Tag: Superdickery

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Do you know why we can’t have nice things? It’s because there are quisling out there ready and willing to cooperate with their oppressors:

MINNEAPOLIS – A Maple Grove bar owner and manager have been charged after being caught illegally importing Spotted Cow beer that they then sold at their establishment.

The two men, Brandon Hlavka, 37, of St. Michael and David Lantos, 28, of Brooklyn Park, were charged with a single felony of transporting alcohol into Minnesota for resale on Feb. 4.

Lantos, the bar manager, and Hlavka, the owner, of Maple Tavern were busted in April of last year after someone reported they were selling the Wisconsin beer on tap.

The New Glarus Brewing Co. beer is not a licensed manufacturer in Minnesota and its beer cannot be sold in the state.

Alcohol laws here in Minnesota are, well, really fucking stupid. There are different rules for alcohol that is sold only for on site consumption, referred to as on sale liquor, and alcohol sold only for off site consumption, referred to as off sale liquor. You can only buy on sale liquor at bars and restaurants and off sale liquor at liquor stores. Grocery stores can only sell liquor if they have a store separate from the grocery section. And the list goes on and on.

In this case the bar owners were importing beer from a company that isn’t licensed here in Minnesota. Here in Minnesota that’s a felony. You read that right, selling beer from an unlicensed manufacturer is a fucking felony.

These laws wouldn’t be as big of a deal if it wasn’t for quisling like the one who turned these bar owners over. If nobody cooperated with the laws the laws would be much harder to enforce. Unfortunately there are people who are willing to ruin the lives of others because their religion of statism mandates that individual humans are of less value than the arbitrary decrees issued by the political clergy. It’s fucking sick.

Rules Are Different For The King’s Men

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) breaks into 1,300 computers with a single, vaguely written warrant it’s labeled justice. But when somebody breaks into the FBI’s computers it’s labeled criminal:

A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.

The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.

This is something that fascinates me about statism. It’s relies on the belief that humans are inherently bad and that the only solution is to absolve a handful of those humans of any responsibilities for their actions so they can control the rest.

A lot of people are willing to give the FBI a pass in breaking into 1,300 computers because the operation was dealing with combating child pornography. While I detest child pornography I also detest throwing due process out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient. There’s no way the FBI could know that all 1,300 computers it broke into were involved in the child pornography site. Not every visitor to a site is a user. Sometimes people are tricked into visiting a site, sometimes they’re curious if a site is actually as terrible as people are claiming (and often report sites containing illegal content to law enforcers if they find those claims to be true), etc. Due process involves identifying suspects based on evidence and investigating them specifically.

Further compounding the issue is the fact the FBI was knowingly distributing child pornography from its own servers. The agency was quite literally doing the exact same thing it was supposedly trying to stop.

Yet many people are calling what the FBI did justice while labeling what the hacker did as criminal.

Fascist France

France appears to have learned all the wrong lessons from World War II. Instead of recognizing fascism as a bad idea France seems to be adopting the idea that their conquerer must have had the right idea. No longer satisfied with merely having emergency powers as law the parliament of France has decided to make emergency powers part of the nation’s constitution:

Paris (AFP) – The lower house of the French parliament voted Monday in favour of enshrining in the constitution the process of declaring a state of national emergency, one of a series of controversial amendments the government proposed after November’s Paris attacks.

The measure — which gives the state increased security powers — was voted through by 103 to 26, although it met opposition from some leftwing lawmakers and some deputies from the right.

Truthfully this doesn’t change anything. Since emergency powers have already been declared and were being used it’s obvious the nation’s constitution did nothing to stop them. What this vote amounts to is the statist equivalent of a religious ritual. Within the religion of statism ritual is what determines whether a governmental decree is holy or heresy.

What What, In The Butt? Government.

What is the biggest concern facing Michigan? Some may say it’s the poisoned water in Flint. Others may say it’s the devastated economy in Detroit. The Michigan Senate has decided it’s butt sex:

Those who violate bans on anal sex in the US state of Michigan now face up to 15 years prison time, after the Michigan Senate passed a controversial bill last Thursday (February 4), and despite the US Supreme Court ruling the legislation to be unconstitutional.

I’m of the opinion that where one man sticks his dick is none of my concern so long as everybody involved has consented. That’s why the puritans’ fascination with male genitalia baffles me. But this doesn’t surprise me. Since humanity first developed the really bad idea of letting a handful of us rule everybody else the State has been very interested in what people do in their bedrooms. And bathrooms. And living rooms.

