Tag: Shut Up Slave

The State’s Citizen Hit List

Attorney General Eric “Arm the Mexican Drug Cartels to Make an Excuse for Gun Control” Holder has finally let us mere peasants in on the criteria used by the United States government to decide when it will kill its own citizens:

Much has been made of the distinction between our federal civilian courts and revised military commissions. The reality is that both incorporate fundamental due process and other protections that are essential to the effective administration of justice – and we should not deprive ourselves of any tool in our fight against al Qaeda.

[…]

I have faith in the framework and promise of our military commissions, which is why I’ve sent several cases to the reformed commissions for prosecution. There is, quite simply, no inherent contradiction between using military commissions in appropriate cases while still prosecuting other terrorists in civilian courts. Without question, there are differences between these systems that must be – and will continue to be – weighed carefully. Such decisions about how to prosecute suspected terrorists are core Executive Branch functions. In each case, prosecutors and counterterrorism professionals across the government conduct an intensive review of case-specific facts designed to determine which avenue of prosecution to pursue.

Several practical considerations affect the choice of forum.

First of all, the commissions only have jurisdiction to prosecute individuals who are a part of al Qaeda, have engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, or who have purposefully and materially supported such hostilities. This means that there may be members of certain terrorist groups who fall outside the jurisdiction of military commissions because, for example, they lack ties to al Qaeda and their conduct does not otherwise make them subject to prosecution in this forum. Additionally, by statute, military commissions cannot be used to try U.S. citizens.

Second, our civilian courts cover a much broader set of offenses than the military commissions, which can only prosecute specified offenses, including violations of the laws of war and other offenses traditionally triable by military commission. This means federal prosecutors have a wider range of tools that can be used to incapacitate suspected terrorists. Those charges, and the sentences they carry upon successful conviction, can provide important incentives to reach plea agreements and convince defendants to cooperate with federal authorities.

Third, there is the issue of international cooperation. A number of countries have indicated that they will not cooperate with the United States in certain counterterrorism efforts — for instance, in providing evidence or extraditing suspects – if we intend to use that cooperation in pursuit of a military commission prosecution. Although the use of military commissions in the United States can be traced back to the early days of our nation, in their present form they are less familiar to the international community than our time-tested criminal justice system and Article III courts. However, it is my hope that, with time and experience, the reformed commissions will attain similar respect in the eyes of the world.

Basically whenever a military commission decides that you’re a member of Al Qaeda and it is otherwise inconvenient to deal with you that commission can order your executed. Reading through the speech I’m convinced that Holder gets off on his power to kill American people, the speech is him basically masturbating to how awesome he believes the state to be. What a power hungry prick.

I wonder why this justification will start being applied to other supposed terrorists? Perhaps the state will justify murdering sovereign individuals. Who knows? The state isn’t accountable to anybody and that’s what the founders of this country warned us about. It’s too bad we didn’t listen to them.

The United State’s Censorship Powers Extend Beyond Its Borders

After the failures of SOPA and PIPA I brought up the fact that both pieces of legislation were irrelevant because the government would just act as if the laws were passed. Merely taking down MegaUpload wasn’t enough to satisfy the United State government’s appetite for censorship and now they’ve started enlisting the help of private domain registrars to take down more “undesirable” websites:

Yesterday Forbes broke the news that Canadian Calvin Ayre and partners who operate the Bodog online gambling empire have been indicted in the U.S., and in a blog post Calvin Ayre confirmed that their bodog.com domain had been seized by homeland security.

[…]

But now, none of that matters, because in this case the State of Maryland simply issued a warrant to .com operator Verisign, (who is headquartered in California) who then duly updated the rootzone for .com with two new NS records for bodog.com which now redirect the domain to the takedown page.

Verisign is the ultimate authority in all .com domains. When you register a .com domain through other sites such as GoDaddy, eNom, or Hover they’re merely acting as resellers, middlemen, between you and Verisign. What this means is that Verisign can technically take down any .com domain, and the United States government used their authority to make Verisign take down a .com website even though the site was hosted outside of the government’s official reach.

