Tag: Shut Up Slave

How Government Environmental Protection Works

When many of my friends find out Ron Paul wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) they flip out. These friends believe the EPA actually protects the environment when in fact they do no such thing. If the EPA was actually interested in protecting the environment they would allow lawsuits against polluters by individuals whose land and body the polluters have contaminated. Instead the EPA states entities that only emit arbitrarily selected amounts of pollution are basically immune from civil suits and issues waivers to favored corporations so they aren’t hindered by legislation while their competitors have to deal with the additional expenses of complying with those regulations.

Such corruption isn’t exclusive to the federal government though, state governments like getting in on the action as well:

A BP (BP) refinery in Indiana will be allowed to continue to dump mercury into Lake Michigan under a permit issued by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

The permit exempts the BP plant at Whiting, Ind., 3 miles southeast of Chicago, from a 1995 federal regulation limiting mercury discharges into the Great Lakes to 1.3 ounces per year.

If you have the money government environmental protection agencies will grants you special privileges so you don’t have to deal with those nasty and expensive regulations. While your company reaps the benefits of these immunities your competitors will be forced to pass on the expense of complying with those regulations to their customers, making their product more expensive than yours.

Indiana officials said the amount of mercury released by BP was minor.

“The permitted levels will not affect drinking water, recreation or aquatic life,” Indiana Department of Environmental Management Commissioner Thomas Easterly told the Chicago Tribune.

Than why did British Petroleum (BP) have to get a special permit? If the amount of mercury they’re dumping is insignificant shouldn’t all companies be allowed to dump the same amount without special permission? Shouldn’t everybody be treated equally under the law? Why can companies will huge bank accounts buy special privileges?

The same answer applies to all of these questions, it’s not about environmental protection it’s about extortion. By declaring rule over environmental issues the government has created a new revenue stream for themselves in the form of permits and waivers. Large polluters support these regulations under the veil of environmental concern when in fact their support stems from the fact that they can afford to deal with these measures while their competitors can’t. Expensive environmental regulations further distort the market by favoring wealthy established companies and making the barrier of entry into many markets so high that no upstart can’t afford it.

People who want to protect the environment should be demanding the abolition of state controlled environmental protection agencies and the establishment of strict property rights. If a company is dumping pollutants that are contaminating land or water owned by individuals those individuals should be able to sue based on the fact their property rights have been violated. You can rest assured that everybody living on the shore of Lake Michigan suing BP would cost them a pretty penny and urge them to find some other way of dealing with their mercury.

TSA Decides No Independent Study of X-Ray Scanner Safety is Needed

Remember some time back when the Transportation Sexual Assaulters Security Administration (TSA) promised to have an independent safety study performed on the x-ray body scanners? Neither does the TSA:

Earlier this month, a ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation found that the TSA had glossed over research that the X-ray scanners could lead to a small number of cancer cases. The scanners emit low levels of ionizing radiation, which has been shown to damage DNA. In addition, several safety reviewers who initially advised the government on the scanners said they had concerns about the machines being used, as they are today, on millions of airline passengers.

[…]

But at a Senate hearing of a different committee last week, Pistole said he had since received a draft report on the machines by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, or IG, that might render the independent study unnecessary.

In other words the government has put their foot down and x-ray scanners are staying regardless of the fact that they may cause cancer. Is there a conflict of interest in having the government perform the review of its own machines? Most certainly. Does the government give two shits about your health? Not at all. Therefore the first question is irrelevant in their eyes.

I contacted a representative of the TSA about this issue and he replied by saying, “HA HA HA HA HA HA! Shut up slave and get in the scanner.” Now that I think about it the man may not have been with the TSA, but he was a registered sex offender which is basically the same thing.

