Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 136

680,000 Names on the Government’s Various Terrorist Watch Lists

When the government announced the Terrorist Screening Database (TSD), which is the source for the various terrorist watch lists, most people probably assume that it would only contain a handful of names. After all, if the government had evidence that somebody is a terrorist they would arrest them, right? Wrong. As it turns out there are 680,000 names in the TSD and almost half of them aren’t believed to be affiliated with any known terrorist organization:

Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.

Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

Now we know for a fact that the database has nothing to do with people affiliated with known terrorist organizations. That means everybody is a potential terrorist. What’s even funnier (in a sick sort of way) is that the man who promised to save us from George W. Bush’s police state is responsible for most of the names appearing in the database:

The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.

This is why I laugh every time somebody tells me that we live in the freest country on Earth. Only a police state could have a list 680,000 names long of suspected enemies. I wonder if getting on the list qualifies an individual as a potential drone target.

The Next Front in the State’s War Against the Homeless

That state has been waging an ongoing war against the homeless for decades. The reasons for this are obvious, the homeless don’t have anything for the state to steal so the state would rather the homeless be wiped out. Fortunately for the homeless genocide is frowned upon but that doesn’t mean they’re safe. Most major cities have made the acts of being homeless and aiding the homeless crimes. The next front in the state’s war is criminalizing sleeping in vehicles:

The ban on sleeping in your car or truck is a downright trend with the number of laws criminalizing the action exploding by 119 percent since 2011 — a growth rate higher than any other anti-homeless law.

Sleeping in your car is illegal even in progressive cities such as Minneapolis. In Palo Alto, where rent is two and half times the national average and there are only 15 shelter beds to accommodate a homeless population estimated at 150 people, the city has made sleeping in “one’s own private vehicle a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to six months in jail,” the report’s authors wrote.

What I took away from this article is that being homeless is a crime and you don’t own your car. Of course nobody is allowed to own any property in this country. We are only allowed to possess certain items for limited periods of time. The second you fail to pay property taxes on your home you lose it. If a cop has decided that there may have been unpatentable drugs in your car they get to take it under civil forfeiture laws. Owning a firearm is a privilege that will be taken from you the second you commit a felony, which almost all of us commit daily. And now many cities won’t let you sleep in your car without threatening to take your money (and probably your car) and tossing you in a cage because some people who sleep in their car are homeless and the state wants to make the lives of the homeless miserable.

Down the Memory Hole

In the book 1984 the Party uses a device called a memory hold to dispose of information that it wants censored. A little known fact is that the United States government (and probably every other government) also have memory holes in the form of classified information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently got to see this wonderful eraser of information as the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to rewrite the history of a court transcript:

On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.

Read the story, it’s an eye opener if you’re one of those poor unfortunate souls who still trusts the state. What’s more worrisome is that an unknown number of court case transcripts may have been altered in the past. In other words even the reliability of the judicial system is in question in this country. It’s pretty hard to set precedents when the information regarding a case is classified.

More Puppycide

At this point news articles about cops killing dogs is a daily event. But this story has an interesting slant:

David Kuge, the county’s chief probation officer, said two officers were contacting a post-release offender on Sequoia Drive in Oildale.

The officers rattled the gate to see if dogs would come out. They had previously been told that there were dogs at the home, and that the dogs would bite, according to Kuge.

No dogs initially came running, so the officers entered the yard. That’s when two dogs came out of the pet door.

One officer got out of the yard. The other officer was trapped and shot one of the dogs four times, because he felt threatened, according to Kuge.

How did the one officer become trapped in the yard? The gate obviously opened both ways since the other officer was able to get out. Was the second officer holding the gate closed to troll his fellow? How tall was the fence and gate? Since they officers could likely see over it since they noticed no dogs came out when they rattled the gate I’m lead to believe it was short enough to jump over. Was the officer who got out of the fenced area pushing his partner back into the fenced area? Seriously, this story is fishier than the coast of Iceland.

