Tag: Shut Up Slave

Only In A Socialist Paradise

A lot of soft socialists (my name for your typical socialist who is too timid to just go full socialist) cite Nordic countries as being a veritable paradise. Free healthcare! Free education! Free everything! All of this comes at a cost though. The most notable is positively brutal personal income tax rates. A lesser considered but more insidious cost is ridiculous economic controls. Where else but a socialist paradise could you find police being tasked with wielding State violence against people who sell pizza too cheaply?

The new campaign, which is being publicised on police social media accounts, asks people to inform officers if they spot a pizza on sale for under six euros (£4.50), national broadcaster Yle reports. “Unless a pizza is on temporary sale there is no way a legitimate establishment can offer pizza for less than six euros,” Det Insp Minna Immonen of the Uusimaa police department is quoted as saying. Police are trying to crack down on the “grey economy”, which costs the country millions of euros in lost tax revenue each year. They also want people to make sure they get a receipt for their pizzas, regardless of value.

There is no legitimate way an establishment can make a profit by selling pizza for less than six euros? Odd. I can think of many. Pizza can, for example, be used as a loss leader at an establishment that makes its real profit from alcohol or cannabis sales (I’m not sure if cannabis is even legal in most Nordic counties but their status as a veritable paradise leads me to believe it must be).

Even more interesting than the idiocy of tasking the police with enforcing this ridiculous restriction is the reason. According to the broadcast the State is merely protecting businesses from themselves (because, apparently, they’re too stupid to know how much they can sell a pizza for and still profit). But the real reason is the loss of plunder from taxes that aren’t stolen.

The cost of free shit is so high that a person can’t even sell a pizza for less than six euros because the State won’t get a big enough cut.

Easy Money

What is the point of periodic vehicle inspections? If you answered, “Safety,” you are a fool. The answer is, “Revenue.”

Bruce Redwine had seen enough. After years of watching a Fairfax County parking enforcement officer slap tickets on his customers’ cars for expired tags or inspection stickers, usually as the cars were awaiting state inspection or repair at his Chantilly shop, he snatched the latest ticket out of Officer Jacquelyn D. Hogue’s hand and added some profane commentary on top.

[…]

They don’t understand why Fairfax police have zealously sought to enforce laws on expired tags or inspections, mainly on drivers who are making the effort to get their cars into compliance, while on private property. Hogue’s appearance in the industrial park often set off a scramble to hide customers’ cars inside the shops, the shop owners said.

You might think this is one of those “isolated incidents” but it’s not. Police are always on the lookout for easy money. Traffic and parking citations are pretty easy but they still require an officer to either stake out piece of road or walk around without any guarantee of revenue. Now they’re beginning to realize that the process can be streamlined by simply staking out inspection and repair businesses because there is a very high probability customers of those places are in violation of the law (since they’re trying to get back into compliance with the law). It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Once Data Is Retained You Lose All Control

Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) claim that Americans have no need to worry since the agency’s focus is on foreigners. Sometimes they even claim that the NSA cannot legally act on any of the domestic communications it collects so there is no danger to Americans regardless of how expansive its surveillance apparatus is. These arguments are irrelevant though because once your data is retained you have no control over how it is used.

Case in point, the NSA has been sharing data with domestic law enforcement agencies:

The Justice Department is investigating the FBI’s use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone metadata.

[…]

Another ongoing Justice Department investigation is examining the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s use of “parallel construction.”

Parallel construction is a controversial investigative technique that takes information gained from sources like the NSA’s mass surveillance, covers up or lies about the sources, and then utilizes them in criminal investigations inside the United States. The information was passed to other federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

While the NSA itself may be restricted to some extent from using any data it collects on domestic individuals there is nothing stopping it from handing that data to an agency that isn’t. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are all agencies that can act on data collected on domestic individuals by the NSA. Furthermore, due to the secrecy of the NSA’s program, these domestic law enforcers can made defending against any collected data extremely difficult. You only have a right to face your accuser publicly if your accuser isn’t hiding behind the nebulous label of “national security,” after all.

Papers, Please

Many decades ago a tiny island nation faces oblivion at the hands of one of its larger neighbors. Its neighbor was not a kindly sort. Very early in its existence it blamed all of the nation’s ills on members of a particular religion. At first things weren’t too bad. The nation forced members of that religion to register with the government and submit to additional security checks. Eventually stores owned by members of that religion were boycotted and then destroyed. Finally members of that religion were hauled off to be executed en masse.

Even though vaguely familiar with history realize I’m talking about World War II, specifically as it related to Britain and Nazi German. I bring this up because I would think a country that was facing complete annihilation would be a bit more proactive in not because its would-be destroyer. But Britain, a nation that truly loves tyranny, has taken a rather frightening step in a very dark direction:

Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.

