Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Creating New Definitions

I’ve often heard people say “words have meanings” when they believe somebody is using a word incorrectly (especially in a debate). It’s true, words do have meanings. Unfortunately, many words have multiple meanings. What makes this matter even more complicated is that words often have different meanings when used in a legal context. For example, a monopoly is generally considered an entity that operates without competition. However, according to the Fascist Communications Club (FCC) and a court that backed it, an entity that operates without competition isn’t necessarily a monopoly:

An appeals court has upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling that broadband markets can be competitive even when there is only one Internet provider.

The real tragedy here isn’t that the FCC and a court have decided that the absence of competition is a competitive market, it’s the fact that the ruling backs a regulatory environment that the government created.

The lack of competition in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) market isn’t due to market phenomenon, it’s due to regulations put in place by government officials to protect their favored ISPs from competition. But nobody (besides government officials and monopolists) likes monopolies so in order to appeal to the stupid sheep that continue to vote for them, government officials have had to create a new definition of monopoly that allows them to grant monopolies without actually calling the companies that receive their grants monopolists. It’s a complicated business. You should probably just pick up the newest version of the Newspeak dictionary and learn the new definitions and roll with them.

Love It or Leave It… If You Can

Love it or leave it is a common phrase used by nationalistic Americans who would rather tell people who criticize their beloved country to get the fuck out than acknowledge its imperfection. What these individuals don’t stop to consider is that getting out isn’t necessarily easy and it’s becoming more difficult everyday:

PHARR, Texas – On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official U.S. birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.

It’s pretty difficult to leave without a passport.

This is another sign of something that nationalists often fail to acknowledge, the United States is a police state. Controlling passports and other forms of travel papers has been a beloved strategy of tyrannical regimes to keep people from fleeing to greener pastures. The Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic were especially notorious for this. In fact in those two countries merely requesting official permission to leave could land you on a secret police watch list. Even if it didn’t, your chances of getting permission were slim unless your communist credentials were solid or you had some collateral (i.e. family members) to put up to ensure your return.

As the United States government continues to tighten the cuffs it has placed on the wrists of population, passport denials for citizens will become more frequent. This, of course, will be sold as necessary for national security but it will really be about stopping tax cattle from taking their wealth outside of the government’s power to steal it.

Gotta Vote Harder

After failing twice to accomplish anything noteworthy as the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, Gary Johnson announced that he was try his hand at failing to win winning a New Mexico Senate seat. This news was met with applause by the Libertarian Party people who prefer their libertarianism to be more watered down than most homeopathic remedies. Unfortunately, their hopes and dreams have once again been shattered because the game has once again been rigged:

In a sudden move with suspicious timing, New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, an elected Democrat, announced today that voters in November will once again be able to vote for every candidate of a political party on the ballot by filling in just one blank. The option, known as the “straight-party” device, gives obvious advantage to parties with high voter-registration totals, while erecting roadblocks to otherwise over-performing candidates from third parties.

Don’t worry though, I’m sure the next election will be fair and will allow the Libertarian Party to bring its brand of watered down libertarianism to the national stage!

While many Libertarian Party members are screaming that this decision is corrupt and outrageous, the fact of the matter is that this decision is the norm. The Democrats and Republicans have a stranglehold on the political system because they’re in power and whoever is in power gets to make the rules. Whenever a potential threat, no matter how minuscule, to the duopoly appears, the rules are changed to eliminate that threat. The only surprising thing about this is the fact that there remains people who believe that a third-party actually has a chance of obtaining any meaningful power.

Of course I’m just parroting Samuel Edward Konkin III who warned the then young Libertarian Party about exactly this.

The Justice System at Work

What happens when a secret compound is discovered where kids are being held against their will, abused, neglected, and training to shoot up schools? The responsible parties are allowed to walk because the government prosecution team couldn’t be bothered to schedule an appointment:

Two judges dismissed charges Wednesday against the defendants in the New Mexico compound case that has drawn headlines for weeks for its lurid and racially charged details, in a major blow to the prosecution.

