Tag: Shut Up Slave

How the State Uses Donations for the Homeless

When you donate funds to a small charity organization that specializes in assisting the homeless there’s a decent chance that those funds will go to help the homeless. When you donate funds to the State for the purpose of assisting the homeless there’s a decent change that those funds will be used to make the lives of homeless individuals more miserable:

DENVER (CBS4)– A CBS4 Investigation has found that the City of Denver used thousands of dollars in public donations intended to help Denver’s homeless with food, shelter and counseling to instead pay costs associated with a sweep of the homeless population out of Denver’s Ballpark neighborhood in March.

[…]

The CBS4 Investigation found that when city administrators were planning the March sweep, they immediately wanted to use donations that had been made to Denver’s Road Home to assist the homeless population.

In a series of city emails obtained by CBS4, city officials from the mayor’s office, public works and a host of other city agencies grappled behind the scenes with an anticipated bill of nearly $60,000 to pay an environmental company to move, store and redistribute personal property confiscated from homeless men and women during the sweep.

I must once again reiterate the fact that the State hates the homeless. The State is an organization built upon theft so it sees those who have nothing to steal as a burden.

A common criticism of libertarianism is that it advocates the charity to help those in need. The critics claim this is proof that libertarians don’t care about the poor. Quite the opposite is true. Libertarians do actually care about the poor, which is why they want to rid society of the State. The State preys on the poor and tries to take what little they have.

You Can’t Own Property, Man

Pop quiz time. Can you own property in Minneapolis? The answer is no. You can rent property in Minneapolis but that rental is subject to paying property taxes and utilizing the land in a manner that is expressly approved by the city council. If that last part sounds a bit strange it’s because you down own a surface parking lot. You see, the city council of Minneapolis has a dream. In that dream Minneapolis looked like Mega City I from Judge Dredd. Surface parking lots can’t pack in a million people so they’re on the list of properties to be axed.

So far the city council has been playing a cautious game but that looks like it may change:

It was a routine briefing of a Minneapolis City Council committee on a seemingly unrelated topic, but it offered the chance to rouse a long-simmering issue in Minneapolis:

What can the city do to rid itself of the acres of surface parking lots in and around downtown?

While development activity has seen many of those lots disappear, many remain — too many, according to Council Members Lisa Goodman and Jacob Frey, who used the May 11 briefing to press city assessor Patrick Todd to do something about it.

Like what? Goodman thinks the city should use state requirements that require property be assessed on its “highest and best use” — and not on its current use — to incentivize owners to either develop the land or sell to someone who will.

Because parking is scarce in Minneapolis a person can make pretty decent money with a surface parking lot. That really bothers certain council members such as Lisa Goodman. It bothers her so much that she wants to change the rules to make them unprofitable. That rule change is a simple one. Instead of assessing a parking lot as a parking lot for property tax purposes she wants to assess them as if they were being used for her vision of their best use. Since her vision is high density apartment complexes the assessment would jack up the property taxes to, she hopes, a level the owners can’t sustain. In fact she flat out says that they must not be paying enough taxes:

“If they’re making enough money by selling parking downtown,” she said, “then they’re not being taxed high enough, and they’re certainly not being taxed high enough for a potential Class A office use.”

Do you know what those surface parking lots were taxed enough for? Funding a study to decide on how best to destroy them:

In 2013, amid planning for the new Vikings Stadium, the group HR&A Advisors conducted a $40,000 study of ways to reduce the number of surface lots in Minneapolis. Several council ordinances have sought to force beautification of parking lots, something that could have also increased the costs associated with operating them. And a bill introduced by state Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, would allow Minneapolis and St. Paul to impose a per-stall fee on parking, with revenue going to public plazas, transit lines, bike facilities and pedestrian improvements.

This is another reason you should avoid paying whatever taxes you can. When you pay taxes they are often used to fund your destruction.

