Tag: Superdickery

Los Angeles Teaching Homeless People To Not Be Homeless By Stealing Their Homes

Governments hate the homeless. Some people find this surprising but only because they don’t understand the nature of the State. The State exists on and for plunder. Every law it creates is created to further its plundering. That being the case, people who have nothing to take are effectively worthless to the State. Because rounding them up and killing them wouldn’t go over well with the general populace local municipalities have opted for another solution to their homeless “problem.” They try to make the lives of homeless individuals so miserable that they go elsewhere and becomes another municipality’s problem.

Los Angeles may be sinking to a new low in this endevour though. Recently city officials have begun teaching the homeless a lesson about being homeless by taking their homes:

Escalating their battle to stamp out an unprecedented spread of street encampments, city officials have begun seizing tiny houses from homeless people living on freeway overpasses in South Los Angeles.

Three of the gaily painted wooden houses, which come with solar-powered lights and American flags, were confiscated earlier this month and seven more are planned for impound Thursday, a Bureau of Sanitation spokeswoman said.

As is always the case in these situations, city officials are citing their own bureaucratic nonsense. These thefts are being perpetrated under the guise of sanitation. City officials also, as it always the case, claimed to be offering a better solution without offering any other solution:

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s spokeswoman, Connie Llanos, said he is committed to getting homeless people into permanent and not makeshift housing.

“Unfortunately, these structures can be hazardous to the individuals living in them and to the community at large,” Llanos said in a statement on the mayor’s behalf.

“When the city took the houses, they didn’t offer housing, they straight kicked them out,” Summers said.

What Mr. Garcetti means by permanent housing is getting the homeless out of the city so they’re no longer his problem. Maybe the homeless population of Los Angeles should consider seizing some of the government’s buildings. They’re technically unowned (since the State, being a criminal organization that has acquired everything in its possession through theft, cannot legitimately own property) and would provide permanent housing.

Due Process Was A Pain In The Ass Anyways

I like to believe that a previous age existed where due process was value. If such an age existed it is obvious long since gone. More and more people seem willing to toss due process aside whenever it negatively impacts their ideological opposites. Throwing out due process is done in many ways. Some of those ways are as blatant as denying people rights based on where they were born. Other ways are more subtle, such as creating a new permit in order to punish an unreleased action:

As it stands, cops who suspect someone of prostitution must actually prove it before arresting them. But that’s a lot of work. So Eau Claire, Wisconsin, officials have a new plan: make non-sexual commercial companionship illegal without the proper paperwork.

To this end, the Eau Claire City Council is considering an ordinance that would require anyone advertising as an escort to get an occupational license from the government.

[…]

But because being an escort does not necessarily mean one is engaged in prostitution, police can’t just go around arresting anyone who advertises as an escort. Not yet, anyway. Ostensibly, cops must still interact with the individual and get them to agree to some sort of sexual activity for a fee. As Eau Claire Assistant City Attorney Douglas Hoffer put it, police are forced to do “intensive investigations” and get their targets to use “explicit language” in order to make charges stick.

Now city officials want to change that. Under their proposed legislation, escorts and escort businesses would have to be licensed by the city and subject to extensive regulations. Any escort operating without a license would be subject to a fine of up to $5,000.

But that’s not all: the proposed law would also punish customers who contract with unlicensed escorts. Hoffner said the idea is to end “demand” for prostitution. Anyone attempting to hire an unlicensed escort could also be charged up to $5,000, as well.

As the article notes, police cannot go after any escort business because many aren’t offering illegal services. This means the police have to effectively create a case with a sting operation or find evidence that a law was broken (but not evidence of a crime being committed since crimes require victims and voluntary prostration involves no victims). When situations like this arise it’s common for the local authorities to create some kind of permit requirement.

With permit requirements in place a police officer can arrest an escort and their customer on the grounds of the escort not having the proper paperwork. It’s a much easier violation to prove than prostitution. In fact the Eau Claire City Attorney admitted to exactly that:

Said Eau Claire City Attorney Stephen Nick: “This is another means, as opposed to actually having evidence of an act of prostitution, pandering, or offering a sexual act for money, so we can follow up” on sex-work suspects.

Cases like this should receive more publicity. It’s not enough for people to only get up in arms over overt violations of due process. People must learn about the more subtle methods as well.