Judge Emilio Chavez said that he had no choice but to release the three defendants, Lucas Morton, Hujrah Wahhaj and Subhannah A. Wahhaj, because the office of District Attorney Donald Gallegos failed to schedule a court hearing to prove they had probable cause for their arrest within 10 days, as state rules stipulate, according to court representatives and defense lawyers.

I’m generally not a conspiratorial minded individual but in this case I wouldn’t be surprised if District Attorney Gallegos received a phone call from an agent of a federal three letter agency who informed him that the individuals his people arrested were federal assets (either as part of an idiotic federal law enforcement operation or an equally idiotic foreign proxy war, not that Gallegos would have been told either way) and that the case against them needs to be mishandled (because the story gained too much press for the charges to merely be dropped). It seems extremely unlikely to me that a district attorney would fumble the opportunity to make a name for himself by going after reviled criminals who received wall-to-wall national media coverage.

Security Theater Is Expensive

During the Super Bowl Minneapolis was effectively turned into a giant prison camp. Barriers were erected, snipers were positioned, Humvees were cruising around, and heavily militarized law enforcers from numerous agencies were marching around. While all of that security theater may have looked impressive, it was also expensive:

The department is expected to spend $175.6 million for the fiscal year, coming in at $1.9 million over its $173.7 million budget, according to new projections from the city’s finance department. The projections were a part of a second quarter 2018 financial report presented to the Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday.

“The Police department expects to come in $1.9 million over budget due to payments to other agencies and overtime related to the Super Bowl and SWAT for the X-Games,” read an earlier draft of the report released on Monday. In the final version that was presented at Ways & Means, the wording was revised to “large planned events.”

It’s a good thing that Minneapolis has so many tax cattle to make up for this shortfall. It’s also a good thing that the National Football League was able to subsidize its security expenses by shoving a huge chunk onto the tax cattle. And let’s be honest here, you can’t put a price on the the convenience of the super wealthy tax cattle being able to attend the big game without the hassle of flying to it on their personal jet.

There Have Been Over 1 Billion Zillion School Shootings

It’s no secret that gun control advocates outright lie about the number of school shootings. What is kind of surprising though is that their lies have become so onerous that even their sympathizers at National Public Radio (NPR) had to call bullshit:

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

The key to telling a convincing lie is that it should be believable. If, for example, you want to make the number of school shootings appear higher than it actually is, you should keep your inflated number within the realm of possibility. If there were only 11 shootings, you might want to keep your inflated number under 20. Inflating your number to 240 is going to raise a lot of red flags and people will likely investigate your claim.

This story also illustrates the fact that numbers reported by government agencies shouldn’t be treated as gospel. I know most, if not all, of my readers are aware of this fact but there are a lot of people out there who still believe that the government is a neutral entity that has no motivate to lie and therefore its reported numbers are accurate.

Taking a Plea Bargain Doesn’t Imply Guilt

Reality Winner, who has a rather unfortunate name considering her current circumstances, has plead guilty to alerting the public to surveillance being perpetrated against them by the National Security Administration (NSA):

A former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who admitted passing secret information to the media has been sentenced to more than five years.

Reality Winner, 26, had faced up to 10 years in prison, but this was reduced to 63 months under a plea deal.

I won’t use the word guilty in her case because I think that it’s time to admit that if somebody is found “guilty” because they took a plea bargain, they probably only admitted guilt because they were under duress and since no trial occurred, they weren’t proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Imagine being trapped in a similar situation. Say a prosecutor is threatening you with 10 years in prison if you’re found guilty by a legal system that is heavily stacked against you. However, the prosecutor is willing to cut you a deal. If you make their life easier by admitting guilt, you will only suffer five years in prison. Can you say for certain that you would choose to take your case to court?