They Grow Up So Fast

It was only 66 years ago that Israel was born. But is has grown up so fast! Since its inception it has basically condensed the progress of most westernized nations into less than a single century. Israel is now catching up to its family members such as the United States and Britain by moving to severely restrict the freedom of speech and association:

The bill proposed by MK Pnina Tamnu-Shata (Yesh Atid) would forbid discrimination in providing a product or service or in entering a public place against soldiers and members of other security and rescue forces such as the police, firefighters, prison guards and Magen David Adom staff.

Tamnu-Shata presented the bill to the Knesset, saying that in recent years, discrimination against people in uniform has become a growing phenomenon.

[…]

“Unfortunately, we all saw the demonstrations in which people held signs with hollow slogans against IDF soldiers or articles by people like [farleft Haaretz columnist] Gideon Levy [who wrote that all IAF pilots are war criminals],” Tamnu-Shata said. According to the lawmaker, there is “wild incitement” against soldiers that could turn into actions.

“We must set limits for words of incitement against soldiers.

Military worship? Check. Restrictions on the freedom of association? Check. Stomping on the freedom of speech? Check. And it’s all compressed into a single piece of legislation! That’s the type of government efficiency you don’t see anymore.

We Built This

As most of you probably realize I’m a huge fan of history. I love reading about it, talking about it, and visiting historical sites. That’s why reports like this really piss me off:

Iraq’s religious and cultural heritage is currently under attack from the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), report sources including Newsweek and Hyperallergic. The group has bulldozed, blown up, or otherwise destroyed churches, shrines, and mosques across the country, as well as ancient statues, artifacts, and archeological sites.

During the last Republican National Convention the party used the theme “We Built This!” And they certainly did build this. ISIS is the result of the United States stomping into Iraq, under false pretenses, and topple a horrible dictatorship only to replace it with another arguably more horrible dictatorship. That’s a recipe for large gangs of zealous thugs to gain support and begin a war. There also seems to often be a correlation between the viciousness of a current state and the viciousness of the revolutionaries fighting it. ISIS is one vicious group of assholes and we built it. It’s too bad we can’t rebuild the history being destroyed by what we built though.

Privileges of Position

Several episodes of Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast covered the fall of the Roman Empire. In it one of the facts that I found interesting was that Roman politicians were immune from lawsuits for acts they performed until they left office. Because of this politicians often sought to remain in office simply to avoid the slew of lawsuits that they knew awaited them upon exiting. Our country isn’t that dissimilar except members of the government are usually immune from lawsuits for acts performed in office for the entirety of their lives. Which leads to some rather interesting situations:

Judge Wade McCree first made headlines when he sexted a shirtless selfie to a female bailiff back in 2012. Then, McCree had a sexual relationship with Geniene La’Shay Mott while overseeing her child support case.

McCree sexted Mott from the bench and had sex with her in his chambers. During this time, he ordered Robert King, the father of Mott’s child, to pay child support and to wear an electronic tether.

King sued McCree, but a court ruled that he could not be sued because of the immunity doctrine, which says that in order for judges to remain impartial, they must be immune from lawsuits.

A judge must be immune from lawsuits to remain impartial but he’s totally remaining impartial in a divorce hearing when he’s banging one of the divorcees. It really is good to be in the service of the king. Perhaps it’s time I sold out, gave up this whole anarchism thing, and got a sweet job with the state that allowed me to abuse my power without consequence. That pay and benefits are usually pretty stellar as well (especially when you consider you don’t actually have to do anything useful).

San Diego Police Department’s Ploy to Bypassed Strip Club’s Cover Charge Results in Lawsuit

There are so many excellent jokes that could be made from this article:

Nothing screams “fuck the police” quite as much as a few dozen strippers slapping the San Diego Police Department with a fat lawsuit this month. The suit refers to an incident back in March, when ten police officers—who were armed and wearing raid vests—busted into Cheetahs Gentlemen’s Club in San Diego and allegedly harassed the strippers for nearly two hours. The media has made this out to seem like an isolated incident, but this kind of behavior is pretty standard for the SDPD’s vice unit, which is the law enforcement equivalent of a bunch of party-hungry frat bros.

