Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

Just Like Government Police Departments

One of the funniest forms of criticism, in my opinion, is claiming that a new entity will be able to do the same thing a current entity is doing. For example, Alabama just voted to allow churches to establish their own police departments. My favorite part about this isn’t the idea of churches with inquisitors police departments though, it’s this:

Critics of the bill argue that a police department that reports to church officials could be used to cover up crimes.

Oh no! Church police departments may be able to do the exact same thing government police departments already do on a daily basis?!

These critics may want to think really hard about what they’re saying. They may come to an interesting revelation.

Degrees of Separation from Hitler

One form of propaganda I’m getting tired of is character assassination. Whenever somebody runs afoul with police officers the tough on crime folks and the media begin performing a thorough background check. Their goal is to find something, anything, that can be used to justify the actions of the police officers.

David Dao, who was roughed up by airport police on behest of United Airlines, is now in the media’s crosshairs and, not surprisingly, they found some dirt on him:

Dao was trying to regain his medical license when he worked at the practice from August 2015 to August 2016, Nadeau said. Dao had surrendered his medical license in February 2005 after being convicted of drug-related offenses, according to documents filed with the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure last June. Broadcast and print coverage of Dao’s arrest, conviction and sentencing made his name familiar to some Kentuckians.

What?! Mr. Dao was convicted of a drug-related offense 12 years ago? Well that changes everything! He totally had that beating on United coming!

The absurdity of this practice is difficult to overstate. What does something that happened 12 years ago have to do with the beating Mr. Dao received last weekend? Nothing. But it gives the tough on crime people and propagandists something to latch onto to justify their view of officer infallibility.

And this practice becomes more absurd every year. At one point stories might be run if a victim of police brutality had a history of violence. Then stories might be run if a victim had a history of drug use. Now stories are run when somebody was convicted of a crime over a decade ago. At this rate it’s only a matter of time until the media starts playing Degrees of Separation from Hitler.

“Up next, on CNN, we present a chilling story. Our researchers have discovered that the unarmed man who was gunned down by police after he was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car only had 37 degrees of separation from Adolf Hitler!” Mark my words, we’re going to start seeing stories like this (although, perhaps, not exactly this) run when people have been brutalized by police officers.

Human Rights Violations and War Crimes

The United States spent tens of millions of dollars on Tomahawk missiles so it could totally fail at destroying a Syrian airport. Supposedly the operation was done in retaliation for the Syrian government using chemical weapons on rebel fighters. You see, under no circumstance will the United States tolerate human rights violations and war crimes! The might of the United States military will be brought to bear against anybody who crosses such a line!

Unless, of course, the human rights violations and war crimes are occurring in a country the United States has no vested interest in:

More than 100 gay men have been detained in concentration camp-style prisons in the Russian region of Chechnya, according to reports by local newspapers and human rights organisations.

The arrests are being made as part of a widespread anti-LGBT purge in the area. The prison camps are the first to be established for LGBT people since the Second World War.

It’s difficult to claim the moral high ground when it’s obvious your morality is based entirely on your interests. People start to think you’re not sincere when you selectively invoke your morality as justification for your actions.

But morality to a government is nothing more than propaganda. It’s pulled out and cited when it’s convenient to forward one of the government’s causes but then buried again once it has served that purpose. When you see a government cite moral grounds for actions know that you’re being propagandized. The actions aren’t being done for moral reasons, the actions were being done for entirely selfish reasons and morality just happened to be a convenient excuse that sounded far better than greed.

Looking Dumb When Trying to Look Smart

Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina. Everything sounds more impressive if said in Latin. While that’s generally true, it only applies when something is said in correct Latin. When something is said in incorrect Latin you just end up looking like a damn fool:

A development of luxury homes in Cambridge has been daubed with graffiti – written in Latin, of course.
Vandals spray-painted the new five-bedroom river-front houses with the words Locus in Domos Loci Populum.

Locals have said the messages, which appear to be a protest against the development, could “only happen” in the university city.

I’m glad that something like this could “only happen” in Cambridge. I’d hate to see a trend of vandals writing “A place on the houses of a place the people,” on houses spread any further.

Today’s lesson is not to rely on Google Translate, especially for Latin. If you really want to use Latin and are unwilling to learn the language, head over to the nearest university’s Latin department and ask for a translation.

A Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia

The problem with statists is that they never ask whether or not people should be ruled. All of their time is spent arguing over who should be ruling. Donald Trump’s election has infuriated a lot of statists because they don’t believe it’s the right person to rule us. Now a handful of these statists believe that the only solution is for them to rule us:

There’s a growing trend of scientists and engineers seeking public office, many of whom say they’re reacting to the cabinet picks and policy decisions from the new Trump Administration, which in many cases have been at odds with science.

