Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

Everything I Want is a Human Right and Should be Free

Economic ignorance has lead to widespread belief in many silly things. For example, people believe that war is good for the economy because it creates manufacturing jobs. Frédéric Bastiat explained why this belief was bullshit in 1850 with the parable of the broken window. Another silly belief many people seem to have is that there is such a thing as free. This belief has become especially commonplace now that everybody equates anything they want as a human right and therefore should be provided for free.

The latest case of this belief being proliferated is tampons. I’m not kidding. This article, which argues that tampons should be free, has been making the rounds on the Internet and many people have deemed it to be a good idea:

We need to move beyond the stigma of “that time of the month” – women’s feminine hygiene products should be free for all, all the time.

Sanitary products are vital for the health, well-being and full participation of women and girls across the globe. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch, for example, have both linked menstrual hygiene to human rights. Earlier this year, Jyoti Sanghera, chief of the UN Human Rights Office on Economic and Social Issues, called the stigma around menstrual hygiene “a violation of several human rights, most importantly the right to human dignity”.

[…]

But this is less an issue of costliness than it is of principle: menstrual care is health care, and should be treated as such.

We’ve come full circle. Since so many people believe that healthcare is a human right and therefore must be provided to all for free anything that can be somehow tied to healthcare should likewise be provided to all for free. But nothing is free. Everything good requires resources. First raw resources must be collected, which in of itself requires energy. Then those raw resources must be refined into something useful for the manufacturing of capital goods, which also requires energy. After that those capital goods must be further refined into something consumers can us, which requires more energy. Energy itself is a resource as is time and basically everything else that touches the manufacturing process.

The bottom line is somebody has to invest the resources necessary to produce a good. When somebody says they believe something should be free what they really mean is that everybody in the world should be forced to set aside a portion of their resources to manufacture that “free” product. To further simplify the matter when somebody says they believe something should be free what they really mean is that everybody else should pay for it.

Now the people who want free shit usually use very utilitarian arguments. This article, for example, points out that approximately half of the population of this planet can utilize tampons. I’m going to one up that. What is an activity that every human being does that can negatively impact sanitation? Shit! Therefore I propose something different. Instead of “free” tampons I propose “free” toilet paper for all! Obviously I’m joking since I’m not economically illiterate and I’m not such an asshole that I want government violence brought against you so I can get something for “free”. But I believe my point has been made.

Protection Against Rockets Doesn’t Imply Protection Against Malicious Hackers

Israel’s Iron Dome has proven to be a very effective defensive system against rockets. But just because you can build an effective anti-rocket system doesn’t mean your network and computer security don’t suck:

Three Israeli defense contractors responsible for building the “Iron Dome” missile shield currently protecting Israel from a barrage of rocket attacks were compromised by hackers and robbed of huge quantities of sensitive documents pertaining to the shield technology, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

The never-before publicized intrusions, which occurred between 2011 and 2012, illustrate the continued challenges that defense contractors and other companies face in deterring organized cyber adversaries and preventing the theft of proprietary information.

It always amazes me how a company that invests so much into physical security fail to properly security their computers and networks. But it doesn’t surprise me since physical security and computer and network security are usually quite different (although there is a lot of overlap). I would still think that a company whose task it is to build weapons for physical security would invest a great deal of money into hiring the best computer and network security people in existence.

If at First You Don’t Succeed

You know what they say, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. But then again sometimes it’s smart to quite while you’re ahead, which is what this dude should have done:

Beaudoin broke a door lock and entered a home about 5:20 a.m. in the 4200 block of Hwy. 53. Homeowner Neil Reller grabbed a shotgun and struggled with Beaudoin, striking the intruder on the head several times with the gun so hard that the stock broke off the weapon.

Were I hit in the face with a shotgun stock so hard that it broke the stock I think I would have called it a night. Mr. Beaudoin was obviously a more determined man than I:

Beaudoin, his face covered in blood, fled in his vehicle about 8 miles to the southeast and showed up at the Himes’ home in the 5700 block of Hwy. 53. He told Ethel Himes that he had been assaulted. When Himes let Beaudoin inside, he threw her onto the living-room floor, choked her and beat her head on the floor.

Brad Himes came upon the struggle and went to his bedroom for a handgun. Beaudoin followed the son and lunged at him, prompting Brad Himes to shoot the intruder.

A sheriff’s deputy gave first aid to Beaudoin, who died at Rainy Lake Medical Center.