The highly controversial proposal appears in a leaked draft of the Government’s new counter-extremism strategy, seen by The Telegraph, which goes substantially further than previous versions of the document.

The strategy, due to be published this autumn, says that Whitehall will “require all faiths to maintain a national register of faith leaders” and the Government will “set out the minimum level of training and checks” faith leaders must have to join the new register.

Registration will be compulsory for all faith leaders who wish to work with the public sector, including universities, the document says. In practice, most faith leaders have some dealings with the public sector and the requirement will cover the great majority.

One might point out that this is different because it doesn’t target any specific religion but we all know that broad laws have a way of being enforced very selectively. And there is certainly nothing stopping a supposedly secular state from persecuting all religions.

The real takeaway though, in my opinion, is the fact that Britain is planning to force all faith leaders to register with the government and submit to compulsory training. Historically subsets of societies registered on special government lists haven’t fared very well. Even if this is never passed into law the fact that the proposal is viewed as acceptable by even a single member of the British state shows just how far that nation has slid into imitating that which tried to destroy it not even a century ago. I think our friends across the pond are in for some dark times.

Child Terrorized For Being Intelligent And Having Drive

What happens when a child with a Middle Eastern name and appearance builds an electronic clock and brings it to school? If you said, “He’s awarded for his efforts and drive to learn,” you’d be incorrect. The correct answer is he’s terrorized by the State:

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

[…]

Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”

Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.

After interrogating, cuffing, and parading him around like some kind of captured beast the police magnanimously decided that they had terrorized the poor child enough and announced they would not pursue charges. Of course they never went so far as to apologize for their absurd overreaction:

Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.

[…]

Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.

“We live in an age where you can’t take things like that to school,” he said. “Of course we’ve seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution.”

Every officer involved with this travesty should be arrested and charged with kidnapping. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of bullshit. Circuit boards along do not make a bomb. Unless there was some clay or other such material that at least kind of resembled an explosive attached to one of those boards there were no grounds whatsoever for anything more than a cursory glance.

The levels of idiocy that has to take place for these events to spiral so far out of control is almost awe inspiring. You need a teacher to not bother with looking at the clock and using a bit of critical thinking to contact the police. Then you need the police to against not bother taking a look at the clock and applying a bit of critical thinking. On top of all of that you have to have a society full of people who are so fucking compliant with anybody holding a badge to not storm the jail, arrest the police, and hold a trail to determine their possible guilt and punishment.

That school doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Hell, this society doesn’t deserve a student like Ahmed. Students that demonstrate intelligence and drive should be somewhere where their knowledge and skills will be appreciated and advanced. My only hope is that this fiasco doesn’t stomp down his drive and he’s eventually able to start an underground company and make billions of dollars without paying one cent in taxes.

Minneapolis’ Finest

A lot of people, but neocons especially, have a hard time understanding why the public’s view of police officers has been degrading rapidly. They often try to blame the media for focusing too much on the bad things cops do and not enough time on the good things they do. Truth be told the biggest threat to the public’s view of police is police. If there weren’t so many bad cops doing bad things for the media to cover its influence would be minimal. But there seemingly isn’t a day that goes by where something like this hasn’t happened:

The handgun found near a teenager shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2006 could not have been carried by the teen, new court documents allege: It had last been in possession of police before it was found next to the body of Fong Lee.

Admittedly the Minneapolis Police Department is fairly well known for its corruption. That’s something it shares with the police departments of most sizable metropolitan areas. And therein lies the problem. Police departments in large cities seem to have a high rate of corruption, which means their corruption impacts a lot of people. It’s not that the media is necessarily covering the bad things police officers do; it’s that police departments continue to give the media bad things to cover.

Apologies

Last weekend Black Lives Matter marched on the Minnesota State Fair and held a protest. A lot of people are very worked up about this but I wasn’t there so the event didn’t impact me in the slightest. In addition to the protest itself some people are upset that some of the protesters were chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” Was that phrase a call to kill cops or a clever play on words in context of an event well known for having every food you could imagine in fried form? I don’t know and I don’t care. But representative Tony Cornish cares very much:

Representative Tony Cornish is calling for an apology from the protest group Black Lives Matter for a chant made at the State Fair.

Well since we’re on the topic of apologies, I want an apology from Tony Cornish for his active support in expanding the already pervasive police surveillance apparatus. I’m guessing we’re both going to end up disappointed.