Basically the State is very interested in everything that happens in your home. That way it can tax, fine, or otherwise extort wealth from people. Do you want to remodel your a room? You need to buy a permit! Do you want to enjoy anal sex with your partner(s)? That’s a finable and jailable offense! Do you want to grow a plant that you use for medicinal properties? Excellent! Not only is that a finable and jailable offense but civil forfeiture can come into play as well!

The reason there are so many laws on the books is because the State wants a cut from every activity humanly possible. This is just another example of the State trying to get a piece of some action.

Detecting Wrongthink Early

1984 taking place in London was very appropriate. The United Kingdom (UK) has become the granddaddy of the surveillance state. Surveilling an entire nation isn’t easy, which is why the UK, like every other surveillance state, is desperately searching for new way to automate its activities. I’m sure that desperation is what lead to this idiocy:

London, United Kingdom – Schoolchildren in the UK who search for words such as “caliphate” and the names of Muslim political activists on classroom computers risk being flagged as potential supporters of terrorism by monitoring software being marketed to teachers to help them spot students at risk of radicalisation.

The “radicalisation keywords” library has been developed by the software company Impero as an add-on to its existing Education Pro digital classroom management tool to help schools comply with new duties requiring them to monitor children for “extremism”, as part of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy.

[…]

The keywords list, which was developed in collaboration with the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism organisation that is closely aligned with the government, consists of more than 1,000 trigger terms including “apostate”, “jihadi” and “Islamism”, and accompanying definitions.

I’m not sure if schools in the UK have deteriorated as far as the schools here but if they haven’t then it’s quite plausible that many of the keywords being looked for would appear quite frequently in a history class. What’s more interesting is that they keywords don’t seem to so much be targeting terrorism as Islam.

It must be noted that using keywords to detect wrongthink is a fruitless endeavor. Because terrorism is currently the biggest target of the State’s propaganda it is a topic of general interest. A lot of people searching for keywords related to terrorism aren’t interested in becoming terrorists but merely want to learn about events related to terrorism. The number of false positives such a system will throw out are going to be far greater than any potentially useful information. Drowning out the signal in noise is counterproductive but it seems to be the strategy most automated surveillance systems rely on.

Sovereign Immunity Means Never Having To Take Responsibility For Your Actions

If a private company poisoned your water supply you’d have grounds for a lawsuit. The reason for this is obvious, poisoning your water causes damage to both your person and property. Because of this the only way to make things as right as possible is for the poisoner to pay reparations. But the rules are different when the State poisons your water supply because it enjoys a legal fiction called sovereign immunity:

Michigan’s state and local officials poisoned Flint’s water with lead but innocent federal taxpayers are the ones having to foot the cleanup bill. President Obama has pledged to hand Flint $85 million in aid money. This sounds like a lot, but the fact of the matter is that it is far less than what Flint’s victims would have gotten if a corporation — rather than government — had been the culprit. That’s because, unlike private companies, the government is shielded from liability lawsuits.

[…]

The main reason that they don’t have a prayer of collecting much more is something called the doctrine of sovereign immunity. Under this doctrine, citizens are barred from suing their government for screw-ups that it has caused in the course of discharging a core function unless the government itself consents. Some very narrow exceptions exist but it is very difficult to make them stick.

We’re often told that governing bodies within the United States contain a series of checks and balances. The federal government has legislative, executive, and judicial branches that are supposed to keep each other in check. Municipal governments are supposed to be kept in check by country governments which are supposed to be kept in check by state governments which are supposed to be kept in check by the federal government. Reality is much different though.

Instead of acting as a checks and balances the various pieces of the government more accurately reflect a circlejerk. Each part works to absolve the other of responsibility.

People have sued parts of the government before but only after it consented to being sued. Herein lies the major difference between private entities and the State. When a private entity causes you damage you can sue them whether they agree to allow you to do so or not. Suing the State requires getting its permission to do so. Since the State enjoys a monopoly on legal services within its borders you have no recourse if the State tells you to go pound sand when you come asking for permission to sue it.

Registering A Drone Puts Your Home Address Publicly To The Internet

When a handful of drone owners made some poor choices the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saw the opportunity to drum up some cash. It mandated that all drones must be registered with the FAA. Registering as a drone pilot costs $5.00 and failing to register can cost up to $250,000 and/or up to three years in a cage. Either way the FAA wins and you lose. Why do you lose? Because a hidden costs of registering your drone is making your home address publicly available on the Internet:

The FAA is delighted that signups for its new drone registry have hit 300,000. But the agency’s buoyant mood is destined for a nosedive. The FAA isn’t warning drone owners their names and addresses are easily searchable and downloadable (47MB) in the agency’s online registry.

