Tag: Superdickery

The Streisand Effect

The Internet doesn’t lend itself well to censorship. In fact, attempts to censor information usually lead to a great deal of public scrutiny. Take Ham Radio Deluxe, for example. Until a few days ago I hadn’t heard of the software or the company that creates it. But then the company tried to make a negative review posted by a user go away. Now I’ve not only heard of the company but I know that it’s a company that I won’t ever do business with:

This tactic, however, is a new twist on the old “punish customers for negative reviews” game. A user of Ham Radio Deluxe wasn’t too happy with its apparent incompatibility with Windows 10. He posted a negative review of the software at eHam.net, calling out the company for its seeming unwillingness to fix the underlying issue.

[…]

The “customer support” at HRD Software then pointed the user to its terms of service, stating that it had the right to do what it had just done. HRD Software reserves the “right” to “disable a customer’s key at any time for any reason.” Then it told him the blacklisting would be revoked if he removed his negative review. Bonus: mention of a capital-A “Attorney” for added seriousness, I guess.

If you remove the eHam review, which was blatantly false, we will remove the blacklist from you call. You are not buying software, you are buying your callsign’s access to the software. the so called bug you reported is not one in HRD, but one in the CAT commands of the FT­3000 radio, which have been verified with yaesu. Again refer to section 8 of the TOS, which was written by our Attorney.

There are many ways to deal with negative reviews. Usually the best option is to ignore them. Not everybody is going to have a good experience with your product so you need to accept that some users will give negative reviews. If a particular negative review is hurting business you can either act on that review by improving your product or you can issue a rebuttal if the review is based on false information. What you should never do is try to coerce the reviewer into deleting their review. That looks scummy to everybody watching.

The Double Edged Sword of Body Cameras

As the public’s trust in law enforcers diminished demands were made to monitor working police officers. These demands resulted in calls for making officers wear body cameras that recorded their actions while they worked. In response many law enforcement agencies started buying body cameras and issuing them to the police. This satiated many peoples’ demands for police monitoring but some of us pointed out the limited utility of body cameras due to the fact that the departments usually controlled the footage. So long as body camera footage isn’t made available to the public in some manner it’s far too easy for departments to make any footage that incriminates their officers disappear down a memory hole.

Since no standards exist regarding the availability of police body camera footage states, counties, and cities are making up their own rules as they go. Locally a Hennepin County judge recently ruled that police body camera footage is off limits to the public:

So Hennepin prosecutors met with the chief judge and representatives of the Hennepin Public Defender’s Office, which handles 45,000 cases a year. The result was Bernhardson’s order, which asserts that prosecutors and defense attorneys have to follow the guidelines of the law, which save for “certain narrow exceptions,” classifies body camera video as off-limits to the public.

As the article points out, there are some difficult privacy questions regarding police body camera footage. However, body cameras are of limited use if such footage is classified as off-limits to the public. Under such a system body cameras allow law enforcers to use the footage as evidence against the people they arrest but don’t allow the public to use the footage to hold bad law enforcers accountable.

This lopsided policy shouldn’t surprise anybody. Law enforcement departments wouldn’t willingly adopt body cameras if they could realistically be used to hold officers accountable. But they would jump at the chance to use such devices to prosecute more people because then body cameras are a revenue generator instead of a liability. The State, having an interest in appeasing its revenue generators, has been more than happy to give law enforcers a ruleset that gives them the benefits of body cameras without the pesky downsides.

What does this mean for the general public? It means everybody should record, and preferably livestream, every police encounter they are either a party to or come across.

What Ignoring the Problem Gets You

What happens when you ignore a problem for an entire year? The problem doesn’t go away:

Despite ongoing national scrutiny of police tactics, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from last year when nearly 1,000 people were killed by police.

Through Thursday, law enforcement officers fatally shot 957 people in 2016 — close to three each day — down slightly from 2015 when 991 people were shot to death by officers, according to an ongoing project by The Washington Post to track the number of fatal shootings by police.

The Post, for two years in a row, has documented more than twice the number of fatal shootings recorded by the FBI annually on average.

Why hasn’t anything been done to reduce the number of people being shot by police? Because the politicians rely on the police to be revenue generators and too many people worship the police as heroes.

