Tag: Shut Up Slave

You’re the Product, Not the Customer

In his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein coined the phrase there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (usually abbreviated as TANSTAAFL). The phrase is used by the main characters of the book to remind themselves and others that there’s no such thing as free. This is a lesson too many people fail to learn in real life. People are obsessed with the fantasy of free. They want free food, free money, free healthcare, and free online services.

People commonly make the mistake that online services such as Facebook and Twitter are free. On the surface they appear to be free since you don’t pay to use them. But TANSTAAFL. When you’re using a service for free you’re not the customer, you’re the product:

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday outed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for feeding a Chicago-based company their user streams—a feed that was then sold to police agencies for surveillance purposes.

[…]

Geofeedia, which did not respond for comment, says it has more than 500 customers, including the Denver Police Department. That agency recently signed a $30,000 annual deal with the company. The money came from the agency’s “confiscation” fund. The department’s intelligence agency’s top brass wrote that it would allow cops to analyze and respond in real time to “social media content from anywhere in the world.”

Geofeedia, the actual customer, has been paying for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’s product, your personal information. It has then been turning around and selling it to various police departments, which use the information to more effectively expropriate wealth from the people they victimize. The only person not making any money on this deal is you. In fact, you’re losing money if any of the sold information about you is used by the police to take some of your wealth.

Because this revelation could turn into a loss of product for these sites they have apparently announced that they’ve cut off Geofeedia’s access. That shouldn’t make you feel better though. That access can be regranted at any time and there are likely many other companies doing the same thing as Geofeedia who just haven’t been caught yet. So long as you continue to be the product you shouldn’t believe any of your information is safe.

The Public Education System’s Ongoing War with Education

Since its inception the public education system has been at war with education. Instead of education people the United States public education system is based off of the Prussian system that was designed to make automatons that were smart enough to operate the machinery but not smart enough to revolt against the State. But remnants of education continued to stick around for a few generations until we finally reached the point we’re at today where the movie Idiocracy looks more like prophecy than satire.

The Hibbing School District has identified a remnant of education that has managed to remain untouched and is working to address that hiccup:

HIBBING — The Hibbing School District is considering ending its nearly 60-year partnership with the Hibbing Rifle and Pistol Club.

During a school board meeting Wednesday, Superintendent Brad Johnson said various concerns from the public regarding the gun range in the basement of Lincoln Elementary has led him to strictly limit access to the facility until there’s a permanent solution to ensure everyone’s safety and to limit concerns from the public.

The facility can only be used once school-organized activities and events have concluded on Wednesdays, or when inclement weather prevents gun safety classes from being held outdoors.

There has never been an incident on the range so safety isn’t the actual reason for attempting to shutdown the range. But teaching children how to safety and effectively operate firearms is education and potentially threatening to the State. And I’m not even talking about the potential form armed revolution in this case. People who have the ability to defend themselves and are confident in their ability are much harder to scare. Fear is the health of the State. Without fear the State has a hard time manipulating people into surrendering their autonomy.

Consider the police state we live in today. It was able to expand because first people were afraid of the communists then they were afraid of the drugs and now they’re afraid of the terrorists. People are willing to put up with widespread surveillance, again, because they’re afraid of the terrorists. Now the State is drumming up fears of war with Russia and that will be used by it to grab even more power.

The knowledge and ability to defend yourself is a significant threat to the State. The public education system has been hard at work stamping down this knowledge by teaching children to never fight back against bullies but instead run to a school administrator. In recent years schools have even begun punishing students who do defend themselves under the idea that violence is never the answer. Sometime like a gun range that teaches children how to use the most effective tools of self-defense commonly available wasn’t going to fly forever.

We’re All Terrorists Now

In many governmental circles I’m considered a terrorist sympathizer. Why? It’s not because I’ve sold arms to terrorists or provided them logistical support. It’s because I teach people how to use secure communication tools, which can get you arrested in certain parts of the world:

Samata Ullah, 33, was charged with six terrorism offences after being arrested in a street in Cardiff on September 22 by officers from Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism squad.

The charge sheet includes one count of preparation of terrorism “by researching an encryption programme, developing an encrypted version of his blog site, and publishing the instructions around the use of [the] programme on his blog site.”