See what I mean? Sometimes it’s a better idea to just say “Fuck it.” and give up. While I’m sure Mr. Beaudoin thought he clever plan of claiming he was assaulted was fool proof it’s never a good idea to get into a physical confrontation after recently getting your ass severely kicked. This is especially true when getting shot is a realistic outcome, which is always the case when invading a home.

It’s Not Technically a Lie

Friday the goons over at Moms Demand Something or Other Action (MDA) posted the following tweet:

Here’s a screenshot just in case the tweet falls down the memory hole (which seems to happen with alarming frequency on any Twitter account controlled by gun control advocates):

moms-demand-peer-nations

This caused Linoge and myself to wonder what a “peer nation” is:

wtf-is-a-peer-nation

We see with this tweet by the folks over at (MDA) a common tactic used by gun control advocates: massaging data. In almost any of the reports issued by any of the major gun control organizations there are terms such as “developed nations” and now “peer nations” scattered about within. These terms have no definite meanings, which makes them convenient stipulations on the data being used.

I could, for instance, claims that a “peer nation” is any nation that relies predominantly on coal to generate electrical power, possesses one or more aircraft carriers, has a population made up predominantly of people who hail from another part of the planet, consume beef as a primary form of meat, have no laws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol but heavily restrict its sale and manufacturing, and has at least two cities with a population greater than one million. Doing so would lead to absolutely useless data but I could make claims without technically lying. This is what gun control advocates have been resorting to. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start with the results they want and continue to add stipulations onto what qualifies as a developed or peer nation until they get the data necessary to match their results.

I’m reminded of government provided statistics on inflation, unemployment, and other economic matters. They always look good. Even when things are bad the government provided statistics make them look at the very least OK. When you look into how the government calculates those statistics you see that it adds on a tremendous number of stipulations and when those stipulations aren’t enough they add a few more.

The thing is if you have to add so many stipulations to get the results you want then you’re working with meaningless data. Massaging data until you get a desired result doesn’t allow you to identify anything of value. You have to start with an honest data set, calculate the results, and work from there. But like the government, gun control advocates know if they worked with an honest data set they wouldn’t have a case.

Speed Limits

This month the men and women of Minnesota’s various police departments have been holding one hell of a fundraiser in the form of speed traps. They’ve been using the tagline “There’s not excuse for speeding.” And they’ve been covering billboards, newspaper pages, and other advertising space (with our tax dollars no less) with propaganda about the dangers of speeding (the ads are kind of like reefer madness but less entertaining).

Do you know what fucks up traffic flow? People who don’t drive with the flow of traffic, which is always above the posted speed limit because those posted speed limits are bullshit and the state knows it. This shouldn’t surprise anybody though. Who knows the maximum safe operating speed of a stretch of road better than the people who drive it twice a day, five days a week as they go to and from work? Posted speed limits are the product of arbitrary decisions made by people sitting in marble buildings who have no idea what the maximum safe speed on a random stretch of road they’ve never driven on is. Flow of traffic is the result of people who have a great deal of experience driving on a stretch of road doing so at the maximum speed they know to be safe.

Salon Goes Full Retard Again

You writers at Salon are like an enteral fountain of stupid ideas. That’s probably because…

you're-all-a-bunch-of-socialists

More to the point, you’re all a bunch of state worshiping socialists. As far as you’re concerned the only problem in this world is that we don’t have a state boot stomping on our faces quite enough yet. And that leads you to say really stupid things like this:

They’re huge, they’re ruthless, and they touch every aspect of our daily lives. Corporations like Amazon and Google keep expanding their reach and their power. Despite a history of abuses, so far the Justice Department has declined to take antitrust actions against them. But there’s another solution.

Is it time to manage and regulate these companies as public utilities?

No. No it’s not. And I’m going to tell you why it’s not by using your own stupid arguments against you. You see, every argument you use against Google and Amazon can be equally applied to the state.

Big Tech was created with publicly-developed technology.

Publicly-developed technology are built by private companies. Think of the state’s major technologies. Fighter jets, bombers, tanks, drones, missiles, and aircraft carriers are all built by private companies. The technology that runs the Internet? Yup, it’s all made by private companies such as Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM (which has quite a history of building things for governments). When the state wants something it throws money at private companies that actually build it. Without private companies there would be no “publicly-developed” technology.

Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society.