I’ve written a lot about how being revenue generators makes politicians wary of curtailing bad law enforcement behavior. To summarize that point, the politicians don’t want to risk upsetting their biggest revenue generators because they might generate less revenue. If police officers are punished for shooting an innocent person during a no-knock raid they might be less inclined to go on the next no-knock drug raid and that would cut into the State’s civil forfeiture profits.

Hero worship is another problem. Whenever an individual rises to the status of hero they get a tremendous amount of leeway. Obviously bad behavior is explained away by the hero’s worshippers. After all, the individual is a hero and therefore can do no wrong. Ever since 9/11 law enforcers have been elevated from civil servants to heroes.

We see this come into play whenever an officer is in the news for doing something questionable or outright terrible. Cop apologists crawl out of the woodwork and find any excuse to justify the officer’s actions. Did the officer shoot a carry permit holder during an otherwise routine traffic stop? While the carry permit indicates that the victim wasn’t a felon or domestic abuser the cop apologists will still cite mundane nonsense like traffic citations as justification for the officer’s actions.

This hero worship also influences the actions of those who are tasked with holding law enforcers accountable. No politician, even a lowly municipal one, wants to be the person known for going against a hero. It’s bad for their public image and reelection efforts. So most of them are willing to turn a blind eye towards any issues involving law enforcers.

I imagine 2017 will also see approximately 1,000 people killed by police. Until law enforcers stop being revenue generators and stop being viewed as heroes the motivation to curtail their bad behavior won’t exist.

Capitalism Versus Socialism

One of the biggest criticisms socialists make against capitalism is that under capitalism a poor individual may starve. But under socialism a poor individual… may starve:

PUERTO CABELLO, Venezuela (AP) – When hunger drew tens of thousands of Venezuelans to the streets last summer in protest, President Nicolas Maduro turned to the military to manage the country’s diminished food supply, putting generals in charge of everything from butter to rice.

But instead of fighting hunger, the military is making money from it, an Associated Press investigation shows. That’s what grocer Jose Campos found when he ran out of pantry staples this year. In the middle of the night, he would travel to an illegal market run by the military to buy corn flour – at 100 times the government-set price.

Queue all of the socialists claiming Venezuela isn’t real socialism. But the military is part of the State and therefore it having a “legitimate” monopoly on food distribution most certainly is socialism.

Scarcity is a law of nature. Because of that, no system can guarantee that every individual will receive everything they need to survive. Socialists claim that they can overcome this rule of nature but socialists countries have been proving them wrong time and again.

The difference between capitalism and socialism is how wealth is distributed. Under capitalism wealth is distributed by one’s ability to serve the market. If you are able to serve the market successfully you can obtain wealth. Under socialism wealth is distributed by one’s favor with the State. If you can curry favor with the State you can obtain wealth.

Neither system can prevent starvation or nefarious people from obtaining wealth. But the former relies on pleasing the masses whereas the latter relies on pleasing the elites in power. To me it seems rather obvious which is more ripe for abuse.

The Biggest Threat to Free Markets are Successful Entrepreneurs

Everybody loves freedom so long as it’s the right kind of freedom. Neoconservatives love freedom right up until somebody wants to marry somebody of the same sex. Neoliberals love freedom right up until somebody wants to buy a firearm. Statist libertarians love freedom right up until somebody wants to opt out of paying taxes to fund the military national defense force appointed by the duly elected representatives of the Very Small Government. Likewise, a lot of people love free markets until they fail to serve the market. When that happens those people turn into big government twats:

With competition so fierce and profit margins so small — roughly 2.7 per cent on average — the role Quebec’s highly interventionist government should play in one of the province’s most dynamic industries remains a source of contention.

The debate is not new and was rekindled earlier this year when Carlos Ferreira, owner of a well-known eatery, said Montreal should impose quotas in neighbourhoods to limit competition and help struggling legacy restaurants stay in business.

“I don’t believe in the free market anymore,” Ferreira said at the time. “We have to protect the good restaurants.”

And by “good restaurants” he means his restaurant.

