Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Congress is Making the Big Sacrifices

The United States is faced with a several trillion dollar deficit. Truth be told this isn’t a big deal because this country’s debt is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, which is a euphemism for aircraft carriers, drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, and tanks. But Congress needs something to quibble about between their daily circlejerks so the deficit is brought up from time to time.

Every time the issue of the deficit is brought up Congress introduces some meaningless bill that is, at most, a symbolic gesture meant to make it appear as though they’re making major sacrifices. This time around the bill would prevent members of Congress from using tax victim money to buy first class airliner tickets:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced legislation aimed at preventing members of Congress from flying first class using taxpayer funds.

The bill, titled, “If Our Military Has to Fly Coach Then so Should Congress Act,” was introduced by Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Raul Ruiz, D-Calif.; John Barrow, D-Ga.; and Walter Jones, R-N.C., in a bid to end the purchase of first-class flight seats with taxpayer money.

“All it does is prohibit members of Congress from using taxpayer funds to purchase first class airfare,” Gosar said in a statement. “At a time of massive deficits and with a national debt in excess of $17 trillion, members of Congress should not be using taxpayers’ hard-earned money to buy luxury airline seats.”

You have to love how the authors were able to tied a bill restricting the flight arrangements of Congress to the military. Nothing gets people fired up quite like patriotism!

Much like the title the idea behind the bill is absurd for two reasons. First of all making members of Congress fly coach instead of first class isn’t going to put a noticeable dent in the deficit. We’re talking about a bill that could potentially save a couple of hundred dollars per flight per member of Congress. That amount of money isn’t even a blip on the radar when we’re talking about $17 trillion dollars.

But there’s another reason this bill is absurd. It doesn’t prevent members of Congress from utilize its fleet of private jets:

Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate jets by companies receiving taxpayer funds.

The purchases will help accommodate growing travel demand by congressional officials. The planes augment a fleet of about two dozen passenger jets maintained by the Air Force for lawmakers, administration officials and military chiefs to fly on government trips in the U.S. and abroad.

Who gives a damn about first class when you have a fleet of private jets? I’d much rather fly on a private jet than a public one anyways and I’m sure members of Congress feel the same way.

Well This Changes Everything

Remember the 7 year-old kid who was suspended from school because he ate his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun? Well new information has come to light that changes everything:

Laurie Pritchard, Anne Arundel’s director of legal services, said that the object central to the case had been misportrayed, as well as the reason for the discipline.

“First of all, it wasn’t a Pop-Tart,” she said. “It was a breakfast pastry. And he was not suspended because he chewed his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.” He was suspended for “an ongoing classroom disruption,” she said.

Holy shit, why weren’t we informed of this right away? If we had known he had shaped a breakfast pastry into a gun instead of a Pop-Tart we could have demanded the kid’s head!

OK, the actual content of the story isn’t quite that simple. But that quote was gold. The school is now trying to claim that the child was suspended because of a history of behavioral problems:

School officials produced a lengthy log of various types of incidents. They argued that they had made many efforts to address the boy’s behavioral issues. The family said they had not seen the list before and had been unaware of a number of the incidents.

There’s a problem with this narrative though. If he was suspended for a history of behavioral issues why was he not suspended during one of those incidents? Why did they choose an incident where the kid ate a Pop-Tart, sorry, breakfast pastry into a firearm to suspend him? Is eating food into abstract shapes a behavioral issue?

I’m sure the school will go to great extent to justify the suspension. We’ll probably be told that the kid held a black mass in the school cafeteria or something along those lines. School administrators don’t like to admit wrongdoing and will go to absolutely absurd lengths to throw their petty authority around.

Now I Don’t Want the Ability to Remotely Disable My Phone

I live in Minnesota, the state partially made famous for its oddball political atmosphere. This state is both the source of some pretty decent legislation (the legislation regulating our ability to carry a firearm is surprisingly good) and some absolutely atrocious legislation. This is an example of the latter:

A first-in-the nation measure would require smartphone manufacturers to install mandatory “kill switch” technology to deter thefts became law with Gov. Mark Dayton’s signature Wednesday.

“This is a very important step forward for protecting young people and protecting people of all ages,” Dayton said.

The law mandates that smartphone manufacturers equip their phones with the technology by July 1, 2015. The “kill switch” enables a smartphone owner to remotely disable a smartphone or tablet if it is lost or stolen, rendering the devices useless.

I carry an iPhone, which has the ability to be remotely disabled via my provisioning server. For me it’s a desired feature because I would like to render the device unusable should somebody steal it and, due to the fact that I have the feature tied to my provisioning server, the feature is entirely within my control. With that said, I do not want the inclusion of such a capability to be mandatory. There are a lot of legitimate reasons why an individual wouldn’t want such a capability.

