Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 141

Is Your Neighbor a Snitch

There are tradeoffs to anywhere you live. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates. But wealthier neighborhoods tend to have a more insidious problem: snitches. You know the type, a nosy neighbor who calls the city if they notice anything they don’t like about a neighbor’s property. Brian Collins decided to put up one of those adorable little free libraries that you see springing up throughout metropolitan areas. They’re little more than cabinets where people can withdraw and deposit books. Usually they’re based on the honor system where for every book you take you leave one in its place. But the city recently caught wind of Mr. Collins’ free library and told him that it had to go:

LEAWOOD, KS (KCTV) – Can a library be illegal? The City of Leawood says yes.

Little Free Libraries are popping up across the metro. They allow book lovers to borrow and share their favorite books whenever they want.

“We came back to find a letter from the code enforcement telling us it was an illegal dwelling or structure,” Brian Collins said.

Whenever city officials move in on little things like this it’s always in response from a neighborhood snitch. Can you spot the snitch in this story? There he is:

Not everyone thinks it’s fun. Another neighbor told KCTV5 off camera he’s glad the city is making Collins remove the library because he believes it’s an eyesore for the neighborhood.

And like any neighborhood snitch he’s too much of a chickenshit to reveal his identity. As the popular saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice thing. These free libraries are a neat idea that I believe promote literacy. They offer a free, convenient way for people in a neighborhood to share books. But every neighborhood has that one asshole who calls the city whenever he sees something he doesn’t expressly approve of, regardless of how petty his complaint is.

Hillary is Turning Out to Be the Ideal Republican Candidate

I feel bad for whoever gets the Republican Party presidential nomination next election. Not only will they have the misfortune of being the nominee for the more incompetent of the two parties but they will most likely be going up against the perfect Republican candidate, Hillary Clinton. Hillary has proven to be the neocon’s neocon. She revels in killing leaders of countries in the Middle East, has a legacy of war mongering, can’t managed finances, and is extremely insensitive regarding rape:

Hillary Clinton’s successful 1975 legal defense of an accused rapist has surfaced again with the victim, angered over a tape of Clinton chuckling over her courtroom tactics in the case, lashing out at the potential Democratic presidential candidate.

“Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” the victim told the Daily Beast in an emotional interview published today. The woman said that if she saw Clinton today she would say, “I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I heard you on tape laughing.”

The name of the woman, who is now 52, was withheld for privacy reasons. She decided to speak out after hearing never-before-heard audio tapes released by the Washington Free Beacon earlier this week of Hillary Clinton talking about the trial. In the recordings, dubbed the “Hillary Tapes,” Clinton is heard laughing as she describes how she succeeded at getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was guilty.

“He took a lie-detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton said about her client on the tapes, which were initially recorded, but never used, in the early 1980s.

Good luck finding a more perfect neocon, Republican Party.

But what will make this race even more interesting than the fact that the Democratic Party will almost certainly field a Republican candidate is how the social justice warriors will respond to this. Obviously the social justice warriors want a woman president, which will incline them to support Hillary. But they’re also against, what they call, the rape culture. I’m not scholar on rape culture but I would imagine getting a rapist off on a lighter sentence would certainly qualify. So what will the social justice warriors choose? Will they opt to support Hillary because they want a woman president or will they opt to oppose Hillary because she promoted the rape culture? Only time will tell.

War Criminal Calls Gun Rights Activists Terrorists, Irony So Thick You Can Cut It

The one thing I do enjoy about the upcoming presidential race is Hillary Clinton. She’s like a perpetual irony machine. Every time she opens her mouth to criticize somebody she dislikes she ends up saying something hypocritical. One group of people she really hates is us gun owners. So she takes every opportunity afforded to her to insult us. Most recently she called us a bunch of terrorists:

During a CNN “town hall” yesterday, Hillary Clinton said she was disappointed that Congress did not pass new gun control legislation following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in December 2012. “I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation,” said the former secretary of state and presumptive presidential candidate. “We cannot let a minority of people—and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people—hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

I wonder what minority holds more terroristic viewpoints. Gun owners who tend to be very peaceful or officials in the United States government who bomb foreign countries seemingly at random and then laugh about it (seriously, Hillary, that quote is the gift that keeps on giving)? Considering that I’ve never threatened anybody with violence nor wielded violence against another it’s pretty hard to say I’m terrorizing anybody. Hillary, on the other hand, was the head of the State Department for the government that, under the current administration, dropped bombs on civilians in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia (and probably a few other countries that I’ve forgotten about).

I’d say if any minority holds terroristic viewpoints it’s her and her cronies.