It’s Not Just Once iPhone The FBI Wants Unlocked

There are people siding with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in its current court battle with Apple. These misguided souls are claiming, amongst other nonsensical things, that the FBI only wants a single iPhone unlocked. They believe that it’s somehow OK for Apple to open Pandora’s box by releasing a signed firmware with a backdoor in it so long as it’s only for unlocking a single iPhone. Unfortunately, as those of us siding with Apple have been pointing out, this case isn’t about a single iPhone. The FBI wants a court precedence so it can coerce Apple into unlocking other iPhones:

In addition to the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, the US government is pursuing court orders to force Apple to help bypass the security passcodes of “about a dozen” other iPhones, the Wall Street Journal reports. The other cases don’t involve terror charges, the Journal’s sources say, but prosecutors involved have also sought to use the same 220-year-old law — the All Writs Act of 1789 — to access the phones in question.

By setting a precedence in the San Bernardino case the FBI would have grounds to coerce Apple, and other device manufacturers, to unlock other devices. We know the FBI already has a dozen or so phones in the pipeline and it will certainly have more in the coming years.

Besides the precedence there is also the problem of the firmware itself. If Apple creates a signed firmware that disables iOS security features and automates brute forcing passwords it could be installed on other iPhones (at least other iPhone 5Cs but possibly other iPhone). With this firmware in hand the FBI wouldn’t even need to coerce Apple into helping each time, the agency could simply install the firmware on any compatible devices itself. This is why Apple believes creating such a firmware is too dangerous.

You can never believe the government when it claims to be taking an exceptional measure just once. Those exceptional measures always become standard practice.

Political Campaigns Suck At Protecting Your Personal Information

I don’t need more reasons to abandon politics but I realize others do. To that end I feel that it’s important to point out the abysmal security record of political campaigns:

Over the last three months, more than 100 million US voters have had their data exposed online. These data breaches weren’t caused by a sophisticated hack or malware. Instead, political campaigns’ abysmal cybersecurity practices are to blame. Although modern campaigns constantly acquire and purchase massive amounts of data, they often neglect to fully beef up security surrounding it, effectively turning the campaigns into sitting ducks — huge operations with databases left open and vulnerable.

[…]

That might be unsettling, but perhaps more troubling is the fact that political campaigns are terrible at cybersecurity. Not only do the organizations have access to more information than ever before, they’re not able to keep it safe. The incentives to do so just don’t exist, and that’s why we’re seeing so much compromised voter data.

In Iowa last month, the state’s Republican party failed to adequately protect a database containing information on 2 million voters, making it readily available through just a basic scan of the website’s source code. In December, an independent security researcher uncovered a publicly available database of 191 million voter records. Included in that trove was each voter’s full name, home address, mailing address, unique voter ID, state voter ID, gender, date of birth, phone number, date of registration, political affiliation, and voter history since 2000.

I’ve mentioned these sorts of issues to friends before but they always hid behind the “I give campaigns a fake phone number” excuse. But the phone number you gave to a campaign isn’t what’s getting out, it’s your real personal information including your home address.

Politics is continuing to become more polarizing in this country. Both parties have become religions where disagreements with the party being tantamount to heresy. True believers are often willing to shun former friends and family members. Some employers are even willing to avoid hiring or terminating employees based on their form of political worship. There are no signs indicating this trend will cease or reverse so your voting record could become a major problem in the near future.

The amount of personal information many campaigns have on individuals is rather shocking. It’s often enough information for people with access to commit acts of identify theft.

There really isn’t anything to gain for political participation and there’s a lot to lose. Control over your personal information is one of the things you could potentially lose. My advise is to avoid politics since it’s obvious campaigns have no interest in protecting you.

Legalizing Slavery

The United States has a long history of slavery. Since the very beginning of this country through the end of the Civil War black individuals could be owned as slaves in many states. After that the rules were changed. Private ownership of slaves was deemed illegal (a very good thing) but the State gave itself permission to enslave anybody it arbitrarily labeled as a criminal (a very bad thing). Eventually the process was streamlined and Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) was created so manage the federally owned slaves. Individual states used this precedence to establish their own government owned corporations to managed their slaves.

Now a congressman is looking to change the rules yet again by expanding the State’s ability to own slaves. If passed, this bill will allow the State to enslave anybody by issuing a simple court order:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reportedly will introduce legislation soon to criminalize a company’s refusal to aid decryption efforts as part of a governmental investigation. The news was first reported Thursday afternoon by the Wall Street Journal.