I haven’t written much about the activities of Black Lives Matter. From my point of view the organization is an inevitable reaction to decades of abuse perpetuated by those in authority. If you keep punching somebody you can’t cry foul when they finally retaliate. Since at least (but likely well before) the war on drugs law enforcement agents have been focusing more on generating revenue than protecting and serving the people. Revenue generation, in this case, means stealing wealth in the form of both assets (fines and civil forfeiture) and labor (prison labor). Black people have been far more frequent targets of this quest for revenue. This backlash shouldn’t surprise anybody. The only thing that should surprise anybody is that it has taken so long.

If anybody is owed an apology it’s the people who have been aggressed against by the police. Every nonviolent person who has been confined, extorted, beaten, or killed by agents of the State are the real victims. They’re the ones who have been wronged by the State and left without recourse because of the State’s monopolization of justice. Cornish is a retired police officer. He was one of those responsible for victimizing nonviolent individuals. Instead of demanding an apology he should be the one apologizing.

The State Has Redundancies To Protect Itself

There’s a sentiment that the proper place to fight the State’s illegal activities is in the courtroom. Sometimes this strategy seems to play out but more often than not if one court rules against the State’s power another court will reverse the decision. In this way the court system acts as a redundancy for the State to preserve its power while maintaining the illusion the people hold the power. Take the National Security Agency’s (NSA) illegal domestic spying operating as an example. In 2013 its actions were ruled illegal by a court but after a lengthy appeal process a higher court has overruled that decision:

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has overturned an injunction against the US government’s phone surveillance program. Today, the court handed down a decision in Klayman v. Obama, a lawsuit arguing that the NSA’s mass collection of phone records is unconstitutional. It found that there was not enough evidence that the lawsuit’s subjects were actually under surveillance, reversing a decision made in late 2013.

The court didn’t address whether the surveillance program was legal or constitutional. Instead, it concluded that the case’s subjects lacked standing to bring a complaint at all, because they were unable to demonstrate that they’d suffered harm. The secrecy of US surveillance programs has made it almost impossible to prove that a specific person or organization was subject to them, so Klayman and other recent cases have relied on leaked documents from Edward Snowden, particularly a court order requiring Verizon Business Services to hand over metadata on all its customers’ calls.

Isn’t it interesting how this court ruled that the plaintiff didn’t have a case because there wasn’t enough evidence to show they weren’t be spied on by a nationwide domestic surveillance apparatus? That’s a twist of logic if ever one existed. Let this be another lesson though. The state protects itself even against itself.

The Best Argument For Encryption Yet

I’ve made a lot of good arguments favoring effective encryption. Effective encryption protects at risk people from oppressors by concealing their identities and communications, ensures data integrity by preventing third parties from altering data unknowingly, provides a way to verify authenticity and the identity of content creators, etc. Ironically though Jeb Bush made have inadvertently made the best argument for effective encryption:

“If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job—while protecting civil liberties—to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst,” Bush said in South Carolina at an event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, according to The Intercept.

Effective encryption makes the American government’s job harder?

grumpy-cat-good

Assault, murder, theft, extortion, and kidnapping should be hard and anything that makes those criminal activities harder is a good thing.

Regel Theaters Searching Bags For Fun And Profit

I seldom go to movie theaters anymore and when I do it’s usually second-run theaters. Paying $15.00 or more to subject myself to sitting in a cramped, uncomfortable seat in a crowded theater fully of people playing with their brightly backlit smartphones for two hours doesn’t appeal to me. So Regel’s announcement that it will assume all paying customers are violent criminals doesn’t really impact me but you should probably know about it if you frequently go to theaters:

One of America’s largest cinema chains, Regal, is now searching bags of film-goers following several attacks on movie theatres across the US.

Regal’s updated policy says it wants customers and staff “to feel comfortable and safe” in its cinemas.

[…]

“Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America,” Regal Entertainment Group’s admission policy now reads on the company’s website. The company has not yet commented publicly on the new regulations.

“To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission,” it continues.

While this policy is being implemented under the guise of safety I think it has more to do with profits. Tickets aren’t the only thing expensive about going to a movie theater, the food and drink is also expensive. If you read Regel’s admittance policy you’ll see what is probably the real reason bag searches are now being performed:

Outside Food or Drink:
No outside food or drink is permitted in the theatre.

Because of the price of movie theater food and drinks a lot of people smuggle their own in. Accusing paying customers of smuggling in food and drinks probably won’t sit well but claiming the searches are for safety may sit well enough (after all, it works for sporting events).

Searching bags for weapons isn’t effective anyways. I (as well as most people I know) always carry my weapons on my person. My knives are in my pockets and my handgun is in a tuckable in-the-waistband holster. Carrying weapons in a bag that can be easily separated from my person is bad form.

So keep in mind if you’re going to go to a movie that Regel’s will treat you like a criminal in the hopes of making more money off of you.