America’s Relationship with the Middle East Continues to Baffle Me

I know what you’re thinking after reading the title, who isn’t. But this recent situation in Iraq makes the past relationship look positively simple. Apparently the White House has decided that our puppet government in Iraq needs to get the fuck out:

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is signaling that it wants a new government in Iraq without Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, convinced the Shiite leader is unable to reconcile with the nation’s Sunni minority and stabilize a volatile political landscape.

The U.S. administration is indicating it wants Iraq’s political parties to form a new government without Mr. Maliki as he tries to assemble a ruling coalition following elections this past April, U.S. officials say.

Such a new government, U.S., officials say, would include the country’s Sunni and Kurdish communities and could help to stem Sunni support for the al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, that has seized control of Iraqi cities over the past two weeks. That, the officials argue, would help to unify the country and reverse its slide into sectarian division.

So we start a war with Iraq for no discernible reason other than our president at the time got a chubby whenever he ordered the invasion of a country and replace Saddam’s regime with a puppet government. All is well (as far as we’re concerned) and except for sporadic fighting that never ceased we declared the whole operation a gigantic success. Then we decided that we no longer want to sink money into the country so we pull out our combat troops, replace them with mercenaries from whatever the fuck Blackwater calls itself now, and kick back in our giganting embassy.

Things seem to be going fine until out of nowhere (nowhere being Middle Eastern slang for Saudi Arabia) this group called ISIS appears and begins wrecking our puppet government’s shit. On top of being surprisingly successful, ISIS also turn out to be total twats. In fact they’re such twats that Iran offers to put aside its past difference with the United States in order to stomp ISIS down. This news is so glorious that Britain says it will reopen its embassy in Iran. But now the White House wants to get rid of our puppet government and replace it with one that ISIS will find more agreeable.

I generally pride myself with having some understanding of who hates who in the Middle East. But right now I have no god damn clue who anybody, including ourselves, are allied with. The entire situation is a mess, which is why it’s a bad idea to meddle in the affairs of other countries.

That Whole Fair Trial Thing Was Woefully Out of Date Anyways

Do you remember that whole fair trial thing that people used to talk about? It involved zany things like the defendant being able to review all of the evidence that was going to be used to the prosecution. That mess lead to a lot of undesirable outcomes, namely people the state was targeting being found innocent of wrongdoing by a jury. Thankfully our benevolent overlords have corrected this problem and now allow the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defendant:

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled against terrorism suspect Adel Daoud, saying that he and his attorneys cannot access the evidence gathered against him. The Monday ruling overturns an earlier lower district court ruling that had allowed Daoud and his lawyers to review the legality of digital surveillance warrants used against him.

[…]

When Daoud’s lawyers discovered that this case involved secret evidence that they had not been privy to, they eventually asked the court to notify them if any evidence gathered had been done so under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order. Under the normal procedures of American jurisprudence, a defendant has the right to see the evidence against him or her and can challenge the basis on which such a warrant was authorized.

The government responded with its own affidavit from Attorney General Eric Holder, who told the court that disclosing such material would harm national security.

Now if we can just get rid of those inconvenient juries we will finally have a system that can throw anybody in prison for any reason whatsoever. I’m sure a convincing argument can be made for why juries are a threat to national security. After all a jury trial would involve 12 regular Americans hearing all of the evidence, which certainly qualifies as a threat to national security.

Shit like this is why I don’t take arguments claiming we need a government to administer justice seriously.

The Tor Challenge is Apparently Going Strong

On June 4^th the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) kicked off the Tor Challenge, which is its attempt to encourage more people to run Tor Relays. Running a relay is fun and easy to do but I never imagined that the Tor Challenge would be such a rousing success:

However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet:

“Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide. At what point does civil society say that as well as the benefits that brings, this enables huge risk and threat to our society that we need to take action against?”

The Tor is now 90% of the Internet?* Holy shit, that’s one hell of an increase since June 4^th! Congratulations to the EFF for transforming almost the entire Internet into an anonymous network in less than one month!

Seriously, this guy is a fucking tool who shouldn’t be allowed to head anything, let alone a crime unit focused on intellectual “property” violations.

* Just in case it’s unclear 90% of the Internet is not The Tor. The guy is simply an idiot.

Economy in a Slump? Just Blow Some Shit Up!

The New York Times, the same publication that gives Paul Krugman space to print is insanity, has a piece under the heading “The Pitfalls of Peace”. As you can imagine from a publication that gives Paul “Boost the Economy By Warring with Aliens” Krugman space, the article is about how war is good for the economy:

The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards. Some of the recent headlines about Iraq or South Sudan make our world sound like a very bloody place, but today’s casualties pale in light of the tens of millions of people killed in the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Even the Vietnam War had many more deaths than any recent war involving an affluent country.

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.

Emphasis mine. Let us start off with the obvious, if a state is at war it has already failed at the most basic of basics, not getting involved in a war. Wars are only good for two things: destruction and death. And not surprisingly both of those things are bad for the economy. Recreating that which was lost is not economic growth, creating new wealth is. And death is always bad for an economy because is reduces both the number of producers and consumers.