To add a bit more insult than usual to public registries, the FAA’s drone pilot registry even includes minors:

While drone owners must be 13 years old to register, the privacy threat posed by this registry is particularly concerning for minors — for obvious reasons.

The poor manner in which this registry program has been handled just adds credence to the entire thing being a quick cash grab. Even a little bit of thought would have caused the developers to realize how bad of an idea making people’s name and addresses publicly available is. It’s especially damning when it’s so easy to make a more anonymized database.

Mandatory Tracking

Fitness trackers are convenient devices for tracking health related information. Unfortunately many organizations see genuinely good ideas and decide they must be mandatory. That’s what the Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma has decided:

Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is requiring incoming freshmen to wear Fitbit fitness trackers to record 10,000 steps per day, with the information being made available to professors.

“ORU offers one of the most unique educational approaches in the world by focusing on the Whole Person — mind, body and spirit,” ORU President William M. Wilson said in a statement, a local CBS News affiliate reported.

“The marriage of new technology with our physical fitness requirements is something that sets ORU apart,” he said. “In fact, when we began this innovative program in the fall of 2015, we were the first university in the world to offer this unique approach to a fitness program.”

The Fitbit device uses GPS technology to track how and where students exercise, eat and sleep, as well as the calories they burn, how much they weigh and other personal information, EAGNews reported.

This raises so many privacy related questions. How does the university verify each student has taken the right number of steps per day? Is the information synced to the student’s smartphone (assuming the student has a smartphone)? If so, is the data collected by an app created by the university or Fitbit’s app? If the latter does the university demand students hand over their Fitbit account credentials? Is the health data accessible at any time to the university?

More concerning is how this technology will be mandated in the future. Will health insurance companies begin mandating that customers must wear Fitbits and meet a certain number of daily steps? While one can choose not to attend the Orwell, err, Oral Roberts University they cannot decide to forgo health insurance less they be fined by the State. Could businesses require employees to wear Fitbits as part of a wellness program (one of my friends works a place where wearing a Fitbit is required to receive a health insurance discount but it’s not mandatory yet)?

Technology is great so long as it remains voluntary. It’s when organizations start mandating the use of a technology that things become frightening.

Fascism Is Alive And Well In Europe

A lot of people in the United States who lean more towards the neoliberal side of the political spectrum seem to have a love affair with Europe. Whenever somebody points out the idiocy of socialism they’re quick to point to Europe as an example of socialism working. Socialism certainly is alive and well in Europe but it’s mostly of the national variety, which means men wearing armbands first blaming and then attacking minorities:

Hundreds of masked men marched through Stockholm’s main train station on Friday evening, reportedly beating up refugees and anyone who didn’t appear to be ethnically Swedish.

Wearing all-black balaclavas and armbands, the men “gathered with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” Stockholm police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.

The biggest problem with socialism is that it’s a collectivist ideology. Instead of viewing people on an individual basis it encourages thinking of people as groups. When you strip away individuality it’s much easier to start blaming entire groups of people based on rather arbitrary labels such as where they were born or what religion they believe in. National socialism is slightly scarier because it doesn’t even pay lip service to all people being equal. Instead it preaches that the people of a particular nation are superior to all other people.

As Europe continues to circle the drain because of political decisions made decades ago fascism is beginning to surge once again and the target of its scorn are the newly arrived immigrants.

Police Body Cameras Won’t Save Us

Setting aside the severe privacy implications of pervasive police body cameras the biggest issue is that the police remain in sole control of the devices and data. Even in cities that require police to wear body cameras I still urge people to record any and all police interactions they’re either a party to or come across. When individuals record the police the footage isn’t in the polices’ control so there are barriers that make it more difficult for them to use it to prosecute somebody. Footage recorded by individuals is also more resilient to the body camera memory hole:

Chicago Police Department officers stashed microphones in their squad car glove boxes. They pulled out batteries. Microphone antennas got busted or went missing. And sometimes, dashcam systems didn’t have any microphones at all, DNAinfo Chicago has learned.

Police officials last month blamed the absence of audio in 80 percent of dashcam videos on officer error and “intentional destruction.”

When the only footage of a police encounter comes from a police controlled device it’s a simple matter for the officer to disable it. The best way to counter such a threat is to record police interactions yourself.

Most people carry smartphones, which usually come equipped with a decent camera. You can use the builtin video recording app but there are better options in my opinion. A friend of mine who spends a lot of time recording the police uses and recommends Bambuser. The American Civil Liberties Union has region specific apps for recording the police. Both options are good because they upload the video to a remote server so a cop cannot destroy the footage by confiscating or destroying your recording device.

Police body cameras sound like a great idea on paper but as with most things in life if you want something done right you should do it yourself.