The bottom line is this: the government wants you used to the idea of constant warrantless surveillance. These scanners give them that by ensuring everybody who flies is searched without reason. Even now the TSA is performing warrantless searches in other venues such as truck weigh stations without so much as probably cause. If you think that is the final extent of the TSA’s power you are sorely mistaken, they will continue to expand their influence and I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see interstate checkpoints staffed by TSA agents. A populace under constant surveillance is much easier to control than one able to go about their business that remains unknown the the government.

No question exists in my mind about whether or not these scanners are going or staying. Were research presented by a well-known and respected institute that proved, with no uncertainty, that these scanners cause cancer we will still not be rid of them. Shortly after such research was released the government would likely release their own counter-research that said the chances of getting cancer from one of these machines is lower than the chances of somebody getting onto a plan with a weapon without the scanners and therefore, for the greater good, these scanners must remain.

As I said before we’re not traveling down the road to fascism, we’ve already reached our destination.

The Stop Online Piracy Act Hearing Looks a Little Bias

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sent out a notice alerting people to the fact that today’s hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a wee bit on the bias side:

The House Judiciary Committee will meet today for a hearing on the controversial Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). What could have been an opportunity for the committee to hear from a variety of stakeholders has devolved into parade of pro-SOPA partisans. Scheduled to testify are representatives from the Register of Copyrights, Pfizer Global Security, the Motion Picture Association of America, the AFL-CIO, and Mastercard Worldwide—many of which helped to draft this legislation in the first place, and didn’t let anyone else into the room. The only scheduled witness in opposition to the bill is Katherine Oyama, policy counsel on copyright and trademark law for Google.

It’s almost as if the government wants to push SOPA through and are trying to control the message to that end. One way debates can be won is by stacking the deck in your favor. Excuse me while I travel down a side road to make an important point.

In the past the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had a regulation on the books known as the Fairness Doctrine. The regulation required holders of broadcast licenses to present both sides of an issue which resulted in the practice of having three people in a debate; one for the issue, one against the issue, and one neutral party.

Today many are asking the FCC to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine because they feel news today is too bais. What these same people fail to realize is the news was equally bias while the Fairness Doctrine was in effect but the game was played differently. For instance if you wanted to present an pro-gun control message you would get one person from the Brady Campaign (for the issue), one neutral party, and then a third pro-gun individual who was either crazy or just sounded crazy to the public (for instance you might get a self-declared militia leader who advocates the overthrow of the government to talk on the side against gun control). That way people the pro-gun control advocate would appear reasonable and sane so people would be more likely to side them him or her. Even with the Fairness Doctrine in place bias existed and that allowed the media to control the message.

Now that I’ve traveled down that side road let’s return to the topic at hand. The government wants SOPA to pass and they believe part of passing it requires controlling the message. Since many people don’t know the major players in this legislation the government has stacked the deck with numerous people who represent a pro-SOPA stance but appear neutral on paper (after all most people would believe Mastercard is a neutral party in this debate as their income isn’t derived from copyright). Most people will look at the list of testifiers and believe a large majority will be neutral and only a handful will speak for or against the legislation. In reality the government has simply stacked the deck in a rather underhanded manner so they can claim extensive support to justify passing the bill.

A majority of people don’t even realize that we’re being fucked over by our government since the methods being used to fuck us over aren’t blatant.

Department of Justice Deems Violating Website Terms of Service Illegal

We’ve all glossed over the Terms of Service (ToS) agreements of various websites and software packages. Most ToS agreements are composted of dense legalese that nobody without a law degree could possibly hope to translate. I view ToS agreements the same I view any broken contractual agreement where nothing of value has been lost, a non-issue. If you make an agreement with me to stand on one foot for an hour every Saturday morning in exchange for me agreeing to do a handstand at 21:00 every Thursday and one of us breaks the agreement neither party has actually lost anything. Even if there is a contractual agreement between the two of us as neither of us has actually suffered any loss of property no prosecutable offense has taken place.