This demonstrates quite succinctly that the government doesn’t actually need to pass any Internet censorship bills, such legislation would serve as a simple formality. What the government wants to do they do and anybody who attempts to stand in their way will find themselves crushed under the weight of the leviathan.

Does this mean everybody should rush out and register their sites with top-level domains controlled by organizations residing in foreign lands? You could attempt to do that although I highly doubt it would accomplish much. The United State’s government has a lot of pull and can likely get any domain they wish seized. It’s certainly a decent backup plan though, even if it is likely a temporary one. What we really need is a decentralized Dynamic Name System (DNS) that not central authority holds control over.

70 Years Ago Today

Today, February 19th, 2012 marks 70 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed military personnel to round up Americans of Japanese Decent and place them in concentration camps. Well known actor George Takei was placed in one of these camps as a child and was later interviewed about it:

Without so much as charges Americans of Japanese decent were rounded up, put onto trains, and hauled to concentration camps where they spent years behind barbed wire under the watchful eyes of machine gunners standing in surrounding guard towers.

What’s even more disgusting is what Takei explains regarding the questionnaires prisoners were required to fill out when it became apparent a labor shortage existed in the United States. After being imprisoned for a year the prisoners were asked if they would take up arms in defense of the United States and if they would swear allegiance to the United States while forswearing allegiance to the Japanese Emperor. The second question was a catch-22 because it insinuated that the prisoners, many of whom were born in the United States, had sworn an other to the Japanese Emperor and thus justifying their detention. I’m glad to hear Takei’s parents refused to take up arms in defense of the United States or swear allegiance to this country. Nobody should take up arms in support of tyrants and those held in the concentration camps were getting a front row seat to tyranny in action.

The Stasi in School Lunchrooms

Parents who send their children to public schools have two options when it comes to food; have the kid eat the school provided lunches or pack lunches for the kid. Well it appears as through the latter option is going away as the Stasi are inspecting lunches and confiscating those that aren’t approved by the state:

The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a U.S. Department of Agriculture agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet USDA guidelines,” the Journal reports.

The decision was made under consideration of a regulation put in place by the the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs to meet USDA guidelines.

In other words the state makes the requirements. If you don’t agree with those requirements that’s just too fucking bad. Do you believe your child needs turkey and cheese instead of the pink goo used to make chicken nuggest? Too bad, the state has deemed that you believe wrong and will steal your child’s lunch just like it steals your money.

This is no longer the land of the free, it is a police state where every action is controlled by the state at the point of a gun.

EDIT: 2012-02-16 13:20: The link posted by Nicole calls several aspects of this story into question. Namely the situation has become a bit of a he said, she said situatation:

Additionally, citing the above-linked statement, a local TV news outlet which had jumped on the bandwagon claims that “the agency says it gave the little girl milk to offset a missing dairy item.” However, this claim does not appear to be in the cited statement.

The TV station’s update further quotes the school district’s superintendent as saying that the child was simply instructed (it is unclear by whom, and it is unclear whether the child was first asked whether she wanted milk) to go through the lunch line to get some milk, and that the superintendent thinks “that the child became confused about what she had to do. I think the child, instead of going over and picking up the milk, I think the child, for whatever reason, thought she had to go through the line and get a school meal which, that’s not our policy.”

In other words one of two possibilities exist; either an overzealous employee, given legitimacy by the state, ordered the girl to get a school provided lunch or the child was simply order to get milk but became confused. It does sound as though the lunch was not confiscated, which is a relief to know. What becomes far more interesting though is the following:

Notably, as the second-linked story above suggests, the mother’s main gripe here does not even appear to be with this “state agent,” but instead with the school’s teachers, who continue to give the girl milk and vegetables despite letters from the mother asking them not to.

What is not made clear is why the mother desired her child not to be provided milk and vegetables. This is of importance because it is very possible that the child has allergies that must be avoided or the family has religious reasons (for example if they’re strict Orthodox Jews they may require food to be kosher). Regardless the mother’s wishes were ignore. The following claim is then made:

The mother apparently objects to this option being provided to her daughter, not because of any health concerns or the like, but because she incorrectly believes that she will be charged additional money for her child being provided this option.