Ullah is also accused of knowingly providing “instruction or training in the use of encryption programmes” in relation to “the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism or for assisting the commission or preparation by others of such acts.”

He has additionally been charged with being in possession of a “Universal Serial Bus (USB) cufflink that had an operating system loaded on to it for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation, or instigation of terrorism.”

This is the nightmare Orwell alluded to in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The State has become so controlling that merely providing an encrypted version of your blog, which I am currently doing since my blog is served exclusively over HTTPS, can be considered noteworthy enough to mention on a list of charges. The same goes for USB cufflinks. We are at a point that even mundane activities can be labeled criminal offenses if the State decides thrust the word terrorism upon you.

I have no doubts that this will come to the United States. The United Kingdom seems to be where new tyrannies are birthday and the United States seems to be where tyrannies go to grow up. And anybody who watched the hearings surrounding Farook’s iPhone, which the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) wanted to force Apple to break into, knows that the United States government is already at war with cryptography. If it passes a law mandating all domestic encryption include a government accessible back door I’ll be a criminal for teaching people how to use secure foreign encryption.

To Better Protect and Serve You

The police exist to protect and serve you, which is why police departments invest so much money into buying equipment that better enables them to protect and serve you. Take Ford’s new innovation that will surely help you feel safer:

Just when it seemed like undercover police cars couldn’t get any stealthier, along comes this.

After adding red-and-blue emergency lights inside the front visors of unmarked police cars, Ford said Monday that it is introducing rear emergency lights built into the spoiler.

The system means that in states where officers in unmarked cruisers are allowed to pull over speeders, it may be harder to recognize their vehicles — until those lights go on.

Here in Minnesota police cars are required to be marked. That requirement has lead to black police cars with black lettering on them that is difficult to distinguish unless you’re close to the vehicle. I won’t be surprised if I see these innovative spoilers even on “marked” cars.

So how will these innovative spoilers help police better protect and serve you? The same way International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers, surplus Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Trucks (BearCat), drug sniffing dogs, laser speed detectors, and most of the other fancy shit law enforcers buy: not at all. What it will do is help law enforcers expropriate even more wealth from the people they prey on.

Forensic Voodoo

If you hang out with enough gunnies you’ll eventually run across Mr. Tough On Crime. Mr. Tough On Crime is remorseless. If somebody has been stopped by a police officer Mr. Tough On Crime more often than not has already judge them to be a criminal. In his eyes the police only stop people who are perpetrating crimes. And if you’ve been convicted of a crime Mr. Tough On Crime will forever disparage your name because you were proven to be filthy criminal scum. Judge Dredd has nothing on Mr. Tough On Crime.

But how guilty are the people sitting in prison right now? Last year it was revealed that microscopic hair forensics was basically voodoo. As it turns out, microscopic hair forensics cannot reliably tell one person from another. This has raised the question about what other supposedly scientific forensic techniques are bullshit and therefore what individuals in prison are actually criminals:

The White House will release a report Tuesday that will fundamentally change the way many criminal trials are conducted. The new study from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) examines the scientific validity of forensic-evidence techniques—DNA, fingerprint, bitemark, firearm, footwear and hair analysis. It concludes that virtually all of these methods are flawed, some irredeemably so.

Americans have long had an abiding faith in science, including forensic science. Popular TV shows like “CSI” and “Forensic Files” stoke this confidence. Yet the PCAST report will likely upend many people’s beliefs, as it should. Why trust a justice system that imprisons and even executes people based on junk science?

Only the most basic form of DNA analysis is scientifically reliable, the study indicates. Some forensic methods have significant error rates and others are rank guesswork. “The prospects of developing bitemark analysis into a scientifically valid method” are low, according to the report. In plain terms: Bitemark analysis is about as reliable as astrology. Yet many unfortunates languish in prison based on such bad science.

Mr. Tough On Crime is a blithering idiot. Condemning anybody who has ended up in one of the State’s slave labor facilities is asinine because many crimes don’t even involve a victim (and therefore aren’t actually crimes) and even when there is a victim the guilt of the accused perpetrator is often not proven beyond a reasonable because so much forensic “science” is voodoo.