Aiding decryption efforts requires labor. In the San Bernardino case the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is order Apple to create a custom version of iOS that removes several key security features. Apple has refused and it has every right to do so because nobody should be compelled into performing labor against their will. If the FBI wants the phone unlocked so badly it can either put in the effort itself or hire somebody willing to try.

We’re living in interesting times. The State is seeing less and less reason to conceal its intentions.

Private Surveillance

Although public surveillance is more frightening to me because the consequences are generally more dire, I also don’t shy away from criticizing private surveillance. This is where I often part company with other libertarians because they often instinctively say private surveillance, because it’s voluntary, is entirely acceptable. Of course this attitude is overly simplistic. First, private surveillance often turns into public surveillance. Second, the market manipulations performed by the State have raised the consequences of private surveillance even when it doesn’t turn into public surveillance.

Consider health insurance. For most people their health insurance is tied to their employment. This practice is a holdover from World War II, where the State manipulated the market in such a way that employers had to find forms of compensation besides pay to attract employees:

There is no good reason for any of this, aside from historical accident. During World War II, federal wage controls prevented employers from wooing workers with higher pay, so companies started offering health insurance as a way around the law. Of course, this form of nonmonetary compensation is still pay. When the war ended, the practice stuck.

I doubt the long term consequences of this marriage were realized by the employers who first used health insurance as a means to attract employees. Fast forward many decades later and we have a relationship so tight that employers are surveilling their employees’ health data:

Employee wellness firms and insurers are working with companies to mine data about the prescription drugs workers use, how they shop, and even whether they vote, to predict their individual health needs and recommend treatments.

Trying to stem rising health-care costs, some companies, including retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., are paying firms like Castlight Healthcare Inc. to collect and crunch employee data to identify, for example, which workers are at risk for diabetes, and target them with personalized messages nudging them toward a doctor or services such as weight-loss programs.

One of the downsides of employers providing health insurance is that they front a lot of the costs. Employers, like everybody else, have an interest in keeping their costs down. Now, instead of minding their own business, employers are trying to snoop on their employees’ health care information.

Health care information is something most people see as confidential. It can reveal a lot of potentially embarrassing things about a person such as having a sexually transmitted disease or mental illness. Unless your health is preventing you from working it shouldn’t be the business of your employer and most likely wouldn’t be if your health insurance wasn’t tied to your employment status.

This is why I respect Samuel Edward Konkin III more than most libertarian philosophers. His philosophy, agorism, argue for the death of wage labor. Instead it encourages everybody to be an entrepreneur that contracts directly with others. This is a stark contrast to many libertarian philosophers who seem to encourage wage labor.

The more independent you are the more free you are. By moving away from wage labor an individual becomes more independent and therefore more free. If you’re your own employer then you are free from worries of being surveilled and possibly fired for simply being too expensive to insure.

The Party Of Fascism

I believe that getting into bed with social conservatives was one of the worst things to happen to libertarianism. Now that election season is upon us I’m reminded of this every day. Self-proclaimed libertarians are openly declaring their support for Republican frontrunners that continue to remind us that their interests aligned with fascism, not libertarianism.

The recent kerfuffle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is yet another demonstration of this. Using the All Writs Act, a federal court is trying to make literal slaves out of Apple’s iOS developers. Anybody who subscribed to even very basic libertarian principles would oppose this order. But a fascist, whose loyalty is to the State above all else, would support. So where does Donald Trump stand?

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump is insisting that Apple unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack.

[…]

Trump disagreed stridently on Wednesday, calling it a matter of “common sense.”

“I agree 100 percent with the courts,” the business mogul said. “In that case, we should open it up. I think security over all — we have to open it up, and we have to use our heads. We have to use common sense.”

Donald believes Apple’s software developers are property of the State and should be compelled to write software. Let’s look at the current favorite amongst so-called libertarians, Ted Cruz (and we’ll throw in his buddy Carson as an added bonus):

Cruz said, “Apple has a serious argument” in protecting users’ privacy but said resisting the FBI’s request for help amounted to defying a search warrant. Carson said that Apple should find a way to get over mistrust of the government, but then added that might have to wait until President Obama leaves office, allowing for a delay that the FBI would probably oppose.

As if defying a terrible court order is a bad thing. My “libertarian” friends that support Cruz keep telling me he’s for small government and individual liberty but I can’t fathom how a man who thinks a court has a right to enslave software developers is for small government. Carson also demonstrates his love of government by criticizing Apple for being mistrustful of it.