Spend a bit of time really considering the scenario. The court where your case will be tried is part of the same government that you’re accused of wronging. The judge who will preside over your case is also an employee of that government. The prosecution will try to get any jurors who might be sympathetic to your cause removed from the pool and the judge will then lie to the jurors by instructing them that they must rule on the letter of the law. Oh, and the agency that you’re accused of wronging controls one of the world’s largest surveillance apparatuses and there is no telling how much information they have about you (this is especially important because the reason you’re accused of wrongdoing is that you were trying to inform the public about the agency’s illegal use of its surveillance powers). It’s easy to see why an accused individual might consider that an unwinnable situation.

People take plea bargains all the time because they look at situations like this and realize that their chances of winning are almost nonexistent, not because they’re actually guilty of the crimes they’re accused of perpetrating.

Pointless Judicial Decrees

A bunch of states decided to sue Cody Wilson’s company Defense Distributed after the Justice Department gave up its futile fight against the company. As part of this ongoing lawsuit a federal judge has extended the ban against Defense Distributed distributing its 3D printer designs for firearms:

A federal judge in Seattle issued an injunction today that blocks Defense Distributed from publishing its 3D-printed gun designs online. The move extends a temporary ban issued last month and the injunction will remain in place until a lawsuit brought forth by a number of state attorneys general is resolved. Washington, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oregon, Maryland and Washington, DC signed onto the suit last month in an effort to reverse a US Department of State settlement that allowed the 3D gun designs to be published online. Eleven additional states joined the lawsuit earlier this month.

Gun control advocates, who have never been the sharpest tools in the shed, are celebrating this ruling. In their fantasy land where laws have power they view this judge’s ruling as a strike against 3D printed firearms. The problem is that this ruling, just like the previous ruling it extends, is meaningless because you can find the designs all over the Internet.

What gun control advocates and the states that are bringing this lawsuit against Defense Distributed fail to understand is that the gun control debate is over. Once guns became data that could be uploaded to the Internet the ability to control them ceased to exist. It doesn’t matter what the outcome of this lawsuit is, the files released by Defense Distributed will remain available.

Stupid Shit Politicians Say

The Australian government is once again pushing to make effective cryptography illegal by demanding that companies that utilize cryptography compromise their security model by implementing some kind of government backdoor. If you have any familiarity with cryptography, you know that what the Australian government wants, a backdoor that ensures only law enforcers and authorized individuals can access the encrypted information, is impossible. Once you compromise a cryptographic protocol, anybody who discovers the compromise can bypass the encryption as well.

However, that fact is merely a mathematical law. As the Australian prime minister noted, the laws of mathematics don’t apply in his country:

“Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” he said.

This realization will put Australia decades if not centuries ahead of other nations. Imagine how quickly Australia’s space program will advance when the politicians prohibit gravity and therefore eliminate the need for expensive rockets to reach space! Imagine how quickly the country’s electronics manufacturing market will advance when the politicians rule the laws of energy illegal and all of their electronics can run indefinitely without needing to be recharged! Now that Australia can simply render natural laws null and void with the stroke of a pen, there’s nothing the country can’t achieve!

Living in the Freest Country on Earth

A lot of people living here in the United States remain adamant that it is the freest country on Earth. Even those who don’t believe that it is the freest country on Earth are skittish about calling it a police state. However, I can’t think of any other term that describes the state of a nation where this kind of nonsense takes place:

Los Angeles will be the first US city to start equipping its subways with body scanners. But the Southern California metropolis isn’t using the bulky, slow-operating models that populate US airports: Instead, LA’s Metropolitan Transit Authority will deploy portable trunk-sized scanners that can survey people from 30 feet away at a rate of 2,000 individuals an hour.

This shouldn’t surprise anybody. When the Transportation Security Administration installed body scanners at airports, there was a short period where people expressed outrage at the idea. After that short period almost everybody rolled over and accepted it. Now that practice is coming to subways in Los Angeles and I predict a similar result. There will be a short period of outrage but everybody will roll over like the good little slaves they are in short order. Then this system will come to trains (including municipal light rail) and buses and eventually you won’t be able to go anywhere without being subjected to a full body scan.