I blame a great deal of this on the State’s monopoly on the legal system. Since the State has declared a monopoly on the legal system it is the prosecuting party in almost all criminal cases. The State is necessarily biased against anybody charged with a crime because its job is to prosecute them, not discover the truth about the crime. Many forensic labs work for the prosecutor and are therefore also biased against the defendant because they want to make their paying client happy so they’ll purchase their services again. The judge, at best, is a neutral party but realistically, as en employee of the State, is likely going to be biased against the defendant as well, which is a major problem because they instruct the jury. Members of the jury are often clueless about forensic techniques so they often lap up what the forensic labs, which are usually on the side of the prosecutor, feed them. Jurors are also usually ignorant about their rights as jurors, which is exacerbated by the judge lying to them. Often the only person in a court room that isn’t gunning for the defendant is their lawyer.

With odds like that, it’s difficult to have much faith in a guilty verdict, especially when a great deal of the forensic “evidence” submitted against the defendant isn’t any more reliable than guesswork.

Reminder: Private Quantitative Easing is Illegal

A man in Idaho was recently sentences to a year in jail and three months of home imprisonment. His crime? Following the Federal Reserve’s plan to stimulate the economy through quantitative easing:

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — A northern Idaho man who created counterfeit $50 bills using a computer printer has been sentenced to a year in jail and three months home confinement.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says 51-year-old Daniel Keith Snyder of Hope also on Monday in federal court was ordered to pay $1,150 in restitution and have three years of supervised release.

Quantitative easing, more common referred to as counterfeiting, is, like kidnapping and assault, perfectly legal if performed by the State but illegal if performed by a private individual. So remember, just because the State does it doesn’t mean you, a lowly peasant, can do it.

Even the President Admits That the System is Rigged

Two days ago was National Register to Vote Day. It amounted to the Internet asking what I was doing to encourage my friends to register to vote and me responding that I don’t encourage my friends to actively participate in their own subjugation. Voting exists to give the subjects the false belief that they have a say in the actions of their rulers. You can see this by simply looking at the ballot. For each office a ballot will list any running candidates and leave a space if you want to write somebody else in. What isn’t on the ballot is the option to abolish the office. As Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views.” You are allowed, at most, to choose your master from a curated list but you can’t choose to do something radical.

The system is rigged. This fact has become so obvious that even the rulers are publicly admitting it:

President Barack Obama warned in a radio interview on Wednesday that Americans who vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November risk putting Donald Trump into the White House, as he sought to blunt momentum for third-party candidates.

“If you don’t vote, that’s a vote for Trump,” Obama said in an interview on the Steve Harvey Morning Show. “If you vote for a third-party candidate who’s got no chance to win, that’s a vote for Trump.”

There it is, plain as day. And you know what? He’s right. At least about third-party presidential candidates having no chance of winning (he’s still wrong about not voting or voting for a third-party candidate being a vote for Trump). Third-party candidates exist to create the illusion of choice. Their presence on the ballot legitimizes the State in the eyes of many people who are unhappy with the two major parties by creating the illusion that other alternative exist. In reality your only choice on the ballot is whether you want a republican or a democratic ruler (and in reality even that is a false choice based on how poorly Trump has been polling).

Here’s my question, if you know the game is rigged why bother playing it? You don’t have an actual choice, you have a curated list of choices deemed acceptable by the rulers. And if you don’t live in a swing state you don’t even have that. Here in Minnesota, for example, Hillary is going to win. Any vote that isn’t for her won’t count in any meaningful way. Any vote for her is merely an exercise in electoral masturbation since it serves no purpose other than increasing the magnitude of her victory.

Why waste precious minutes or hours of your life in a meaningless exercise? There are so many more productive things you could do. You could read a book, go to the range, hit the gym, smoke a joint, or trim your toenails. But you won’t gain anything by playing a rigged game.

You Can’t Squeeze Blood from a Turnip

I have yet another story of civil forfeiture for you. But this one is a little different. Instead of it being a story about cops stealing property that the owner is never able to get back this story starts out with the courts siding with the owner. However, there’s a plot twist. The stolen property has already been sold:

For eight years, Michiganders Gerald and Royetta Ostipow have been fighting the seizure and forfeiture of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of their property.