What we have here are central planners run amuck. Consumers have already spoken and they want surface parking lots. How can I say this since there hasn’t been any kind of vote? Unlike voting, the market actually indicates what consumers want. Because there are enough consumers paying to use these surface parking lots to make them profitable we know for a fact that those lots are in demand with consumers. Goodman doesn’t like them and instead of offering to buy those lots herself she’s using tax dollars to fund studies to determine the best way to destroy them… in a manner that requires the denizens of Minneapolis pay for it.

In the end I predict that the city council will get its way because it will just keep cranking up the taxes until it bleeds surface lot owners dry. Then those lots will sit empty because if developers really wanted those lots they’d have already bought them.

You Have to Appreciate His Honesty

The Republican and Democratic parties seem to disagree on many things but they can agree on one thing: they both hate Muslims. But the Republican Party is far more overt about its hatred. Still, like most racists, the party usually tries to keeps its hatred tucked under a burqa thin veil of justifications that aren’t related to religion or race.

Every now and then one of the Republicans slips off of his leash and blatantly states their views on Islam. Funny enough, that view almost always reflects how the Nazis views the Jews:

An Oklahoma lawmaker personally propagated an article over the weekend calling for a “final solution” regarding “radical Islam,” arguing that the 1,400-year-old faith is not a religion and should not be protected under the first amendment of the Constitution.

On Sunday, Oklahoma State Rep. Pat Ownbey re-published an article to his Facebook page entitled “Radical Islam – The Final Solution.” The article was originally published on the personal blog of Paul R. Hollrah, an Oklahoman who touts himself as a “retired government relations executive,” but Ownbey appears to have copy-pasted the piece and reposted it in its entirety, citing Hollrah.

[…]

“And since the 95% of Muslims who are described as either ‘moderate’ or ‘un-radicalized’ appear unwilling to play an active role in keeping their radicalized brethren in check, we have no long term alternative but to quarantine them… prohibiting them from residing anywhere within the civilized nations of the Earth,” he writes.

The Nazis felt that the Jews had to be quarantined as well. That’s not even a case of Godwin’s Law, that’s historical fact. Likewise, they called their plan the final solution.

A lot of people argue that the State is necessary to defend against bigotry such as racism, religious prejudice, and sexism. While that sounds good on paper the reality is that the State is usually the biggest enabler of persecution. It was, after all, the United States government that legally required citizens and individual states to help capture and return escaped slaves. It was the United States government that rounded up people of Japanese decent and put them in concentration camps. passed and enforced by state and municipal governments. In other words, the worst forms of bigotry are created and enforced by the State. Without an apparatus as big and as powerful as the government of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust would not have been possible. That’s why it’s far scarier when members of the State talk about persecuting people than when individuals do. It’s also why defending against bigotry doesn’t require the State but the abolition of the State.

How Do You Get on The Terrorist Watch Lists? Be in the Wrong Place When an Officer Needs to Fill a Quota.

With all the talk about prevent terrorists from buying guns I think it’s time we sat down and asked what a terrorist, in this context, means. When people say they want to prevent terrorists from buying guns what they really mean is that they want to prevent people on the terrorist watch lists from buying guns. But being on the terrorist watch lists doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist. In fact, over 40 percent of the names on the lists aren’t affiliate with any known terrorist organization.

So what lands somebody on the lists if they’re not affiliated with any known terrorist organization? One way is to be in the wrong place when an officer needs to fill a quota:

You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

This is the problem with secret lists that have secret criteria. Anything can potentially land you on the lists. Since they’re secret you don’t even know you’re on one. Furthermore, if you do find out you’re on one there’s no way of getting off of it.

This is the problem with using lists that involve no due process to punish people. Under the laws the gun control advocates are fighting for you could lose your right to purchase a gun just because you were sitting near an air marshal when they needed to fulfill a monthly quota.