Finally, just for fun, I’m going to throw in Tom “I Hate Due Process” Cotton for giggles:

“As a society, we don’t allow phone companies to design their systems to avoid lawful, court-ordered searches,” Cotton said in the statement. “If we apply a different legal standard to companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook, we can expect them to become the preferred messaging services of child pornographers, drug traffickers, and terrorists alike — which neither these companies nor law enforcement want.”

Whereas the other Republicans at least tried to sound kind of reasonable, Cotton went straight for the “messaging service of child pornographers, drug traffickers, and terrorists” line.

The Republican Party really is the party of fascism (as opposed to their close rival, the Democratic Party, which prefers its socialism be international). Not only are the policies put forth by Republican lawmakers generally fascist in nature but its members can’t help themselves when an opportunity to go on television and public declare their fascist policies presents itself. How this is supposed to be the party libertarians can prevail with is beyond me.

Doublethink

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four doublethink is described as, “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.” That is the most accurate term to describe the White House’s claim that what the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is demanding of Apple isn’t a back door:

The White House says a court ruling asking Apple to help the FBI access data on a phone belonging to the San Bernardino gunman does not mean asking for a “back door” to the device.

By definition a backdoor, as it pertains to security, is a purposely placed mechanism that allows an unauthorized party to bypass security measures. What the FBI is asking Apple to develop is a special version of iOS that attempts to brute force the device’s password and doesn’t contain the increasing timed lockout functionality when entering incorrect passwords or the functionality that erases the phone after 10 incorrect passwords have been entered. The FBI is asking for a backdoor.

Just because the FBI is demanding this special firmware for a specific iPhone doesn’t mean the firmware isn’t a backdoor. But through the magic of doublethink the White House is able to claim what the FBI is demanding isn’t a backdoor.

TANSTAAFL

Free K-12 schooling! Free college! Free healthcare! The State sure is magnanimous!

Unfortunately, to the chagrin of utopians, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch:

WILLOW RIVER — Scott Killerud was about to throw away a mailing about the 2016 enrollment period for MNsure last November when something caught his eye.

“Just as I was going to drop it in the trash, I was like — wait a second. What did I just read?” the Pine County farmer said.

What caught his eye was a notification that if you’re 55 or older and on Medical Assistance — Minnesota’s version of Medicaid — the state places an estate claim with which to recover its costs after you and your spouse have died.

Killerud was younger than 55, but his wife, Ellen, had reached that age the previous September. The couple, who supplement their farm income with part-time jobs, were told when they signed up for insurance through MNsure in 2014 that their income level qualified them for Medical Assistance.

But they didn’t know about the estate claim until Scott saw that mailing.

The State is in the business of stealing wealth, not handing it out. Whenever it claims to be giving something out for free you can be assured it’s part of a scam that is actually granting it further power to plunder the people.

Health insurance is the peak of the latest pyramid scheme. Acknowledging the fact that income taxes offer little in the way of plunder from people with little income, the State has created a program that allows it to take assets instead. This is especially important because it’s not unusual for retired individuals to have little in the way of income but a sizable sum in assets. By getting these individuals to sign up with MNsure, the State of Minnesota can give itself access to wealth that was previously outside of its grasps.

There is a lengthy list of things you should always be wary off. At the top of that list should people offering free stuff.

Uncle Sam Wants His Money


Dennis Farina plays Uncle Sam in Get Shorty.

Let this story be a lesson to everybody, be careful when you’re taking out a loan with the country’s biggest gang:

It might seem odd in an era defined by stagnant wages and rising income inequality for the long arm of the law to be cuffing Americans who default on their federal student loans. But according to reports out of Texas, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Paul Aker, 48, tells the New York Daily News and a local Fox broadcast affiliate that a coterie of heavily armed US Marshals showed up at his door in Houston last Thursday. His alleged crime? Failing to pay Uncle Sam back for a $1,500 student loan he took out to attend Prairie View A&M in 1987, he claims.

If you fail to pay back the mafia there’s a good chance armed men will come to your door, kidnap you, and take you to the Don.

This is another example of the rules being different from private individuals and the State. If you or a private institution loans money to somebody and they refuse to pay you cannot kidnap them and place them in a cage until they pay you back. Uncle Sam can. So think twice before taking any of his filthy lucre.