[…]

Now more people in STEM fields are showing an interest in running for office—and many don’t have any formal experience running a campaign. 314 Action, a nonprofit organization named after the first three digits of the number pi, hopes to help solve that problem. It encourages those in the STEM community to run and offers resources to potential candidates, such as training sessions. Founder Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who previously sought a seat in Congress, says that having more science-minded people in Washington “would lead to a more collaborative and fact-based approach to governing.”

“We have a lot of people that never considered running for office before that now feel compelled to step up and try to make a difference in their communities because of this assault on our future,” she told Ars.

More than 3,000 people have reached out to the organization since January. Most of those people are left-leaning and about half of them are women. 314 Action has not officially endorsed any candidates yet, but it’s currently only supporting Democrats because the organization considers the Republican party anti-science, especially on issues like climate change. The training sessions, however, are open to people from all political parties.

A dictatorship of the intelligentsia will solve everything! It’s science!

This is why statism will continue to doom us all. These people are upset about the Trump administration’s track record in regards to science. Instead of learning the obvious lesson, that the State shouldn’t be involved in scientific research in any capacity, they’re repeating the cycle that has lead us here. In fact, their inability to theorized based on observations really makes me question their scientific credentials. Even a cursory examination of the history of the State and its attitude towards scientific research would lead anybody of at least lukewarm intelligence to the conclusion that its attitude changes every time a new group of politicians come into power. If nothing else, allowing the State to involve itself in scientific research inserts unnecessary and undesirable instability.

Instead of running for office or supporting a political action committee that claims to want to put the “right people” in charge, scientists should be working to divorce their fields from the State. That is the only longterm solution.

Watch a Dying Business Thrash Desperately

I will go so far as to say that Let’s Encrypt revolutionized the Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate market. While there were some free sources of certificates, the general rule remained that you had to pay if you wanted to implement a secure connection for you website. Then Let’s Encrypt was released. Now anybody can implement a secure connection for their website for free. On top of that, Let’s Encrypt greatly simplified the process of managing certificates. So it’s no surprise that certificate vendors are feeling the squeeze and responding desperately:

The fact that Let’s Encrypt is now being used to make phishing sites look legit is a total burn for us, and a potential house fire for users who rely on simple cues like the green padlock for assurance. According to certificate reseller The SSL Store, “between January 1st, 2016 and March 6th, 2017, Let’s Encrypt has issued a total of 15,270 SSL certificates containing the word ‘PayPal.'”

Keep in mind that the SSL Store is a provider of those incredibly overpriced certificates, so Let’s Encrypt’s mission isn’t necessarily in their interests. Even still, their post points out that the “vast majority of this issuance has occurred since November — since then Let’s Encrypt has issued nearly 100 ‘PayPal’ certificates per day.” Based on a random sample, SSL Store said, 96.7 percent of these certificates were intended for use on phishing sites.

The reseller added that, while their analysis has focused on fake PayPal sites, the firm’s findings have spotted other SSL phishing fakers, including Bank of America, Apple IDs, and Google.

The SSL Store paints a frightening picture. But the picture requires ignoring two facts.

First, TLS doesn’t verify if a website is legitimate. TLS verifies that the URL you’re connecting to matches the name in the certificate provided by the server and that the certificate was issued by a trusted authority. For example, if you connect to https://paypaltotallyascam.com, TLS will verify that the URL in the certificate is for https://paypaltotallyascam.com and that the certificate was issued by a trusted authority. However, TLS is not magical and cannot determine whether the site is a scam or not.

Second, you can’t even pull a certificate with Let’s Encrypt unless you have a registered URL. So why is Let’s Encrypt getting all of the blame but not the Domain Name System (DNS) registrar that allowed the domain to be registered in the first place? Because DNS registrars aren’t a threat to The SSL Store’s business model, Let’s Encrypt is.

This report by The SSL Store is nothing more than the desperate thrashings of a dying business model.

Everything is Stand Your Ground Law Now

If three armed individuals break into your home and you shoot them does that fall under stand your ground doctrine? According to our friends across the pound it does:

The intruders – who police say were armed with brass knuckles and a knife – were shot by a 23-year-old man in an act of “self-defence”, officers said.

The son may not face charges due to so-called stand your ground laws.

[…]

Two of the teenagers died inside the home and one ran outside before dying in the driveway.

I understand that learning what stand your ground doctrine means takes a whole 30 seconds of Google searching and that’s a lot of time when you’re trying to get your article in front of people who have the attention span of a goldfish. Still, it would benefit everybody if the facts being reported were accurate. In that sprit I will clarify the difference between castle doctrine, what the author was probably thinking of, and stand your ground.

Castle doctrine states that an individual has the right to defend themselves in their home without a duty to retreat. Stand your ground doctrine states that an individual has a right to defend themselves wherever they are, assuming they have a right to be there, without a duty to retreat. This case would fall more under castle doctrine than stand your ground.

But even in the absence of either law, assuming the facts currently being reported are accurate, this case looks like a pretty clear example of regular old self-defense. Three armed individuals wearing masks smashed a sliding glass window to gain entry into the home. That signals intentions that aren’t good for the homeowner.