[…]

Brittany Murphy is a dancer at Cheetahs who told me that the police raid left her feeling “creeped out” and “humiliated.” Murphy doesn’t have any tattoos, but the officers insisted on taking photos of her anyway. She was wearing the outfit she wears when she dances: two sheer leotards layered on top of each other.

“The flash was going off, and I’m sure they could see my nipples,” she told me. “I mean, I am a stripper, but… there were girls ahead of me who were saying, ‘Do you have to do this?’ and the police officers, like, reached for their gun holsters, in a threatening way. Like, what are you going to do, shoot her if she doesn’t take semi-naked photos?”

Another San Diego club, Exposé, reported similar harassment from the police during an inspection, and now 30 strippers from both clubs are suing the SDPD for violating their Fourth Amendment rights.

But I think I’ll take the high road and discuss the irony in this paragraph:

The vice unit is a special division of the police force that maintains regulatory control over “morality crimes” like underage drinking and prostitution. Vice detectives basically spend their week attending peep shows and strip clubs, hanging out in bars, searching for prostitutes on Craigslist, and cruising down El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego’s famous hangout for hookers.

Having police enforce “morality crimes” is kind of like having foxes guard hen houses. Modern policing is about the most amoral thing there is. They wield civil forfeiture laws to steal property from people who haven’t even been convicted of a crime, shoot family pets during no-knock raids, beat people whose skin contains a bit too much melanin, expropriate wealth from motorists, and otherwise be amoral individuals. Unlike police officers, strippers provide a service that people voluntarily pay them for. If anything the strippers should be overseeing police departments. This country has it all backwards.

That Was Fast

No sooner did the Washington DC Police Chief issue his troops orders to not arrest people lawfully carrying firearms within the city in response to a recent lawsuit lawful carry in that city was gone again:

A federal judge on Tuesday granted a 90-day stay in a ruling that upended the District’s ban on carrying handguns in public, giving city officials time to consider whether they will appeal the case or concede and begin drafting gun carry laws.

The breathing room was a relief to local leaders who indicated they might craft legislation in response to the ruling, which deemed it unconstitutional to deny individuals the right to carry guns on city streets.

I doubt anybody is surprised by this. I’m sure the city officials will be busy writing the most restrictive carry laws they can during this 90 day grace period. While the complete prohibition against carrying was ruled unconstitutional there is no reason why Washington DC won’t be able to follow in the footsteps of Hawaii and create a shall issue system that only allows those especially favored by the state to obtain permits.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if the city officials decided to appeal the decision. The rulers of Washington DC never struck me as a group that liked the idea of armed slaves living within its borders. We will probably see every trick in the book pulled out to ensure the status quo remains.

Be Careful in Constitution Free Zones

According to the United States government everything within 100 miles of this country’s imaginary lines (often mistakenly referred to as a border) is a “Constitution free zone”. What this means is that the government can’t even be bothered to pretend to abide by the very document it created when it gave itself absolute power. So anybody living within 100 miles of this country’s imaginary lines, which is approximately two thirds of the country’s population, has fewer privileges than normal. For example, photographing Border Patrol agents inside of the “Constitution free zone” will result in your staring at the business end of a gun held by a Border Patrol agent:

About 10 days into the trip, an innocent action by one of the nearly two dozen Scouts at the Canadian border into Alaska set off a chain of events that lead to a U.S. border official pointing a gun at a scout’s head.

[…]

Fox said one of the Scouts took a picture of a border official, which spurred agents to detain everyone in that van and search them and their belongings.

“The agent immediately confiscated his camera, informed him he would be arrested, fined possibly $10,000 and 10 years in prison,” Fox said.

Just another day living under the most transparent government in history! This story should be a lesson though. Being a good citizen means doing what you’re told and not questioning authority. Good citizens are rewarded by being allowed to live, bad citizens get put down. So be a good citizen. Don’t question police actions, do rat out any of your friends who are committing acts of wrongthink, and don’t photograph the police. Failure to abide by the rules of good citizenry may result in your immediate termination.