Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

Legalizing Parenting

There is a long list of laws that shouldn’t be necessary. This law that will soon go into effect in Utah:

A new law legalizing free-range parenting will soon take effect in Utah allowing children to do things alone like travelling to school.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed the bill on March 15, which takes effect in May.

The bill redefines “neglect” in Utah law so that kids can participate in some unsupervised activities without their parents being charged, a representative from the state confirmed to ABC News Monday.

Why does allowing children to walk to school unattended need to be a law? Because the government has declared itself the owner of all people in the nation and has used that power to decide what does and doesn’t qualify as childhood neglect. In many areas children playing unattended in parks or walking to school unattended are valid grounds for law enforcers to charge parents with neglect. It’s absurd considering that not too long ago I was playing with my friends around town and walking to school unattended and everybody consider it normal.

The FBI’s Dog and Pony Show

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) made a big stink about being unable to unlock an iPhone 5C, which led to a lengthy debate over whether or not phone manufacturers should be required to include a law enforcement backdoor in their devices. According to the FBI, it was powerless to unlock the phone and because of that terrorists, child pornographers, and other heinous individuals would be able to act with impunity. It turns out that the FBI may be been exaggerating its incompetency:

Additionally, the OIG also found that when then FBI Director James Comey swore up and down in Congressional hearings that there was no alternative but to force the issue in court—it wasn’t entirely true.

“We have engaged all parts of the US government to see, does anybody have a way, short of asking Apple, to do it, with a 5C running iOS9, and we do not,” Comey told Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) during a March 1, 2016 hearing.

However, the new OIG report reveals that by February 11, the head of yet another FBI group—known as the Remote Operations Unit—had been in touch with a vendor that “he worked closely with [who] was almost 90 percent of the way toward a solution that the vendor had been working on for many months, and he asked the vendor to prioritize completion of the solution.” In short, weeks before Comey’s testimony before Congress, the FBI actually did know of a technique that was nearly all the way there.

Why would the FBI lie about something like this? One reason is that government agents, unlike private individuals, are allowed to get away with lying during hearings. But the biggest reason is probably because the FBI wanted to expand the United States government’s overall surveillance powers. A law enforcement backdoor would enhance not only the FBI’s surveillance powers but also the Drug Enforcement Agency’s, Central Intelligence Agency’s, National Security Administration’s, and basically every other federal, state, and local agency’s. Technology that allows individuals to protect their privacy is directly at odds with a government’s desire to expropriate wealth from individuals.

Nobody will likely be punished for this lie, which means that the FBI will see no reason to lie again in the future. But it’s good to keep these cases in our back pocket to remind ourselves that every time a government agency claims it needs additional powers, the reasons it feeds us are likely bullshit.

Embracing the Darknet

Big changes came to the Internet shortly after Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). SESTA, like most legislation, has a name that sounds good on the surface but actually conceals some heinous provisions. One of those major provisions is holding website owners criminally liable for user generated content. This resulted in some drastic changes to sites like Reddit and Craiglist:

So far, four subreddits related to sex have banned: Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy. None were what could accurately be described as advertising forums, though (to varying degrees) they may have helped connect some people who wound up in “mutually beneficial relationships.” The escort forums were largely used by sex workers to communicate with one another, according to Partridge. Meanwhile, the “hooker” subreddit “was mostly men being disgusting,” according to Roux, “but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith.”

[…]

Reddit yesterday announced changes to its content policy, now forbidding “transactions for certain goods and services,” including “firearms, ammunition, or explosives” and “paid services involving physical sexual contact.” While some of the prohibited exchanges are illegal, many are not.

Yet they run close enough up against exchanges that could be illegal that it’s hard for a third-party like Reddit to differentiate. And the same goes for forums where sex workers post educational content, news, safety and legal advice. Without broad Section 230 protections, Reddit could be in serious financial and legal trouble if they make the wrong call.

The passage of SESTA set a precedence that will certainly expand. Today Section 230 protections can be revoked for user generated content about sex trafficking. Tomorrow it could be revoked for user generated content involving hate speech, explaining the chemistry and biology behind how prohibited drugs work, showing the mechanics of how a machine gun operates, and so on. User generated content is now a liability and will only become more of a liability as the precedence is expanded.

Will this rid the world of content about sex work, drugs, and guns? Of course not. It will merely push that content to anonymized servers, commonly referred to as the “darkweb.” As laws make hosting content on the non-anonymized Internet a legal hazard, Internet users will find that they need tools like I2P and the Tor Browser to access more and more of the content they desire. The upside to this is that it will lead to a tremendous increase in resources available to developers and operators of “darkweb” technologies. Eventually the laws passed to thwart unapproved behavior will again make restricting unapproved behavior all but impossible.