The Democrats Want to Prohibit Muslims from Owning Firearms

Yesterday the Democrats had a little sit-in. They were trying to prevent any politicking from happening until the Republicans agree to vote for a gun control bill. Let me start off by saying that preventing politicking from happening is a noble thing. I think the Democrats were being a shining example for their fellow politicians. More politicians should sit around and do nothing. The longer they sit and do nothing the longer they’re not voting on measures and the longer the people can enjoy relief from the tyranny of law makers.

But it behooves us to look at their motives. Many Democrats cheered their fellow politicians on. They believed this sit-in is noble because of what the Democratic politicians were trying to achieve. However, what they were trying to achieve was to prohibit Muslims from owing firearms:

While sit-in participants are also advocating for expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban, their primary call to action is for a vote on a measure that would ban gun sales to people listed on a federal government watchlist – a move clearly designed more for its political potency than for its effectiveness.

And the government’s consolidated terrorist watchlist is notoriously unreliable. It has ensnared countless innocent Americans, including disabled war veterans and members of Congress. Nearly half of the people on these watch lists were designated as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept in 2014.

What little we do know about the terrorist watch lists, thanks to a handful of leaks, is that over 40 percent of the names on them aren’t affiliated with any known terrorist organizations and that many of the names sound Muslim. There’s nothing noble about trying to block people of a specific religion from buying firearms. In fact, not to go all Godwin (since this is an accurate historical example), that’s exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews.

People criticize the Republicans for persecuting Muslims and rightly so. But the Democrats seem to get a pass even though they’re working towards the same ends. They’re two sides of the same fascist coin.

John Brennan is an Idiot

You probably read the title of this post and wondered what Brennan did this time to piss me off. Truthfully he didn’t really piss me off this time. What he did was make a public statement that really requires being an idiot to make.

Everything old is new again. As before, the United States government is busy debating whether or not mandatory backdoors should be included in civilian encryption. Security experts have pointed out that this is a stupid idea. Crypto-anarchists have pointed out that such a law would be meaningless because the Internet has enabled global communications so finding foreign encryption algorithms that don’t include a United States backdoor would be trivial. Hoping to refute the crypto-anarchists, John Brennan made this statement:

Brennan said this was needed to counter the ability of terrorists to coordinate their actions using encrypted communications. The director denied that forcing American companies to backdoor their security systems would cause any commercial problems.

“US companies dominate the international market as far as encryption technologies that are available through these various apps, and I think we will continue to dominate them,” Brennan said.

“So although you are right that there’s the theoretical ability of foreign companies to have those encryption capabilities available to others, I do believe that this country and its private sector are integral to addressing these issues.”

Theoretical ability? Let’s have a short discussion about the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES is one of the most prolific encryption standards in use today. Most full disk encryption tools, many Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections, and a load of other security tools rely on AES. Hell, many devices even include hardware acceleration for AES because it’s so heavily used. AES was originally a competition held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to find a modern encryption standard. In the end an algorithm called Rijndael won. Rijndael was created by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. If those two names sound foreign it’s because they are. Joan and Vincent are Belgians. So one of the most common encryption algorithms in use today, an algorithm chosen by an agency of the United States government no less, was created by two foreigners. I’d say foreign encryption tools are a bit beyond theoretical at this point.

Adding insult to injury, let’s discuss Theo de Raadt. Theo, for those who don’t know, is the creator and lead developer of both OpenBSD and OpenSSH. OpenBSD is an operating system known for being security and OpenSSH is probably the most common secure remote connection tool on the planet. Both of them are developed in Canada:

It’s perhaps easy to forget, but the cryptographic landscape was quite different in 1999. A lot has changed since then. Cryptographic software was available, but not always widespread, in part due to US export controls. International users either had to smuggle it out printed on dead trees, or reimplement everything, or settle for the 40 bit limited edition of their favorite software. Many operating systems originated in the US, so it was difficult to integrate cryptography top to bottom because there needed a way to build the export version without it. OpenBSD had the advantage of originating in Canada, without such concerns. The goto public key algorithm of choice, RSA, was encumbered by a patent for commercial use. The primary symmetric algorithm was still DES. You could use blowfish, of course, but it wasn’t officially blessed as a standard.