Although I won’t claim that Quebec’s restaurant scene is currently a free market, the market was free enough that the barrier to entry was low enough for Ferreira to enter. Now, like most established corporations, he’s finding that the pressures of continuously appealing to the market tiresome and wants the State to step in to protect him and his interest at the expense of everybody.

I say the expense of everybody because as things currently stand consumers have all of the power. If a restaurant starts serving shitty food consumers can go to a competing restaurant. New restaurants have to attract customers and that means appealing to consumers. What Ferreira wants is to restrict those consumer’s choices and therefore limit the power they have.

This is nothing new. The biggest threat to free markets are successful entrepreneurs because they’re the ones that throw money at politicians to get laws passed that hinder their competitors.

Another Violent Cop Reinstated

The State has many redundancies to protect its people from justice. Take police unions, for example. When a police officer steps out of line so egregiously that their department actually fires them the police unions are quick to move in and get the officer reinstated:

A Richfield police officer who was seen on video striking a Somali-American teenager in the fall of 2015 must be reinstated to the force, an independent arbitrator said Wednesday, and police officials in the first-ring suburb aren’t happy about that.

Officer Nate Kinsey had been fired by the city of Richfield. Instead, the arbitrator said, he will serve a three-day suspension and again be a member of the department.

And what was the union’s justification for pushing for the officer’s reinstatement? Well, you see, he was such a good boy:

“[He] is held in high regard by his fellow officers and supervisors and is known for his honesty, commitment, and dedication,” said Sean Gormley, executive director of Law Enforcement Labor Services. “The incident in question demonstrates the challenges officers face on a regular basis. [It] also illustrates the pitfalls of jumping to conclusions based on partial video and audio recordings.

Challenges officers face on a regular basis, like having to ask the union to get them reinstated after getting caught on camera striking somebody without cause.

The people of Richfield can look forward to this officer protecting and serving the shit out of them again.

Just a Slight Shortfall

What happens when a business makes more monetary promises than it can fulfill? Its assets are liquidated so that the proceeds can go towards paying off some of those promises. What happens when a government makes more monetary promises than it can fulfill? That seems like an important question to ask right now:

You can look at the financial health of Social Security in many ways.

[…]

Despite the huge numbers, there’s even a less generous way of looking at the fiscal shortfall.

A projection, known as the “infinite horizon,” takes into account all the program’s future liabilities, even those beyond the 75-year period that Social Security actuaries typically use in their calculations.

Under the infinite horizon, Social Security will have $32.1 trillion in unfunded liabilities by 2090, $6.3 trillion more than last year’s projection. (See the chart below.)

Social Security was sold as a safety net that would guarantee that retirees would have money even after they were no longer working. But like all government schemes, Social Security was just another mechanism to expropriate wealth from the people for the benefit of the State. The scheme was originally quite simple. Today’s valued dollars would be taken by the State so it could use them as it pleased and then returned at a future date after inflation had devalued those dollars significantly. But the scheme quickly became more complicated.

Since 1982 Social Security has been paying out more than it has been bringing in. This deficit, often referred to by cute names such as unfunded obligations or unfunded liabilities, is slated to ballon to $32.1 trillion by 2090. To put that in perspective, the current national debt is hovering near $20 trillion.

If Social Security (or the United States government for that matter) was a business it would be forced to file bankruptcy as there is no realistic way that it will ever be able to repay its debts.

Without Government Who Would Punish Those Who Help the Homeless

The State continues its war against the homeless. Again the State is targeting those who dare to help them:

DUNDALK, Md. – Patapsco United Methodist Church is in Dundalk, Maryland, not far from Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay. Sometimes, at night, homeless people with nowhere else to go will sleep on church grounds, taking advantage of the promise of safety that a church often represents.

But in the future, those people may have to find another place to sleep, because the church may be fined out of existence by local government.

According to Yahoo News, Rev. Katie Grover found a $12,000 citation attached to a church door when she went to the church one morning recently.

The citation said that the church had violated a county regulation that prohibits “non-permitted rooming and boarding” and that the church failed to “cease exterior use of property as housing units.” An inspector’s comments noted that “People (were) still living in (the) rear of (the) property under tarped area.”

Whether its food safety, nutrition, or boarding regulations, local municipalities always have a law to cite at hand when they want to punish somebody who is trying to help the homeless.