Then why ruin it by giving it over to the state? The only thing the state does competently is steal and break shit. While it does throw some money at private companies to build substandard roads much of its resources are invested in militarizing the police so they can better murder our pets, building more efficient ways for our military to blow up people overseas, and protecting the politically connected private companies from its not as well connect competitors.

If Google and Amazon were nationalized the would use them to collect even more data on you and I. Gmail would exist to allow the state to know when we’re communicating about something illegal and our purchases on Amazon would be scrutinized to see if some tangible connection to terrorism could be made. Google Maps would probably be used to drop Hellfire missiles on whoever used it as well.

They’re at or near monopoly status – and moving fast.

The state is a monopoly. In fact it is the monopoly that makes all other monopolies possible.

They abuse their power.

And what does the state do? Let me think. It sends heavily armed men to kick down people’s doors at two in the morning, shoot their dogs, and kidnap them for possessing a fucking plant. Then you have the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the state’s apparatus for spying on our phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, and other communications. When it finds a little free time it also likes to put people to death even though the evidence supporting those people’s guilt is nonexistent. I haven’t even gotten to the number of foreigners it slaughters.

They got there with our help.

So did the state. It acquires its resources by stealing them from us. Sometimes it’s in the form of taxes other times its in the form of fines and other times its in the form of slave labor (which it rather humorously refers to as prison labor).

The real “commodity” is us.

Guess what? The state’s commodity is us. We’re nothing more than tax cattle and cannon fodder to it.

Our privacy is dying … or already dead.

Edward Snowden really brought this point to light. The NSA has been spying on our digital communications for years. While I dislike many of the data collection policies used by Google and Amazon there is a major difference between what they do and what the state does with my data. Google and Amazon use my data for personal profit and to find more shit for me to buy from them. The state uses my data to decide whether or not it will send armed thugs to my home at two in the morning so they can shoot my pets and kidnap me. I’d say that’s a pretty big difference.

Freedom of information is at risk.

Are you referring to the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA)?

The free market could become even less free.

And your solution is to preemptively restrict it by putting Google and Amazon under the state’s direct control? That’s not a solution to the hypothetical problem of the free market becoming less free; that’s making the hypothetical problem a reality.

They could hijack the future.

So could the state. The difference, of course, is that Google and Amazon hijacking the future doesn’t lead to people being locked in cages, bombed, and otherwise brutalized.

GOP Stupid Train Stops in Minnesota

I’ve been documenting a major problem for the Republican Party (GOP), the mouths of its candidates, under the headline the GOP stupid train. Admittedly it’s not a particularly clever name and when I chose it I mean to use it as a one off. But Republican candidates keep saying absurdly stupid things so I’ve been forced to continue running with the theme.

After making a tour around a good chunk of the country the GOP stupid train has finally stopped here in Minnesota. I give you Bob Frey who has this to say:

Frey then explained his view: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it’s the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”

There you have it. According to Mr. Frey anal sex causes AIDs. This man better be trolling us because if he managed to get through our school system and still believe this shit then all hope is lost.

Why Advocating for Gun Control in Gun Publications Carriers Consequences

The Atlantic has an article titled Why We Can’t Talk About Gun Control. In it the termination of Dick Metcalf from Guns and Ammo is discussed as an excuse for why this nation, supposedly, can’t have a discussion about gun control (you know, except for all of the discussions about gun control that happen every damn day):

In the column, Metcalf wrote that he did not believe it was an infringement of the Second Amendment to require some training before a person can have a concealed carry. He added that states can have a universal background check law without him feeling infringed upon.

That did not go over well.

The column appeared in the December 2013 issue of Guns & Ammo, but subscribers started getting it in late October. Within three days, Metcalf said, as responses poured in—by mail, in forums, and on social media—from what he called the pointed end of the bell curve, people who “think the constitution is the only law we need,” Metcalf was labeled a “gun control collaborator” and “modern-day Benedict Arnold.”

“What struck me most about what happened to me was that this huge media corporation [Intermedia, the owner of Guns & Ammo] was absolutely unprepared for the onslaught of social-media negativity,” Metcalf said, “when we went over that line and dared ask the question, whether people might think about whether or not regulation is by definition infringement.”