Again, the availability of foreign encryption tools is more than theoretical. I would think the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is supposedly tasked with spying on foreign countries, would be very aware of that. But the CIA has a long history of failure so it being unaware of very real encryption tools originating in foreign countries isn’t really that surprising.

The State’s War Against the Homeless Continues

Who can those with nothing turn to for help? Many people will say the government and they would be wrong. The State hates the homeless because they have nothing to steal. Therefore it wants them to go away. While outright murdering homeless individuals would be frowned upon, making the lives of homeless individuals so miserable that they migrate elsewhere and become somebody else’s problem is perfectly acceptable to the general public.

San Diego, hoping to make the lives of homeless individuals within its borders more miserable, has installed large rocks under many roadways to prevent homeless individuals from sleeping there:

In late April, after jagged rocks were installed along a freeway underpass to drive out homeless encampments, a city spokesman told reporters the project was at the request of residents of Sherman Heights, a working-class neighborhood just east of the 5 Freeway, who felt unsafe walking down Imperial Avenue.

Turns out, it had more to do with San Diego’s upcoming time in the spotlight as the host of baseball’s All Star Game at Petco Park on July 12.

Sherman Heights is never mentioned in more than 700 pages of email documents about the rocks, obtained under the California Public Records Act

[…]

Casey included the rocks in a checklist of work to be done before the All-Star Game. Emails also show that initial plans called for rocks along the base of a wall at Tailgate Park, between 12th and 14th streets and outside the New Central Library — which overlooks the ballpark — to keep away homeless people.

[…]

In a later email, Casey emphasized that the rocks needed to be of different heights so that no one could put down a plank of wood to try to sleep.

Those homeless people are such an eyesore and they’ll make the city look bad come baseball season so we need to make their lives miserable in the hopes that they’ll go somewhere else. How the State treats the homeless may be the single most illustrative example of how the State “fixes” problems. It never actually works to address the problems it’s “fixing”, it just sweeps them under the rug and tells people everything has been taken care of.

Equal Slavery Shouldn’t Be the Goal

A lot of debate has occurred on the topic of equality, especially equality between men and women. Equality can mean many things but to the State the only form of equality that matters is slavery:

The New York Times reported today:

“The United States Senate voted to pass a defense bill today that would require young women to sign up for a potential military draft for the first time in U.S. history.”

This issue was bound to come up eventually, as women have recently been allowed to compete for combat positions on the front line. Captain Kristen Griest’s recent completion of Army Ranger School and assignment as an Infantry officer is evidence of this shift in both policy and culture.

The accepted logic goes that if women have equal access to all jobs in the military, they ought to have equal responsibility with respect to the draft. And make no mistake: even though there has not been a draft since the 1970s, the ultimate purpose of Selective Service registration is precisely to enable a draft when deemed necessary.

Many are applauding these changes as an important step towards “equality” and recognition of women’s capabilities. But the focus on equality is masking the underlying injustice of the law in the first place. The more important issue is that forcing anyone to register for Selective Service is unjust because it is based on coercion (and has the potential to place otherwise peaceful people into violent situations). Let’s examine why.

Equal slavery shouldn’t be the goal. The complete abolition of slavery should be the goal. Let’s not mince words, the draft is slavery. It is a mechanism where the State can force you, at the point of a gun, to join its ranks so it can send you off to murder people who you’ve never met and have in all likelihood caused you no harm. Instead of debating whether women should be equally subjected to enslavement, the people of the United States should have been demanding Selective Service registration be abolished.

This is usually where some statist says, “What if somebody was invading the United States? Shouldn’t everybody be forced to fight for the greater good?” It’s a dumb question. Nobody should be forced to fight for a collective ideal. If so few people are willing to fight the invading force that it stands to conquer the nation then it’s obvious that the people didn’t see the nation as worthy of saving. Isn’t that the will of the people? Isn’t that what this supposedly glorious democracy is all about?