Now let’s get to the second point. According to the author war leads to an investment in science or a, pardon me because this is hard to say with a straight face, liberalizing of the economy. Science is not something that only gets invested in by the state nor only during a time of war. Science is constantly being invested in because science leads to better products. Without being engaged in an all encompassing war we have seen computers go from room sized monstrosities that could only perform a few tasks to devices that fit in our pockets and contain more computing power than their full sized brethren from only a decade back. There is a bitchin’ fully electric car on the market today. The private sector is closer to returning to space than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and it has a plan to mine asteroids for resources (seriously, how cool is that). Of course I don’t want to sell the state entirely short. As it is involved in several minor wars it is investing money into science. It currently possesses the best remotely controlled bombers on the planet! Granted, they’re not really good for anything productive but they exist and that counts for something.

We should also discuss the liberalization of the economy that supposedly occurs during a time of war. World War II, being the last all encompassing war, is a good example. Everything from metal to food to rubber were rationed for civilians so that those resources could be put into the war effort. Perhaps the author has a different definition of liberalize than I do.

Economists often discuss all of the scientific advancements that occur because of war. What they ignore are the scientific advancements made by the private sector regardless of war. The difference between the two methods of scientific investment is that the state focuses on impractical things whereas the private sector focuses on things the average person can fucking use. Give me better computers, cell phones, cars, and e-readers over remotely controlled bombers and aircraft carriers any day.

But, hey, nothing sounds better to the state than war being good for the economy. If there’s one thing the state is good at it’s war. Which is why it only hires economists who say war is good for the economy to its advisory boards.

Johnny Cannabis Seed

Some people in the United Kingdom have taken a page for Germany’s book and begun planting cannabis seeds everywhere:

However, since other places – notably Uruguay and the couple of newly weed-friendly American states – started decriminalising and legalising, British activists have stepped it up, uniting previously fractured groups together under the UK Cannabis Social Clubs banner. The most recent action to come out of the UKCSC camp is an initiative called Feed the Birds, which basically involves people up and down the country planting cannabis seeds in public places in the hope that it will open a dialogue about Britain’s current marijuana laws.

It’s a wonderful way to give the state a gigantic middle finger. But the icing on the cake is this:

Are there any planting spots you’re focusing on in London?

Yup, there are. All sorts of public spaces have been done already, all across London and the UK. I think in the month to come, when the plants start maturing, we’ll start seeing a lot more coverage. Also, to my knowledge, we’ve had a lot of the guerrilla cells targeting politicians’ houses. We’ve also had reports that there’s a grow on property owned by the crown. Hopefully we’ll see something come from that in the next couple of months.

That’s the way to do it. Plant cannabis seeds at the homes of politicians. Sadly they’re more or less immune from the war on drugs otherwise they would get a nice taste of a no-knock paramilitary police raid at two in the morning that ends with their dog getting shot and their newborn baby getting burned by a flashbang grenade. But it still sends a message about the futility of trying to control the spread of a weed.

US Marshals Auctioning Off 29,656.51306529 Bitcoin

Do you have $200,000? Are you registered to participating in auctions held by the United States Marshals Service? Have you been looking to buy a lot of Bitcoin? If you answered in the affirmative to all three then I have an auction for you:

This auction is for 9 blocks of 3,000 bitcoins (“Series A Blocks”) and 1 block of 2,656.51306529 bitcoins (“Series B Block”).

The Bitcoin were supposedly seized from Silk Road although the auction description specifically states that they are not the Dread Pirate Robert’s. What I find interesting is that no trial has been held regarding the Silk Road so I’m not sure how the seized property is being auctioned off. It’s almost as if the state can just take your shit and sell it without due process. But being the land of the free I know that we couldn’t possibly have some kind of civil forfeiture laws that allow the state to get away with such things.

As of this writing Bitcoin is hovering right around the $600 mark so, assuming the Marshals get around market value for the Bitcoin, the auction is looking to bring in approximately $17,793,907.839174. That’s a nice chunk of change.

The GOP Stupid Train; The Only Train in America the Run On Time

Will you look at the time, it’s almost Republican Candidate Says Something Stupid O’clock! Oh, and here’s the GOP stupid train right on time:

This week, an Oklahoma magazine discovered that last summer, Tea Party state House candidate Scott Esk endorsed stoning gay people to death: “I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” he said in a Facebook post. Esk went on to add nuance to his position:

That [stoning gay people to death] goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.

If you go to the source link you will see that this isn’t one of those instances where Slate took something a GOP candidate said way out of context. No. Mr. Esk actually said this shit! And then he calls himself largely libertarian.

But this is par for the course. The Republican Party has a long history of candidates who say really stupid shit in public.