First and foremost is that the capability will most commonly be in the hands of the phone manufacturer. Having somebody’s finger on your phone’s kill switch is generally a bad idea. Second if the ability to remotely kill a device exists in any form it’s possible that an unauthorized third-party will find a way to gain access to that feature. Political dissidents performing a protest probably don’t want devices that can be remotely disabled since there is always the possibility that the state they’re protesting against will pressure the manufacturer into disabling the dissidents’ devices.

And because this is a Minnesota bill it had to include an extra heap of stupidity:

The law also prohibits retailers from paying cash for used phones, rather than electronic transfer or check.

In other words if you sell your phone the government wants to know about it. This is just another step in the state’s desire to track all financial transactions. Like every previous step this one is being marketed as a method of help the people. But the first part of this legislation, the mandatory kill switch, renders the second part irrelevant because no retailer is going to buy a useless phone. So this part is entirely unnecessary in regards to protecting people against cell phone thefts.

The Level of Professionalism I Expect From the ATF

Yesterday morning people in Minneapolis who were traversing east on I-94 were in for delays. The police blocked off two lanes as it moved to arrest a man who reportedly brandished a firearm at another driver. As you can guess this headline got a few of the local gun control nuts riled up. This was exactly the event they were waiting for. One of those evil carry permit holders getting into a fit of road rage and threatening a fellow motorist with a firearm. Then the story was updated with information provided by the Minnesota State Patrol:

Police caught up to that driver on I-94 at Olson Hwy. and blocked two of the southbound lanes for a short time while making an arrest. That was enough to cause traffic to jam up back to West Broadway.

The State Patrol took the man with the gun into custody. He was questioned and released after officers learned he was an ATF agent who was carrying proper credentials.

Talk about a bummer. That update really killed the gun control nuts’ mojo (and I mean really killed it, as in the handful of comments I had collected to post here were tossed down the memory hole). But the update didn’t surprise me or any of my other gunnie friends. This is exactly the type of professionalism that we’ve come to expect from agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).

But the real icing on the cake, in my opinion, was how quickly the situation was swept under the rug:

His name was not released per Minnesota State Statue 13.82, which states that data would reveal the identity of an undercover law enforcement officer can be kept private.

Had you or I been accused of the same thing we’d be rotting in a cage. But since the suspect is an agent of the ATF he was not only released but his name was kept private. Service to the state has its privileges.

A Strange Coincidence

While I don’t subscribe to most of the zany explanations for it, I don’t believe the idea of synchronicity has something going for it. We often see multiple meaningfully related events that are unlikely to be causally related. Take the recent conflict in Ukraine that has rekindled that good old Cold War animosity between the United States and Russia. While the conflict wages on Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings, announced a meaningfully related new appointee to its Board of Directors:

Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director.

If Hunter’s last name sounds familiar it should. He’s none other than the son of the current vice presiden. It’s amazing how the son of this country’s vice president was able to get a seat on the Board of Directors of Ukraine’s largest oil producer at the same time as this nasty Cold War-esque conflict. But I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence and the United States’s involvement in Ukraine has nothing to do with this appointment.

Glenn Greenwald Demonstrates Leniency in Describing Hillary Clinton

Glenn Greenwald is a class act. The man manages to find very polite ways to describe horrible people. Read his recent interview with GQ. In it he describes Hillary Clinton and demonstrates a level of professionalism that I couldn’t achieve if asked to describe that war criminal:

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere.

Only one f-bomb? That’s being extremely charitable with Hillary. After all Greenwald is describing the same woman who was downright giddy over the killing of Gadaff. Just look at the joy on her face. That’s pretty sick. But Greenwald also hits another nail on the head during his interview:

But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.

I’m fairly certain his prediction is correct and Hillary will be the next president. Why? Because the Democratic Party has been fawning over her forever and the Republican Party is too incompetent to field a candidate that isn’t an equally horrific human being. And like racism with Obama, criticizing Hillary will end with accusations of misogyny (I’m going to criticize the every living fuck out of her anyways because I don’t give a damn about the opinions of her supporters).

I’m Not Sure Why She’s in Prison

There are times where I’m left completely baffled by a court decision (OK, truthfully it happens more often than not). Take the case of Maria del Carmen Garcia. When her daughter was 13 years-old she was raped. The rapist was sentenced to nine years in prison and was released on parol after seven. After being released the rapist ran into Maria:

While on parole he came in contact with Garcia after returning to the family’s hometown in Spain and asked her, “How’s your daughter?”

I’m sure running into her daughter’s rapist wasn’t a happy situation to begin with but asking how her daughter is doing is rubbing salt in an open wound. Maria then responded in a way that I feel was actually very lenient:

Locating the convicted rapist in a bar, she doused him with newly purchased petrol, and set him on fire, reports The Local. The man died a week later as a result of the burns.

Of all the horrible tortures she could have inflicted on her daughter’s rapist I must admit that dousing him with gasoline and lighting him ablaze was actually quite civil. It was certainly far better than the rapist deserved. Unfortunately the courts disagreed and decided locking Maria in prison was the best way to handle the situation. Initially she received a longer sentence than her rapist but at least the Spanish Supreme Court reduced it. Still the decision to cage Maria doesn’t appear to be very popular with the locals as thousands have signed a petition requesting clemency, which goes to show how popular people who rape children are.