The tone of the article insinuates that us gun owners are such extreme nut cases that we tirelessly censor any attempt in the media to discuss gun control. Let me explain this from a different angle, namely from the angle of a gun owner and gun rights activist. As a gun owner I am the demographic that Guns and Ammo targets. It makes money by selling magazines primarily to its target demographic. When your target demographic involves gun owners and gun rights activists publishing articles that basically raise a gigantic middle finger to them is bad for business. Not surprisingly when Metcalf went on his little rant about supporting mandator background checks for all firearm transfers, a legalese way of making something as simple as gifting one of your firearms to your own fucking child a crime unless you also paid $20 to a federally licensed dealer to do nothing more than make a phone call to a federal agency, it irked Guns and Ammo’s target demographic. Why would gun owners and gun rights activists want to pay money to be told that they are potentially dangerous people who should not be allowed to possess a firearm unless some faceless bureaucrat working for one of the most violent governments currently in existence says so?

But here’s the thing, Metcalf hasn’t been silenced by us evil gun owners. His employment with Guns and Ammo was terminated but he’s still free to write for another publication. In fact there are many publications, including The Atlantic itself, that are more than happy to pay writers money to toe the gun control advocates’ line. Hell Michael Bloomberg would probably pay big money for a writer who was bullied by us big mean gun owners.

So The Atlantic’s assertion that there can’t be a conversation about gun control is flat out bullshit. It’s true that many of us who own guns aren’t willing to pay money to have gun control preached at us but we’re not stopping anybody from preaching. I’m also not willing to pay writers to call me a misogynist. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have a conversation about whether or not I’m misogyny for liking an author’s works, it simply means that I won’t fund the damn conversation.

The Statists Over at Salon Confuse Me

I have to say that the statists over at Salon really confuse me. Via Gun Free Zone I had the opportunity to read this attempt at fear mongering by Salon. The author tries to argue that gun owners are terrorizing the nation but his opening paragraph presents a different story:

Here is a truth so fundamental that it should be self-evident: When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger. And yet that is exactly what happened at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch this spring: An alleged criminal defeated the cops, because the forces of lawlessness came at them with guns — then Bureau of Land Management officials further surrendered by removing the government markings from their vehicles to prevent violence against them.

I’m not a big fan of Cliven Bundy. The guy comes off as a self-righteous asshole to me. But to claim he did anything wrong by trying to defend land against a marauding gang is pretty stupid. What the author claims to be a “legitimately constituted state authority”, a phrase that in of itself is oxymoronic, is nothing more than a gang of thugs roaming around claiming everything within an imaginary set of lines on a map as its own.

The author is trying to making the argument that Bundy, by managing to make the state reconsider its usual brutish tactics, terrorized America. But the “legitimately constituted state authority” has been terrorizing America, and the rest of the world, for over 250 years. George Washington himself marched an armed force against a handful of whiskey producers because they failed to pay Washington’s gang protection money. Today the tradition continues. If you do something the state doesn’t like it sends armed thugs after you in an attempt to intimidate you. Growing a little cannabis? You may find your home being raided by armed thugs at two in the morning who start by burning your child with a flashbang (an article in Salon about real terrorism) and shooting your dog. Exceeding the arbitrarily posted maximum speed? Expect a road pirate to pull you over, walk up to your car, and demand you pay his gang protection money or face potential kidnapping and imprisonment. And God help you if you’re homeless because the state is going to make your life even more of a living hell.

This is the problem with statists. They claim that the gang they support is legitimate. Anybody who crosses their preferred gang is terrorizing “the people”. It’s one of the most idiotic arguments that has ever been muttered because “the people” are being terrorized by the statist’s preferred gang.

Why I Don’t Donate to the Red Cross

The Red Cross is a popular charity but I won’t give a dime to the organization. There are just too many red flags indicating that the Red Cross is a nothing more than a money making scam for the people at the top. But the most recent information to come to light really demonstrates how much of a scam the organization is:

The documents include “internal and proprietary methodology and procedures for fundraising, confidential information about its internal operations, and confidential financial information,” wrote Gabrielle Levin of Gibson Dunn in a letter to the attorney general’s office.

If those details were disclosed, “the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross’s business model for an increased competitive advantage,” Levin wrote.

I’m curious who the Red Cross considers its competitors. Supposedly its purpose is to help those in need. That would indicate that its competitors are other organizations whose purpose is to help those in need. In other words the Red Cross doesn’t want other organizations helping those in need. All of this indicates to me that the Red Cross is primarily worried about raking in as much money as possible.

Talk about an organization run by assholes. You have to be a special kind of dick to sucker people into giving you money under the belief you are going to use it to help people.