Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.

Add this story to the reasons you can’t trust anybody these days. A man who was charged with being a terrorist, although he committed no crimes related to terrorism, was first tortured in a South Carolina military prison. After that he was sent to the court system where he was threatened with a life sentence. In 2007 he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. But the justice system is a funny thing and the rules can change on a whim, which is what happened:

MIAMI (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge in Miami re-sentenced Jose Padilla on Tuesday to 21 years for a 2007 terrorism conviction after an appeals court deemed the original 17-year sentence too lenient.

Now instead of the original 17 years he going to be locked in a cage for 21 years. His crimes? Conspiracy to commit crimes, which means he didn’t actually commit a crime but the state merely said he was planning to do so:

Padilla, an al Qaeda recruit and the first U.S. citizen labeled an enemy combatant, was convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people abroad, as well as providing material support for terrorism.

He was accused of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States. In all likelihood the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested him when he turned out to be too smart to actually press the button on the fake detonator for the fake bomb supplied to him by the agency in another one of its fake terrorist bomb plots.

I Understand that Words are Hard But Dictionaries are a Thing

As somebody who uses words everyday I understand that they can be difficult. Sometimes you think of the perfect word to make your smartass zinger shine but are uncertain if you’d be using it in the correct context. For those situations there are these things called dictionaries. In fact if you go to Google and type “define:word” you will be greeted with the definition of “word”. Because this wonderful technology known as a dictionary exists I’m not terribly forgiving when people totally fuck up their word usage in a professional piece of writing. So when I saw this petition claiming to oppose a federal takeover of the Internet I realized that the author doesn’t know how some very basic works work:

Dear Mr. Wheeler,

Americans have been getting faster and faster Internet speeds because of competition in the free economy, not because of anything the government has done.

To which I ask, what competition? What free economy? This is one of the biggest problems with the net neutrality debate. One side wants to use the state to mandate net neutrality and the other side has no fucking clue how Internet provision works in this country. There is very little competition in the Internet provision market specifically due to government regulations. In the current environment a handful of companies such as Comcast, Century Link, AT&T, and Verizon have near monopolies, if not outright monopolies, in many areas. People who are really lucky may have two Internet Service Providers (ISP) to choose from but that’s not always the case. Thanks to lobbying efforts by large ISPs the option for communities to build their own ISP isn’t even legal in many areas.

If you think the net neutrality debate is currently between a government regulated market or a free market then you have no clue what’s going on. The debate is between a government regulated market or a government regulated market with the only question being what set of regulations should be used to fuck the American people. Don’t fall for ploys like this petition that claim to support a free market in Internet provision. A free market isn’t even an option on the table at this point and the only people who claim it is are shills for large cable providers that are trying to sucker free market advocates into supporting their own subjugation.

Some Things Never Go Out of Style

Thanks to the shitstorm in Ferguson, Missouri people are not noticing that the Department of War Defense has been giving and awful lot of military equipment to local law enforcers. I’m not sure why local law enforcers need armored personnel carriers and machine guns to write speeding tickets, parking citations, and other types of revenue generating fines but I’m at an even bigger loss to understand what local law enforcers are going to do with goddamned bayonets:

NPR recently published an in-depth report on the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, cataloging every military item sent to law enforcement agencies from 2006 through April 23, 2014. Vox pointed out the fact that the cache of weapons donated to local cops included 11,959 bayonets.

Maybe they need them to conserve ammo by stabbing family pets during no-knock raids. Perhaps local law enforcers have found that shooting family pets kills the poor creature too quickly so they want to option to affix bayonets so they can kill it in a way that prolongs the agony. Or local law enforcers may just want them because they think they make them appear more intimidating. Regardless I’m not sure what they’re going to do with fucking bayonets but I do know that it won’t be good for you or me.

Your Daily Fear My Fellow Minnesotans

Are you afraid? If you’re not you should be. Why? Because the anarchists the communists the drug cartels the illegal immigrants al-Qaeda al-Shabaab the Islamic State (IS) is coming to get you!

ST. PAUL, Minn. (KMSP) – Bob Fletcher once held the title of Ramsey County sheriff, and he’s reaching out to his law enforcement contacts again because he believes America should be on guard for a new kind of terror attack. This week, Fletcher sent out a bulletin to police agencies to warn them about a new kind of car bomb that has its own brochure.

Al Qaeda published the document, titled “Car Bombs Inside America,” as a step-by-step guide. The detail is amazing, but aside from instructing people to use propane tanks and an oxygen cylinder to create the destructive device, the publication also gives recommendations for targets — including Times Square, casinos in Las Vegas, and oil trains.