The fact that Maria is sitting in a cage baffles me.

Technology Companies Defying the State By Reporting Law Enforcement Requests

Rebellion is a beautiful thing. Several major technology companies included Apple, Facebook, and Google have decided to notify their users when law enforcement agents request their data:

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

One thing I like about the technology field is that companies and individuals within it tend to have a greater problem with authority than most. Although I would have preferred to see this happen sooner I’m not going to gripe too much. Instead I want to congratulate these companies on doing the right thing.

It’s interesting to see the changes that have rippled through the technology market since Edward Snowden leaked those National Security Agency (NSA) documents. Security and transparency has traditionally been an afterthought for major technology companies but both have gained more prominence since we all learned that the NSA was unlawfully spying on each and every one of us. Google, for example, began encrypting data moving between its data centers. Experts in the security field boycotted the RSA conference because its namesake took $10 million from the NSA to use a knowingly weak random number generator in its BSAFE product. There has also been a race to develop more secure communication devices in an attempt to thwart the NSA surveillance apparatus. Basically the state royally pissed off the technology industry and it is now actively doing what it can to rebel.

I’m proud to work in a field that is actively giving the state a gigantic middle finger. Seeing companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google publicly change their policies to better inform their customers when the state is snooping makes me smile.

If You’re Doing Something Illegal Don’t Brag About It

I feel that this is something that shouldn’t need to be said but if you’re doing something illegal don’t go around bragging about it. Bragging is how people get caught:

YOKOHAMA – A 27-year-old man who allegedly made handguns with a 3-D printer was arrested Thursday on suspicion of illegal weapons possession, the first time Japan’s firearms control law has been applied to the possession of guns made by this method.

The suspect, Yoshitomo Imura, an employee of Shonan Institute of Technology in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, had the plastic guns at his home in Kawasaki in mid-April, the police said. No bullets have been found.

The police launched an investigation earlier this year after Imura posted video footage online of the guns, which he claimed to have produced himself, along with blueprints for them, according to investigative sources.

Emphasis mine. I completely support what Imura did. He lives in a country with very strict gun control laws. By manufacturing firearms he was able to bypass those laws and demonstrate how ineffective gun control laws really are. But he also screwed up by posting video of is escapades in a manner that didn’t preserve his anonymity.

If you’re going to break the law, something that I believe is moral so long as you’re not hurting anybody, either keep your mouth shut or brag about your caper anonymously (the latter being more risky than the former mind you). The desire to received credit is the biggest downfall of law breakers. Breaking the law is an act that will enter you into a conflict with the state. When you’re involved in a conflict, whether it be physical or just verbal, the first thing you should do is put your ego aside.

John McCain Opens His Mouth and Reaffirms That He’s an A-Hole

One good thing I can say about Barack Obama winning the 2008 presidential election is that John McCain has basically faded into irrelevancy. But every so often McCain feels the need to remind America that he’s still alive (which is kind of shocking when you look at him) and to reaffirm the fact that he is still a total asshole. During one of his recent interviews McCain decided to give us his opinion on the surveillance state:

“It’s the world we’re living in. You don’t like it, but everything I say I expect to be recorded,” McCain told Patrick. He went on to defend its place in the lives of American citizens:

“It’s just the way we live. It is something you’ve got to accept. I don’t particularly like it, but it is what it is.”

McCain dismissed a poll that showed 53% of Americans believe that their phone calls are being recorded. When asked by Patrick if they are, McCain laughed, “no, no.”

“Young people aren’t particularly happy. We’ve forgotten a little bit about 9/11, and how if we’d intercepted the right communications we might have prevented 9/11,” McCain continued.

So we just have to accept it? I’ve got news for McCain, we don’t have to accept shit. Thankfully we have the tools to render his beloved surveillance apparatus impotent. And if McCain expects to be recorded I say we give him what he expects. Let’s follow him around 24/7 with cameras, tap his phones, and stream everything he does on the Internet for all to see. I guarantee that he won’t enjoy it and will sick his thugs on us for violating his privacy and harassing him.

Let’s also take a minute to talk about the 9/11 card. It has been pulled out every time the state wanted to implement some new draconian law that infringes on our supposed rights. After 12 years of infringements the card has worn thin. Especially when you consider that the vast surveillance apparatus currently in place hasn’t foiled a single terrorist attack. If the system hasn’t managed to foil a terrorist attack in 12 years it’s pretty hard to claim it could have foiled 9/11.

I can’t imagine what four years of McCain would have been like. OK, I can. It would have been exactly the same as the first four years we suffered under Obama but without Obama’s pretty bitchin’ speech writers (while the man’s policies are crap I must admit that he did hire some excellent speech writers for his first term).