If you signup for a Facebook account and use a fake name, something against Facebook’s ToS agreement, what is lost? Nothing, as the agreement stipulated no transfer of property and thus violation of the agreement is without consequence and therefore not a prosecutable offense. Unless, of course, you ask the Department of Justice (DoJ):

The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile at a site like Match.com.

In a statement obtained by CNET that’s scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues that it must be able to prosecute violations of Web sites’ often-ignored, always-unintelligible “terms of service” policies.

The law must allow “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider,” Richard Downing, the Justice Department’s deputy computer crime chief, will tell the U.S. Congress tomorrow.

What the DoJ stance doesn’t take into consideration is the fact contractual agreements between an employer and employee or service provider and customer often involved actual loss of property. If you make a contractual agreement with a cell phone service provider that states the provier will give you a phone at a reduced cost in exchange for your commitment to two years of service a loss of property, the subsidized value of the phone, is inflicted upon the provider if you break the contract. This is why ending such a contract before the two years is up entitles paying an early termination fee, to reclaim the subsidized value of the phone.

A website doesn’t actually lose any property when you decide to use a fake name. In fact I’m unaware of a single ToS agrement violation that could lead to a provider losing property if violated, considering most of these services are free to use. Therefore there is no legitimate reason to prosecute somebody for violating a ToS agreement.

Either way don’t fret about violating my ToS agreement.

My Favorite Thing About Neocons

My favorite thing about neocons is their naive belief that various government agencies can be reeled in or reformed. While this belief is annoying it is also kind of cute. It’s like looking at a child who hasn’t had a chance to fully experience the world and thus still holds the belief that good can be found in everything.

Sadly most neocons haven’t learned from reality and thus still hold theses naive beliefs. Take one neocon’s remark about the Transportation Sexual Assaulters Security Administration (TSA), she posts a horrific story of sexual abuse performed by a TSA agent and then points out the fact that the TSA isn’t about security:

Is there anyone out there who still believes that all this has anything to do with safety? It does not. These procedures are simply “security theater,” and when a traveler like Tabitha ops out of the potentially carcinogenic scanners, he or she has inconvenienced the TSA workers, who then retaliate by making the pat-down as invasive and unpleasant as possible.

I’m with the author up to this point. Unfortunately in the commends she makes a statement that demonstrate her ignorance regarding government agencies:

Stricty speaking, I’d like the TSA leashed, rather than completely abolished.

Of course this is the same woman who said she wanted to see at least one Republican candidate address the problem of the TSA and when another commenter pointed out Ron Paul she simply dismissed him as a racist and 9/11 truther (neither of which are true). This being the case I don’t expect much logic coming from her as she’s living in a world of cognitive dissonance by believing government agencies can be reformed and that the Republican are somehow different than the Democrats.

Government agencies can’t be reformed. Once the government obtains power over a market they never willingly relinquish it. The TSA is a great example of this as they moved in on the airport security market and are now expanding out to drug enforcement in Tennessee.

Hell the TSA are becoming more corrupt by the day. Yesterday as one of my friends was going through the airport she said a TSA agent pushed her into the radiation scanner before she had any chance to opt-out. I wasn’t even surprised in the slightest to hear that as the TSA are power hungry authoritarian assholes who have no problem pulling such stunts to exercise their authoritah.

As a completely unrelated side note the site I linked has the web address www.conservativecommune.com. How can you have a [neo]conservative commune? There is only one thing neoconservatives hate more than individual freedom and that’s communists.

Just What the Police Need, Weaponizable Drones

What do you get the authoritarian who has everything? A weaponizable drone of course! What could possible go wrong with giving the police drones that can mount Tasers:

A Houston area law enforcement agency is prepared to launch an unmanned drone that could someday carry weapons, Local 2 Investigates reported Friday.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Conroe paid $300,000 in federal homeland security grant money and Friday it received the ShadowHawk unmanned helicopter made by Vanguard Defense Industries of Spring.

[…]

He said they are designed to carry weapons for local law enforcement.