Oops, my mistake. It was al-Qaeda this time, not the IS (seriously, Bob Fletcher really missed an opportunity to cash in on the current fear). But they’re supposedly going to come to Minnesota and pull a Time Square bomb here. Which means that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) will have to find some schmuck with lukewarm intelligence, radicalize him, claim he joined al-Qaeda, and and give him a fake bomb so it can arrest him when he presses the detonator and make itself look like a hero.

Mr. Fletcher, if you’re reading this (which you may very well be since I’m sure I’m the kind of guy you try to make people afraid of), please note that nobody is afraid of an FBI created bomb plot anymore. Nor is anybody going to take the threat of al-Qaeda with car bombs seriously because, let’s fact it, that scenario is pretty ridiculous. And next time make sure your boogeyman is up to day. It’s embarrassing to see law enforcement agents mention al-Qaeda when the IS is the new hotness in fear.

California Finally Addressed One of the State’s Most Important Issues

California has a lot of issues. It has a notably high unemployment rate, getting a carry permit is entirely at the mercy of whatever tyrannical sheriff you’re unfortunate enough to live under, its tax rates are absurdly high, and San Fransisco is there. But there is one major problem that has affected the lives of every citizen of that forsake stretch of land that gone unaddressed… until now!

The California Assembly on Monday passed legislation that would ban the state from selling or displaying the Confederate flag, or any similar image, with Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly casting the sole vote in opposition.

Thank almighty Cthulhu that that’s finally been taken care of! But I noticed that the prohibition suspiciously doesn’t apply to the Nazi flag. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

Citizen Patrol Aimed at Defending Against Police Shootings

Neighborhood watch, as it currently exist in the United State, is a concept born of the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese. The watches were created in response to the lack of intervention from onlookers of the crime. Today there are still groups of individuals who patrol their neighborhoods in the hopes of preventing crime. But there is one crime most neighborhood watches fail to consider. Shooting by the largest violent gang operating in our neighborhoods, the police, often go unchallenged by neighborhood watches. A group of individuals in Dallas are looking to change that. They have established a neighborhood watch expressly for the purpose of protecting the people from the police:

A new group calling itself the Huey P. Newton Gun Club launched armed self-defense patrols Wednesday with one stated purpose: to protect Dallas neighbors from police.

Group leader Charles Goodson said recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri over the killing of an unarmed black teen named Michael Brown by a white police officer is only part of the reason for the new Dallas patrols.

The group is named after Huey P. Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s who was killed by a rival militant in 1989.

“We don’t think that what happened to Michael Brown in St. Louis is an isolated incident. We have so many Michael Browns here in the city of Dallas,” Goodson said.

Another leader, Huby Freeman, said the group wants to educate neighbors about the right to bear arms and the need for it.

“We believe we can police ourselves and bring security to our community, ridding our community of black-on-black crime, violence, police terror, etc., etc.,” Freeman said.

Police brutality is a major problem in this country and it’s nice to see people looking for a solution other than begging the state to be a little less vicious. It’s unfortunate but police officers are unlikely to face consequences for committing acts of murder. Even if evidence against an officer is damning it’s common for him or her to receive a paid vacation and then get reinstated once the media is no longer covering the event. Once in a great while an officer will get fired from the department but that’s a rare enough occurrence to almost be relegated for folklore.

Who watches the watchmen? In most cases nobody. But if this idea takes off there could be watchmen overseeing the watchmen and that could decrease police brutality. If nothing else it would be nice if there were neighborhood watches that would intervene when police officers decided to go all ‘roid rage on somebody.

Off With His Head

Without the police who would decapitate the illegal chickens and leave the heads behind to traumatize children:

Ashley Turnbull said she knows she violated the city’s ordinance that prohibits fowl and acknowledges she was told Aug. 7 by police to remove the three chickens and two ducks.

But she said Police Chief Trevor Berger went too far when he came onto her property about a week later, when nobody was home, and clubbed, killed and decapitated a small, red hen with a shovel.

The fact that the officer snuck onto the property, clubbed the chicken to death, and beheaded it already raised the creepy factor to 10. But the officer took it to 11 when he justified his actions:

Berger said killing the chicken was justified.

“It’s against city ordinance for a chicken to be in the city and running around in people’s yards,” he said.

Because clubbing and beheading the chicken was the only conceivable solution to the problem of illegal chicken ownership. The officer couldn’t have called animal control to capture the bird or arranged for a nearby farmer to take it in. Nope. It had to be decapitated!

This is the problem with modern policing. Violence is its tool and we’re all nails. Modern policing has become almost entirely about law enforcement instead of protecting people and property. When you consider that all laws, and there are a lot of fucking laws, are enforced at the point of a gun this prioritization isn’t ideal for anybody but the state and its cronies.