Preparing Kids for Prison

Approximately 2.3 million Americans are currently sitting behind bars. Public schools are sold, in part, as facilities to prepare children for the real world. With so many individuals behind bars, it makes sense that schools should prepare children for a life in a cage, where everybody is watched by guards and zero privacy is allow:

MIAMI—The Florida high school where a gunman killed 17 people last month will require students to carry only clear backpacks, school administrators announced on Wednesday, after the shooting suspect’s brother was charged with trespassing on campus and two students were arrested on charges of carrying knives.

[…]

Robert Runcie, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, sent a letter to the families of Stoneman Douglas High students imposing the new backpack rule, reminiscent of security measures at airports and professional sports venues. He said any student without a clear backpack would be provided one at no cost after spring break, which takes place next week.

Students also will be issued identification badges, which they will be required to wear at all times while in school. Staff members have badges as well.

In addition, Runcie said the district was considering using metal-detecting wands at school entrances and installing permanent metal detectors — a safety measure Runcie recently criticized as ineffective. A person intent on committing an atrocity would find his or her way around them, he said in an interview last month.

I’m glad to finally see some real world applicable education taking place! I also appreciate that the school administrators have finally decided to punish all of the students in this school for the crime of attending the same school as a murderer. Hopefully these students will decide to be reincarnated in a school district without a murderous fellow student.

The real tragedy about this policy is that the students who did nothing wrong are the ones being punished, which is the norm in the United States. When somebody goes on a shooting spree, laws are proposed and passed to punish the gun owners he didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree, students are subjected to new levels of humiliation because of a shooting spree they didn’t perpetrate, and students who didn’t perpetrate the shooting spree are dragged through hell by school administrators who are more concerned about appearing tough than the student’s welfare.

Everybody involved in implementing this decision can fuck right off.

Members of Congress Will Continue to Use Your Money to Settle Their Sexual Harassment Cases

Sexual harassment has been a hot button issue since last year. Hollywood and Washington DC has been awash in accusations, apologies, and payoffs. However, when an actor in Hollywood decides to pay off their victims, they use their own money. When a politicians decides to pay off their victims, they use your money:

An overhaul of Capitol Hill’s workplace misconduct system is in jeopardy and likely won’t be attached to a government spending bill this week, diminishing the likelihood of reform before the midterm elections, according to Politico.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who introduced the bipartisan Congressional Harassment Reform Act last December, said on Monday that House and Senate leadership “stripped” provisions from the language from the spending bill at the eleventh hour.

[…]

Among its provisions, the act requires that members of Congress personally pay for sexual harassment settlements when they are found liable. Currently, lawmakers can tap taxpayer funds to settle with victims. Also, unless the victim opts for privacy, under the act, settlements would automatically be made public, thus lifting the veil of secrecy around the process.

Having access to tax dollars is yet another mechanism that politicians can use to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. If Congress was composed of angels, this wouldn’t be an issue because the members wouldn’t vote themselves the power to use tax dollars to pay off sexual harassment victims. But Congress isn’t composed of angels, it’s composed of crooked bastards who only care about power.

While many voters will likely claim that they’re outraged by this, members of Congress know that voters will toss aside all of their outrage come election day because most of them will continue to cast their vote for the “lesser evil” incumbent. Members of Congress won’t hold themselves accountable and neither will the voters.

If Violence Isn’t Solving Your Problem, You’re Not Using Enough of It

The United States government has been waging a war against drugs since 1914 when it passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. In 1970 it greatly stepped up its efforts after passing the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. For the entirety of its war against drugs, drugs have been winning by a landslide. I would think after unsuccessfully waging a war as rigorously as the United States has been waging its war against drugs since the 1970s, most sane people would realize the futility of the war and stop. But the United States prefers to live by the mantra of if violence isn’t solving your problem, you’re not using enough of it:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will unveil a plan on Monday to combat the opioid addiction crisis that includes seeking the death penalty for drug dealers and urging Congress to toughen sentencing laws for drug traffickers, White House officials said on Sunday.

The White House plan will also seek to cut opioid prescriptions by a third over the next three years by promoting practices that reduce overprescription of opioids in federal healthcare programs, officials told a news briefing.

As Anatoly Rybakov wrote, “Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.”

What will this likely accomplish? Nothing positive. People who suffer from chronic pain will have to resort to taking an aspirin and toughing it out, which will likely lead a few sufferers choose suicide over living a life of constant agony. But, hey, at least if they’re dead they won’t be addicted to opioids! Drug traffickers will continue to traffic drugs because they’re already subject to summary execution by law enforcers so the possibility of being sentenced to death is nothing new. I guess it will provide a little dog and pony show for the masses who want to see a drug trafficker executed after a trial instead of before.

Unfortunately, the war on drugs isn’t going anywhere. The profits of the government, especially its law enforcers, are too dependent on the wealth confiscated from drug manufacturers, sellers, and users.