Of course this statement is in question because we do not know if there is a health concern regarding the child or not, that is never made clear. It seems to me that the mother had some kind of reason for wishing her child not be provided certain foodstuffs and that reasoning is important to know. The author is also unaware of how the state only expands its powers:

Since this is also an opt-in program, there is no chance of this becoming some sort of generally applicable concern even to the extent there is some sort of nanny state concern here. If the mother has some sort of ethical problem with her child being provided with the option of drinking milk or eating vegetables at school, then she is surely free to send her child to an unsubsidized day care program.

Emphasis mine. The state often uses opt-in programs to field test new powers and authorities before making them mandatory elsewhere. Saying there is no chance of this situation becoming generally applicable shows a gross lack of understanding in how governmental powers expand. I also find the second claim interesting because it’s a play on the statist’s usual rebuttal of, “If you don’t like it leave.” Apparently the state should provided these subsidized services, make everybody pay for them at the point of a gun, but if you partake in one of these programs that you’re forced to pay for you should have no say in how it’s run. That sounds like a typical statist to me.

At most, the only actual concern here, hinted at by the second-linked article, is the expense to the taxpayer of providing the extra food free of charge. Then again, since we are definitionally dealing with children whose parents will often lack the resources to provide a consistently balanced lunch, and since the whole point of the program is to provide those children with a pre-K experience that their parents’ income would otherwise prevent, this would not seem to be a tremendously important concern.

Again, emphasis mine. So we’re definitely dealing with a maybe here.

I’m going to toss this story into the he said, she said pile. Evidence exists that both sides of the story are exaggerated and contain misunderstandings and conjecture. It is my belief that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes although we’re unlikely to ever find out what the truth is.

I’ve Detected a False Dichotomy

In a way you almost have to admire statists. Regardless of how often they are proven wrong they always managed to find some way to make ultimatums that make their opposition look like really bad people. Case in point, the current debate over Internet surveillance laws that is taking place in Canada right now. Opponents of Internet surveillance laws say they will violate the privacy of Canadian citizens while the supporters have said anybody who opposes said laws support child pornography:

But when Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia attacked the Conservatives for “preparing to read Canadians’ emails and track their movements through cellphone signals” – which does appear to be a severe distortion of the bill’s powers – Mr. Toews’s counterattack was fierce.

“As technology evolves, many criminal activities, such as the distribution of child pornography, become much easier,” he told the House. “We are proposing to bring measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide police with the lawful tools that they need.

“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

“Child pornography” is the new say for statists to say, “Shut up slave!” without actually using the word slave (as that word has some negative connotations). Anytime they want to shove a new law down our throats they either claim it’s for the children or to fight terrorism. In this sense you have to give the statists credit for being consistant. While anti-statists find an almost uncountable number of reasons statism is bad the statists only need one; fear. When anti-statists say Internet surveillance is a violation of laws protecting people from unwarranted search and seizure the statist only needs to reply with one of two boogeymen; child pornographers or terrorists (or, theoretically, terrorist child pornographers).

I doubt it needs pointing out but the choice between an Internet free of government snooping and child pornography is a false dichotomy. The Internet is remarkably good at policing itself. When a highly undesirable thing appears on the Internet groups like Anonymous move to attack it.

NYPD to Pay $15 Million for Illegally Arresting People

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been illegally arresting people under laws that were deemed unconstitutional far in advance of the arrests:

For almost 30 years — from 1983 to 2012 — the New York Police Department went about arresting people under laws that state and federal courts had long declared unconstitutional, cuffing and booking almost 22,000 people. In 2010, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin finally held them in contempt of court. Yesterday, she signed an order approving what is effectively their punishment: a $15 million class-action settlement that could generate individual payments of as much as $5,000.

Those arrested were forced to defend themselves in court and even served jail time for completely lawful behavior. The class action settlement also requires the city to help the courts vacate and seal all convictions stemming from the illegal arrests.

This story doesn’t surprise me, especially coming from New York City. Perhaps this is the reason Mayor Bloomberg wants to prohibit guns so desperately, he need to keep the denizens of his city disarmed less they rise up and refuse to comply with the police making illegal arrests.

