg team for those who, like me, aren’t familiar):

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board canceled six federal trademark registrations owned by the Washington NFL club today, ruling that the term “Redskins” was disparaging to “a substantial composite” of American Indians when the marks were granted between 1967 and 1990. The decision does not mean the Washington team must stop using the name.

A lot of people are complaining about this move and claiming that it’s abuse of the Patent Office’s power. Not me. I think this is a great move that needs to be replicated on all intellectual property claims.