Men and women should be equally free to pursue their wants. They should also be equally free from slavery.

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies

Like clockwork, people are demanding the State make it harder for everybody to defend themselves. When this happens many gun owners have a habit of turning to two organizations: the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association (NRA). They’re supposedly friends of gun owners but if these are our friends we scarcely need enemies.

Let’s start with the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Mr. Trump has never been a friend to gun owners but he pretended to be one while campaigning and a lot of people bought it. After the shooting in Orlando he decided to talk with the NRA about abolishing due process:

Trump never favored gun rights so his stance isn’t surprising. Considering Trump’s history and the absurdity of what he’s proposing you would expect the NRA to tell Trump to go pound sand, right? Wrong:

The National Rifle Association said on Wednesday it stood by its position on terrorism watch lists and access to firearms, saying sales to potential buyers who are on the lists should be delayed while they are investigated by the FBI.

In a statement, the gun lobbying group said it welcomed a meeting with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. It also said protections needed to be put in place to allow people wrongfully put on a terrorism watch list to be removed.

The problem with the terrorist watch lists is that they’re secret lists with secret criteria. Nobody knows whether they’re on one of the lists and nobody knows what the criteria is for being put on the list. What we do know, thanks to leak, is that there are 680,000 names on these lists and more than 40 percent of them aren’t even tied to known terrorist organizations.

The NRA is trying to be the middle ground by claiming people on the lists should have their purchase postponed while the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) harasses investigates them. It also says that additional protections should be implemented to allow people wrongfully put on the lists to get their name removed. Of course, we don’t know what criteria is used to place somebody on the lists so we don’t know what wrongfully listed means. If one of the criteria for appearing on the lists is being a gun owner then everybody who owns a gun isn’t wrongfully on the list.

The fact that the terrorist watch lists eliminate due process should automatically mean zero punishment whatsoever befalls anybody whose name appears on any of the lists. Since the lists eliminate due process the NRA shouldn’t even give them the time of day or show any willingness to negotiate with people wanting to utilize them. Instead it kowtows like a good serf and begs for a few table scraps. What a fucking joke.

Who needs Michael Bloomberg and his lapdogs when we have “friends” like these selling us down the river?

The Libertarian Party is Becoming a Real Political Party

Everybody who knows me knows that I think the Libertarian Party is a joke. It’s not because they’re politically impotent, that is at least consistent with libertarianism. It’s because the party is striving to become like the two major political parties and in so doing is sacrificing libertarian principles. Case in point, the Libertarian Party is now purging dissenters from its ranks:

The Howell man whose impromptu striptease last month at the Libertarian Party’s national convention made headlines across the U.S. has been suspended from the party.

James Weeks II announced Sunday evening that Libertarian Executive Committee officials approved his suspension earlier in the day because of his actions.

Weeks, chairman of the party’s Livingston County branch and an announced party candidate for county sheriff, said “the reasoning behind this suspension is their disapproval of my use of free expression in lieu of a speech during my run for Libertarian Party chair at the national convention.”

Normally I don’t find dancing overweight men wearing a g-string appealing. But Weeks was the highlight of the Libertarian Party’s national convention. While all the super serious people were busy nominating somebody who isn’t a libertarian to be the party’s presidential candidate, Weeks went on stage to reminded everybody that the idea of a libertarian political party is a joke. John McAfee, the only frontrunner in the Libertarian Party’s presidential race that displayed genuine libertarian beliefs, had the best response to Weeks antics:

When James Weeks stripped at the LP Convention last Sunday there were widespread boo’s and general disapproval of Mr. Week’s exuberance. Rather than enjoying a respite from the grey blandness of the convention, people were muttering that the world would think that Libertarians were fools. Well, if we care about such tivialities, then we are indeed fools.

Libertarianism cannot spread if its proponents allow their actions to be guided by the people in power. When libertarians try to emulate those people in power, outside of being satirical, they must sacrifice their principles. Once the principles of libertarianism are sacrificed then there is no point in spreading them.