Statists like to claim that the State is necessary to help those who have nothing. But time and again the State demonstrates that it has no interest in helping those who have nothing. In fact, it’s overtly hostile to those individuals. How could this be? It’s because the State wants to steal wealth from people. If somebody has nothing for the State to take then the State sees them as a burden that must be dealt with as one would deal with a spider in their home.

License to Kill

Law enforcers in the United States have a strange fetish for gunning down family pets. This fetish has become so widespread that there’s a term for it, puppycide, and there’s adatabase that attempts to track incidents of it. Fortunately, the courts work as a check and balance against bad law enforcement behavior…

“The standard we set out today is that a police officer’s use of deadly force against a dog while executing a warrant to search a home for illegal drug activity is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when, given the totality of the circumstances and viewed from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer, the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer’s safety,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the court’s opinion.

In the case of the Browns’ two pit bulls, the imminent threat came from the dogs barking and moving around. One officer shot the first pit bull after he said it “had only moved a few inches” in a movement that he considered to be a “lunge.” The injured dog retreated to the basement, where the officer shot and killed it as well as the second dog while conducting a sweep of the residence.

Or, you know, the courts don’t act as a check and balance against law enforcement.

I often laugh when cop apologists use the phrase “totality of the circumstances” because of situations like this. In this case the dogs barked and moved a few inches so the officer shot it. It then retreated to the basement so the officer followed it down there and executed it along with another dog. How is a retreating dog an imminent threat given the “totality of the circumstances?” It’s not.

Once again I feel the need to point out that trust in law enforcement isn’t low because of propaganda by the mainstream media. It’s low because of situations, like this one, where officers obviously overstepped their bounds and weren’t reprimanded for it. When you have people in positions of authority constantly abusing that authority any trust the public has in those people quickly goes away.

The Planes Have Ears

While a bunch of nationalists continue to call Snowden a traitor and demand he return to the United States for execution the rest of us are looking at the material he provided about the criminal organization he worked for as a contractor. Through the information he provided we’ve learned a great deal about how the National Security Agency (NSA) has been abusing its power to surveil the American public. Whether on the ground, on the sea, or in the air the NSA is spying on you:

IN THE TROVE of documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a treasure. It begins with a riddle: “What do the President of Pakistan, a cigar smuggler, an arms dealer, a counterterrorism target, and a combatting proliferation target have in common? They all used their everyday GSM phone during a flight.”

This riddle appeared in 2010 in SIDtoday, the internal newsletter of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, and it was classified “top secret.” It announced the emergence of a new field of espionage that had not yet been explored: the interception of data from phone calls made on board civil aircraft. In a separate internal document from a year earlier, the NSA reported that 50,000 people had already used their mobile phones in flight as of December 2008, a figure that rose to 100,000 by February 2009. The NSA attributed the increase to “more planes equipped with in-flight GSM capability, less fear that a plane will crash due to making/receiving a call, not as expensive as people thought.” The sky seemed to belong to the agency.

In a 2012 presentation, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA, in turn disclosed a program called “Southwinds,” which was used to gather all the cellular activity, voice communication, data, metadata, and content of calls on board commercial aircraft. The document, designated “top secret strap,” one of the highest British classification levels, said the program was still restricted to the regions covered by satellites from British telecommunications provider Inmarsat: Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

I vaguely remember something about some bill listing some supposed rights. If I remember correctly one of the items on that list mentioned something about a right to being protected from unwarranted searches.

Anybody who is even moderately well read on history knows that national surveillance apparatuses are generally developed under the guise of surveilling external threats but always end up being used to surveil the nation’s own people. This is why privacy advocates tend to have a zero tolerance policy in regards to national surveillance efforts. It is also why only a fool would support such efforts.

What Snowden did wasn’t traitorous, it was an attempt to bring some accountability to the unaccountable. The NSA has been performing untargeted searches. Untargeted searches necessarily means no warrants have been issued, which means these searches of the American people are in violation of the language of the Fourth Amendment. This is why it amuses me when self-proclaimed constitutionalists call for Snowden’s head. It is also why I’m amused by people who claim that the Constitution is a protection against the government’s power. To quote Lysander Spooner, “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”