Last month they prevailed when a judge ordered the return of virtually everything that had been taken from them. But the Ostipows’ victory was short-lived, for they soon discovered that the Saginaw County Sheriff’s Office had sold their property years ago, while their forfeiture case was still being actively litigated.

So, it’s back to court for the Ostipows.

You can’t get what isn’t there but at least the system works… for the rulers. Law enforcers were able to steal and hock Mr. and Mrs. Ostipow’s stuff for financial gain. In order to fight the seizure the Ostipows had to invest money in a lawyer and hours in the court system, which helped keep the court employees employed. Then when the court finally ruled in favor of the Ostipows they found out that they would have to spend more money on lawyers, and by extent help pay the salaries of more court employees, because their property was pawned off years ago. If the federal court sides with them then the city that employs the officers will likely be forced to pay damages, which very well may lead to a tax increase to make up for the loss to the city.

In the end everybody involved with the State profits while the Ostipows have to continue hemorrhaging cash and will never be able to reclaim the hours of their life that have been lost.

Expanding the Scope of the TSA

Government agencies only expand, they never contract. Although the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has failed 95 percent of red team exercises the agency hasn’t been abolished. Instead Congress wants to reward the agency by expanding its scope to guard the trains that practically nobody uses:

Several U.S. senators want the TSA to focus more attention and resources on rail, highway, and marine transportation, which would mean greater security oversight at such places as Amtrak stations and Megabus coach stops. A bipartisan bill introduced Thursday by Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) would require the TSA to use a risk-based security model for these transport modes and to budget money based on those risks. It would require a wider use of the agency’s terrorist watch list by train operators and more detailed passenger manifests along with tighter screening of marine employees. The legislation also would increase the TSA’s canine use by as many as 70 dog-handler teams for surface transportation.

Why bother? No terrorist attack has been performed on an Amtrak train. Compared to airliners Amtrak trains are practically ghost towns. They’re low value targets to an attacker looking to rack up as high of a body count as possible. Obviously this isn’t about security so what is it about? My guess is that it’s about police state bullshit.

Remember all those movie scenes where the Nazi or Soviet officer asks passengers boarding a train for their papers? It used to be the thing were we told to fear for obvious reasons. But those scenes are pornography for statists. They show everything statists desire: control, order, and obedience. And they swooped in the second they had an excuse to implement the exact same system for air travelers. When you line up in the security theater line at an airport you hand your papers to a TSA agent who looks them over and decides whether or not your can move forward. If you’re a Jew or a kulak on the terrorist watch lists your trip ends there and you’ll be escorted away but a thug in a uniform. Now that every is used to kowtowing to government agents demanding to see our papers Congress is ready to expand the TSA’s scope. It won’t surprise me if the nation’s highways are someday littered with surprise TSA checkpoints.

Never ending expansion such as this is why I have a zero tolerance policy towards government. If you give government an inch it will slowly take a mile. The only sane solution is to not have a government at all.

Why Police Hate Being Recorded

Many police officers have negative reactions towards being filmed. Why is this? They obviously have something to hide since they always tell us people with nothing to hide shouldn’t oppose surveillance. But what are they hiding? Perhaps instances where they fabricate charges against protesters?

The ACLU of Connecticut is suing state police for fabricating retaliatory criminal charges against a protester after troopers were recorded discussing how to trump up charges against him. In what seems like an unlikely stroke of cosmic karma, the recording came about after a camera belonging to the protester, Michael Picard, was illegally seized by a trooper who didn’t know that it was recording and carried it back to his patrol car, where it then captured the troopers’ plotting.

“Let’s give him something,” one trooper declared. Another suggested, “we can hit him with creating a public disturbance.” “Gotta cover our ass,” remarked a third.

That’s embarrassing!

Notice how the recorded footage came from the protesters camera and not the dashcam in the police car or body cameras? Recently many police officers have expressed a willingness to wear body cameras. This change of heart seems to indicate that officers are willing to be monitored. In reality the officers know that the departments control that footage and can disappear it “accidentally” at any time. It’s public recordings that really body them because they can’t conveniently toss the footage down the memory hole. This is why I encourage everybody to film any police encounter they are either a party to or come across even if the officers are wearing body cameras. Don’t let shit like what these officers pulled go unnoticed.