You don’t find Girl Scouts smashing sliding glass windows to sell homeowners cookies. Even Jehovah Witnesses don’t go that far. So it’s fairly safe to assume that somebody breaking into your home doesn’t have good intentions.

Political Solutions Don’t Work

A lot of people here in the United States are flipping out because the rulers are voting to allow Internet Service Providers (ISP) to sell customer usage data:

A US House committee is set to vote today on whether to kill privacy rules that would prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from selling users’ web browsing histories and app usage histories to advertisers. Planned protections, proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that would have forced ISPs to get people’s consent before hawking their data – are now at risk. Here’s why it matters.

It amazes me that more people seem to be upset about private companies selling their usage information for profit than providing their usage data to law enforcers so the wrath of the State’s judicial system can be brought upon them. Personally, I’m far more concerned about the latter than the former. But I digress.

This vote demonstrates the futility of political solutions. At one point the privacy laws were put into place by the State. The process of getting those laws put into place probably involved a lot of begging and kowtowing from the serfs. But Congress and the presidency have been shuffled around and the new masters disagree with what the former masters did so all of that begging and kowtowing was for nothing.

The problem with political solutions is that they’re temporary. Even if you can get the current Congress and president to pass laws that will solve your particular problems, it’s only a matter of time until Congress and the presidency changes hands and undoes the laws you begged so hard to have passed.

If you want a problem solved you have to solve it yourself. In the case of Internet privacy, the best defense against snoopy ISPs is to utilize a foreign Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider that respects your privacy and is in a country that is difficult for domestic law enforcement to coerce. Using a VPN will deprive your ISP, and by extent domestic law enforcement, of your usage data.

Getting What You Want Good and Hard

Stories of genies often involve a poor sap coming across a genie’s lantern, being granted three wishes, and receiving exactly what they wished for. The twist is that their wishes are usually poorly thought out and therefore the fulfillment of their wishes brings despair instead of joy. This is why when somebody expresses a poorly thought out desire I often tell them that I hope that they get everything wish for and that they get it good and hard.

At one point in time the United States government had virtually no involvement in marriage. The lack of government involvement meant practices such as polygamy were legal. This didn’t sit well with many Christians of the time. Relying on the fact that most of the people in the government were also Christians, they made a wish for the government to get involved in the institute of marriage and that wish was granted:

The idea that the Constitution protects only what happens between a person’s ears isn’t novel. It has roots in a series of laws, and the Supreme Court decisions that upheld them, from 1862 through 1890. The goal at the time was to rein in a new and dangerous-seeming religious movement called Mormonism by criminalizing its most eccentric practice: polygamy. But by claiming the right to regulate the behavior of people of faith, mainstream believers set the stage for the modern political left to step in and regulate them—and to have 150 years’ worth of precedents on their side when they did it.

[…]

In 1852, the LDS Church began openly defending plural marriage. This is what elevated the “Mormon problem” to the national stage. Beginning in the 1850s, Eastern newspapers were rife with references to polygamy as “evil,” “licentious,” a “brutalizing practice,” “repugnant to our sentiments of morality and social order,” and “shocking to the moral sense of the world.” The New York Times editorialized repeatedly for taking direct action against the Latter-day Saints. “The fact, if it be a fact, that the women are willing to live in polygamy, is no reason for our allowing them to do so,” the editors of the paper wrote in March 1860. What had begun as rival groups skirmishing over frontier resources came to be seen as an existential conflict: The soul of the whole country seemed to be at stake if the federal government allowed such behavior to continue.

[…]

In December 1881, Sen. George F. Edmunds of Vermont introduced a law to make anyone who accepted the Church’s teachings on polygamy ineligible to vote, hold public office, or serve on a jury. Again, the editors of the Times endorsed the act’s passage: “It must be admitted that the Edmunds bill is a harsh remedy for polygamy. But then the disease in Utah has gone beyond remedies that are not more or less heroic.”

It passed, as did another law five years later disincorporating the Church and declaring that all Church property and assets above $50,000 would be confiscated by the government.

The Christians of the day got what they wanted but they didn’t think their wish through very well. When you grant government power over something that power is almost always permanent. What happens when your group is no longer the primary influencer of the government? You suddenly find those powers you granted it being used against your wishes.

Today hardcore Christians find themselves at odds with the government when it comes to marriage. The government has become more liberal and has begun allowing same-sex marriages. This hasn’t sat well with many Christians who not only believe that marriage can only be between one man and one woman but also believe the governments should enforce their belief.

Marriage isn’t unique in this regard. Whenever a government gets involved in something the advocates of it doing so cheer… until that government no longer sides with their beliefs. Suddenly they find the power they granted to the government being used against their beliefs but are powerless to do anything about it.

Always keep in mind that granting government more power will turn out poorly in the long run.