A Scared Citizen is a Good Citizen

The Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria (ISIS), has been front page material for weeks now. After being unable to make citizens fear Iran and North Korean and only having moderate success at making citizens fear Vladimir Putin the state and its corporate media partners have been trying to make the IS the thing for fashionable citizens to be afraid of. But the IS is way the fuck over in the Middle East so why should an American citizen fear it? Here we see Allen West, one of the state’s most effective agents at instill fear in the hearts of neocons, entering stage right:

Judicial Watch reports that ”Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED).”

“High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat. Specifically, the government sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas.”

This article combines the IS, illegal immigration, and drug cartels into one giant fear smoothy! Oh, I also forgot to mention, that it is almost certainly bullshit. Why would Mexican drug cartels, which are not exactly apostles of Islam, work with an organization that seems bent on destroying anything not Islam? If the only answer you can come up with is “Because drug cartels hate Americans.” then you don’t understand how drug cartels work. Americans are their biggest source of revenue. The last thing they want is for their customers to get slaughtered en masse, which the IS is supposedly interested in doing.

Another question one should be inclined to ask is why anybody would give weight to a government terror warning. Since 9/11 this country has lived in a constant state of terror warnings. Statistically if we looked at the number of terror warnings issued since 9/11 versus the number of actual instances of terrorism in this country we would see that the percentage is almost in the negative (for those of you who don’t believe I understand how percentages work please look up hyperbole)!

But the state needs a scared citizenry. Tyrannical bullshit is very hard to sell by itself. That’s why tyrannical acts are usually preceded by a period of fear mongering. The United States government has been trying to get widespread support from the citizenry to turn this country into a prison. We’re told that our “unprotected” border will let communists (removed from the latest version of the Newspeak Dictionary) violent drug cartels, terrorists, and other people who want to kill every American across. And since the threats looking to cross today are far more dangerous than the nuclear armed militaries that were supposedly trying to cross previously we’re also told that the police must be militarized. Supposedly if our police officers aren’t roaming the streets in armored personnel carriers, clad in body armor, and armed with machine guns we’re all going to be killed by terrorists!

But fences, guard towers, and barbed wired are interesting in their ability to equally keep things outside of an area and inside of an area. The more secure a border becomes the more difficult it is to cross it when escape is your goal. Uprising are also more difficult to successfully pull off when you’re facing a force that is much better armed than yours. People know this, which is why selling tyranny is difficult unless you have a good pitch. Fear is probably the best pitch of them all.

Whenever you hear people like Allen West, Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer talk about why you should be afraid of the week’s boogeyman just remember that their revenue is generated by generating fear. Fear leads to page clicks, video views, and better Nielsen ratings. They’re also in, what George Carlin referred to as, the big club. If you’re in the big club the tyrannical shit being enacted by the state doesn’t impact you. But we’re not in the big club so we should be wary of people peddling fear because what they claim we need sure as the hell will impact us.

If You Don’t Like It, You Can Leave! But You Have to Pay.

The go to retort for many self-proclaimed patriots who find themselves unable to argue against a criticism against their beloved mother land is “If you don’t like, you can leave!” This seems like the ultimate way to shutdown an argument because anybody who doesn’t like the United States is free to leave whenever they want. OK, that’s not entirely true. Anybody who can afford to pay the government off is free to leave and its price just went way the fuck up:

To leave America, you generally must prove 5 years of U.S. tax compliance. If you have a net worth greater than $2 million or average annual net income tax for the 5 previous years of $157,000 or more for 2014 (that’s tax, not income), you pay an exit tax. It is a capital gain tax as if you sold your property when you left. At least there’s an exemption of $680,000 for 2014. Long-term residents giving up a Green Card can be required to pay the tax too.

Now, the State Department interim rule just raised the fee for renunciation of U.S. citizenship to $2,350 from $450. Critics note that it’s more than twenty times the average level in other high-income countries. The State Department says it’s about demand on their services and all the extra workload they have to process people who are on their way out.

Leaving the land of the free isn’t free, which really refutes the claim that the United States is the land of the free. In the government’s eyes every citizen is property. If you pay it enough money is may be so kind as to grace you with the privilege of leaving but your taxes had damn well better be in order first.

This is why I usually refute “If you don’t like it, you can leave!” with “I can’t afford to leave so you’re stuck with me.”

Now We Know Why John McCain Discussed with ISIS

Last year John McCain sneaked across the Syrian border to hold a meeting with some of the country’s rebels. As it turns out some of those rebels ended up in ISIS. While we didn’t know what he discussed with the rebels at the time we now know:

At least four hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State, including an American journalist who was recently executed by the group, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, according to people familiar with the treatment of the kidnapped Westerners.

If anybody knows how to waterboard people it’s John McCain!