“The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems,” he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a “stun baton.”

“You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft. A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect,” he said.

This is such a great idea! It’s not like there is a record of people who have been killed by Tasers or anything. Who could possibly imagine this type of technology being abused?

Who in the fuck thought it was a good idea to build a drone that can mount weapons and sell it to law enforcement agencies? No, seriously I want to know who the fucker is that thought this was a good idea. Big Brother watching my every move is one thing but it becomes an entirely different game when Big Brother is not only following and watching me but also deploying weapons from remote controlled aircraft.

Militarizing the police has proven to be a very bad idea yet we continue down this road of idiocy. Why not just give police department some nuclear weapons while we’re at it? Perhaps they could use a few flamethrowers in case a perp locks himself in a house and the only option is to burn the building to the ground. Where does this insanity stop?

White House Responses to We the People Petitions

A short while ago the White House spent a fuck-ton of taxpayer money setting up the We the People Petition site. It was marketed as a website people could submit and sign petitions for government action. While the government promised to look at any petitions with an arbitrarily selected number of signatures I suspected they would simply issue easily predictable statements against taking action related to the petitions. Well, my suspicions were right. The White House responded to a handful of the petitions with the most signatures, including the petition to legalize marijuana, and the responses were exactly as expected. For instance here is part of their response to the petition asking the federal government to legalize marijuana:

When the President took office, he directed all of his policymakers to develop policies based on science and research, not ideology or politics. So our concern about marijuana is based on what the science tells us about the drug’s effects.

According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health– the world’s largest source of drug abuse research – marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease, and cognitive impairment. We know from an array of treatment admission information and Federal data that marijuana use is a significant source for voluntary drug treatment admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled over the past 20 years, raising serious concerns about what this means for public health – especially among young people who use the drug because research shows their brains continue to develop well into their 20’s. Simply put, it is not a benign drug.

Basically the response to the petition was to link a bunch of previous studies that were performed to justify the prohibition against marijuana. While most of those studies have been proven wrong by third-party research that’s irrelevant because the government wants marijuana illegal and by Thor in Valhalla it will remain illegal!

When people kept linking to pet petitions I ignored them because I knew the federal government wasn’t going to take any of the petitions seriously. Those in office don’t give two shits what you and I think, we’re just uneducated peons who need every detail of our lives planned, managed, and controlled for our own good.

The EFF Looks at the Three Most Dangerous Provisions of the PATRIOT Act

To celebrate 10 years of tyranny under the USA PATRIOT Act the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has posted an article that looks into the three most dangerous provisions of this blatant power grab of legislation:

1. SECTION 215 – “ANY TANGIBLE THING”

Under this provision, the FBI can obtain secret court orders for business records and other “tangible things” so long as the FBI says that the records are sought “for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must issue the order if the FBI so certifies, even when there are no facts to back it up. These “things” can include basically anything—driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, books, documents, Internet history, and more. Adding insult to injury, Section 215 orders come with a “gag ” prohibiting the recipient from telling anyone, ever, that they received one.

It’s always nice when the federal government can go on a fishing expedition without even having so much as factual evidence to back up their accusation. The most egregious part of Section 215 though is that those who are targeted with the order to provide evidence are forbidden from ever telling anybody.

2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS

Among the most used — and outright frightening — provisions in the PATRIOT Act are those that enhanced so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI can issue NSLs itself, without a court order, and demand a variety of records, from phone records to bank account information to Internet activity. As with 215 orders, recipients are gagged from revealing the orders to anyone.

This is another piece of the PATRIOT Act that allows the federal government to obtain personal information and gag the information provider. When the federal government wants information about you they can issue a National Security Letter, have the information provided to them, and prevent the provider from informing you that the information was handed over. For instance if the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) want any e-mail messages received by or sent from to your GMail account Google would have to provide them but would be prohibited from informing you that government agents demanded the data.