What’s really sad is the fact our country has reached a point where police officers not only arrest people for perfectly lawful activity but juries are more than happy to hand out a guilty verdict. Once again we come to the fact that jury nullification is one of the few options we have left in our toolbox to prevent tyranny and most people absolutely refuse to use it (likewise potential jurors who know about their powers are disallowed from sitting on a jury).

Over the years I’ve changed my outlook on prisons and people who have been in prison. Previously if I heard somebody was pronounced guilty of a crime and went t prison because of it I offered no protest. Now I give prisoners the benefit of the doubt because a huge majority of them are in prison for victimless crimes. When somebody gets thrown into prison their life is often destroyed as future employment because difficult, if not impossible. Without the prospect of obtaining work many former prisoners end up becoming repeat offenders because no legal means of survival is available to them. After being released from prison your slate should be considered clean as your punishment has been completed; instead our government continues the punishment for the entirety of many former prisoner’s lives. The people wrongfully arrested in New York have lost years of their life because they violated laws that weren’t even laws at the time. We live in a police state and the fact things like this happen prove it.

If I Wasn’t on the Terrorist Watch List Before I am Now

Well if I wasn’t on the terrorist watch list before I certainly am now:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as “sovereign citizens,” believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

As a sovereign individual who does not submit to the authority of the state I guess I’m the primary target. There is something that is in desperate need of being cleared up though. Sovereign citizen is a contradiction of terms. A sovereign is a supreme ruler while a citizen is a subject of a state. You can not be a supreme ruler and a subject at the same time. On the other hand a sovereign individual is a supreme ruler of an individual, him or herself. If you’re going to make us appear as a threat please get the terminology right at the very least.

And while the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) try to smear voluntaryists such as myself let me explain something. Most people who refer to themselves as sovereign citizens also abide by the non-aggression principle meaning they have a moral objection with initiating violence. I will not initiate an attack and will use violence only in the act of self-defense. Somehow this fact makes me dangerous according to the FBI.

“We are being inundated right now with requests for training from state and local law enforcement on sovereign-related matters,” said Casey Carty, an FBI supervisory special agent.

FBI agents said they do not have a tally of people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens.”

If any FBI agents are monitoring reading this blog let me inform you that I am a sovereign individual so you can just put me down on the little list you’re writing up. Please update your terminology and replace “sovereign citizen” with “sovereign individual” so you don’t look like completely idiots. Also go fuck yourselves. You don’t have to do those things in that order though.

Naked Body Scanner Submission to Become Mandatory in Australia

I hate the naked body scanners for many reasons but the fact that they are likely to cause cancer and invade your privacy are enough to bitch about for one post. At least here in the United States you have the option of getting cancer or sexually assaulted by an agent of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Australians will no longer have any options:

PASSENGERS at airports across Australia will be forced to undergo full-body scans or be banned from flying under new laws to be introduced into Federal Parliament this week.

Remember when entering the scanner you are to place the heels of your feel together and raise your right arm at a forty-five degree angle. Now be a good little slave and don’t tell the shrink where the bad man touched you, tattletales always find themselves in a secret prison camp in Cuba.

Encrypting Information is Now Terrorist Activity

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) have put out a joint document [PDF] that describes suspicious terrorist activity. What constitutes such activity? The list reads like a list of common sense computer security practices:

Evidence of a residential based internet provider (signs on to Comcast, AOL,
etc.)

I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to mean but it seems to insinuate that anybody with a home Internet connection is a likely terrorist. Isn’t that kind of a catchall that labels almost everybody a potential terrorist? Wait, that’s exactly the point.

Use of anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address

Using Tor? If so you’re a likely terrorist!

Encryption or use of software to hide encrypted data in digital photos, etc.

Do you try to protect your personal information from laptop thieves? If you encrypt your entire harddrive a thief can get your hardware but won’t have access to your data. Also you’re a likely terrorist.

Suspicious communications using VOIP or communicating through a PC game

Skype users are terrorists as well.

I can sum up the little propaganda piece in one sentence, “Basically, everybody is a suspected terrorist.” The propaganda piece then urges citizens to play Big Brother and collect information about any suspected terrorists and report them to your local Stasi.