Technically a Gulag Is a Retirement Plan

A writer for Pravda Salon was giddy when he learned that some millennials aren’t bothering to save for retirement because they’re expecting a great socialist revolution within their lifetime:

Wood, 32, a political consultant, told me via Twitter that she felt similarly. “I don’t think the world can sustain capitalism for another decade,” she explained. “It’s socialism or bust. We will literally start having resource wars that will kill us all if we don’t accept that the free market will absolutely destroy us within our lifetime [if] we don’t start fighting its hegemony,” she added.

Technically spending your golden years in a gulag is a retirement plan.

I don’t think these millennials are complete fools but I do believe that they have been suckered by socialist propaganda. It’s no secret that the United States is becoming more of a shithole every year. Unemployment is at record lows… but more and more employment is becoming part time. Costs of healthcare and college are through the roof and the only reason people haven’t been forced to abandon hospitals and colleges is because they’ve taken on tons of debt. Speaking of debt, the national debt continues to rise at an astronomical rate. While the United States may not have prison camps per se, a massive percentage of the population is currently being held behind bars and many of those prisoners are stuck working for Federal Prison Industries. It’s also no coincidence that this degradation coincides with the United States abandoning capitalism for socialism, which is why socialists have to keep desperately parroting the claim that the United States is a capitalist nation and that all of its ills are being caused by capitalism.

A nation that operated under capitalism wouldn’t have Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or any other government provided welfare program. In order to provide all of those programs a government must necessarily nationalize a portion of businesses. Of course, politicians in the United States don’t use the term nationalization. Instead they call their seizing a portion of a company’s wealth taxation. Whether one calls it nationalization or taxation the result is the same, the government claims a portion of every business in the country. Every business owner works first for the State and secondly for themselves.

Heroes Doing Hero Things

I know most people expect an officer tasked with defending a school to rush in and engage anybody actively gunning down students. But officers just want to go home to their families at night like everybody else so sometimes they need to make a tactical retreat to keep themselves safe:

PARKLAND, Fla. — Video footage released Thursday from the Florida school where 17 people were killed on Valentine’s Day appears to confirm that a sheriff’s deputy did not try to confront the gunman accused of staging the massacre.

In fact, it does not show disgraced Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson doing much of anything.

In the opening minutes, Peterson is seen walking and talking with what looks like a staffer at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. A short time later the two of them ride out of view in a golf cart.

I imagine that at least a few Broward County taxpayers are feeling as though they didn’t get their money’s worth out of their sheriff’s department after witnessing four of its deputies abandoning their children to die. Too bad for them though. Even though the sheriff’s department failed to protect their children, the taxpayers will be forced to continue funding the department. To make matters worse, this lack of accountability will likely motivate other officers tasked with protecting schools to also tear around in a golf cart while the children under their care are murdered.

I Guess Nobody in Denver Owned a Bump Fire Stock

The government of Denver issued a decree that prohibited the private ownership of bump fire stocks. It turns out that the law was unnecessary because every bump fire stock in the city was apparently lost in a boating accident:

Denver Police police last month invited city residents to turn in any bump stocks in their possession but Denverite reports that none have been handed over.

The ban on bump stocks approved by the city council in January was considered largely symbolic. Denver had previously banned the types of semi-automatic rifles that can be modified with bump stocks.

I’m sure other governmental bodies will enact similar legislation and see similar results. It turns out that gun owners are shitty boat drivers and more often than not they end up losing their controversial firearms in bizarre boating accidents.

It’s Not Your Body, Slave

I’m of the opinion that each person has the right to do whatever they want with their own body. My opinion isn’t shared by the government. As far as the government is concerned it owns your body and therefore has the final say regarding what you can do with it. For example, if you’re suffering from a terminal illness and want to try an experimental treatment, the government isn’t going to allow you to do so:

WASHINGTON — In a surprising rebuff to President Trump and Republican leaders, the House derailed a bill on Tuesday that would have given patients with terminal illnesses a right to try unproven experimental treatments.

The bill was considered under special fast-track procedures that required a two-thirds majority for passage, and it fell short. When the roll was called, 259 House members supported the bill, and 140 opposed it.

Most of the opposition came from Democrats, who said the bill gave false hope to patients and could actually endanger people dying of incurable diseases, because it would undermine protections provided by the Food and Drug Administration.

We wouldn’t want terminally ill patients trying experimental procedures because that might endanger their lives!

This is just another example of blatant partisanism. The Democrats didn’t shut the bill down because experimental procedures could endanger the lives of those who are already dying, they shut the bill down because it was introduced by Republicans. But both parties do agree that without the passage of this bill it is still illegal for terminally ill individuals to seek experimental treatments, which means both parties are claiming that they own those terminally ill patients. That is the real tragedy of this entire mess.