3. SNEAK AND PEEK WARRANTS

Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act normalized “sneak-and-peek” warrants. These allow law enforcement to raid a suspect’s house without notifying the recipient of the seizure for months. These orders usually don’t authorize the government to actually seize any property — but that won’t stop them from poking around your computers. Again, sneak-and-peek warrants could be used for any investigation, even if the crime was only a misdemeanor.

This provision is the reason all of my data is encrypted at all times. The drives in my computer and the external backup drives are all entirely encrypted. Data can’t be retrieved from or written to my drives without the decryption keys (technically an agent could wipe my drive, reinstall the operating system, and include key-logging software but all my data would be missing which would raise some serious red flags). I advise everybody to use disk encryption technology on their systems.

There you have it, a nice overview of three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that shit all over our supposedly Constitutionally guaranteed rights of protection.

I Christen Emperor Obama

Well it appears Obama’s illusions of grandeur are continuing. He’s once again come and basically said, “I don’t give a fuck what Congress and the people want, we’re doing things my way!” Apparently it’s time to get the President a crown and change his title to emperor because those spineless fucks in Congress aren’t doing anything to reel in his rampant threats and abuses of executive orders:

President Barack Obama told an audience in Nevada on Monday that he will be regularly announcing “executive actions” his administration will take to “heal the economy” without the “dysfunctional” Congress.

“I’m here to say to all of you and to say to the people of Nevada and the people of Las Vegas, we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will,” Obama said.

Just like you acted in Libya by sending our military over without even consulting Congress? Here’s the kicker Obama, you’re plans to “fix” the economy have failed and you’re latest plan is nothing more than a continuation of your previous plans. Pumping more money into a system already overstuffed with money isn’t going to improve the situation, it’s going to cause continued destruction.

Congress won’t do anything though because that would require taking responsibility. When Obama does something and fucks up Congress laughs and points their fingers claiming they knew the outcome all along. If you knew the outcome and said nothing then you don’t get to claim moral superiority, especially when stopping bad presidential ideas is your fucking job. Things won’t change though because taking responsibility would mean taking blame when something goes wrong and Congress is made up almost entirely of cowards who would rather see their opponent fail than our country succeed.

Soviet Inspired Checkpoints Around the Corner

You know what this country needs? Another program that seems inspired by good old Mother Russia. Since we already have a Soviet approved central bank, public indoctrination education system, and rampant imperialism why not move on to establishing checkpoints:

If you thought the “Transportation Security Administration” would limit itself to conducting unconstitutional searches at airports, think again. The agency intends to assert jurisdiction over our nation’s highways, waterways, and railroads as well. TSA launched a new campaign of random checkpoints on Tennessee highways last week, complete with a sinister military-style acronym–VIP(E)R—as a name for the program.

As with TSA’s random searches at airports, these roadside searches are not based on any actual suspicion of criminal activity or any factual evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever by those detained. They are, in effect, completely random. So first we are told by the U.S. Supreme Court that American citizens have no 4th amendment protections at border crossings, even when standing on U.S. soil. Now TSA takes the next logical step and simply detains and searches U.S. citizens at wholly internal checkpoints.

Remember that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was originally restricted to airports, but now they’re moving into truck and bus stops. This is classic government agency creep; these agencies are generally started with a narrow mandate in mind and expand their powers to cover more and more previously mundane and well-running activities. If left unchecked, I wouldn’t be surprised if the TSA started doing random checkpoints when you try to travel from one state to another. I can see myself running into a random checkpoint on Interstate 90 when I cross from Minnesota into Wisconsin.

We aren’t on the road anymore to tyranny, we’ve reached the destination. Let’s go through the checklist shall we?

Attempts by the government to generate a strong sense of nationalism? Check.

A marriage between corporations and the state? Check.

An ever increasing authoritarian state? Check.

Government controlled checkpoints that hassle innocent travelers? Check.

Congratulations everybody, we’ve reached fascism!