Tag: Your Government Doesn’t Love You

The FBI Thwarts Another Terrorist It Created

If you look at the raw numbers as they are reported, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has thwarted a number of terrorists. However, if you dig a little deeper, you quickly realized that the FBI manufactures many of the terrorists it catches. How does the agency manufacture terrorists? It looks for vulnerable people, usually people mostly isolated from society, and has an undercover agent befriend and radicalize them. When the undercover agent believes the time is right, they hand the sucker a fake bomb, send them on their merry way, and then arrest them. Tell me if you think that this story might fall under the category of manufactured terrorism:

“We as a family are extremely distraught about this situation with our son Jerry Drake Varnell, but what the public must understand is that he is a paranoid schizophrenic and is extremely susceptible to different types of ideology that normal people would deem immoral. Underneath his condition, he is a sweet-hearted person and we are extremely shocked that this event has happened. However, what truly has us flabbergasted is the fact that the FBI knew he was schizophrenic. The State of Oklahoma found him mentally incompetent and we, his parents have legal guardianship over him by the Court. These documents are sealed from the public, which is why no news media outlet has been able to obtain them. The FBI clearly knew that he was schizophrenic because they have gathered every ounce of information on him. Reading the criminal complaint against him has brought us great pause due to the numerous lies from the informant. We do not have an underground bunker! We built our home a few years ago and bought a storage container, as we use it for a storm shelter. We only recently pushed dirt up around it to make it safe. The building is used for storage and is NOT a bunker full of food and supplies, in fact the doors close from the outside. It has neither electricity nor anything that would make it habitable.

What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen. He has no job, no money, no vehicle, and no driver’s license, due to the fact that he is schizophrenic and we; his parents do everything we can possible to keep him safe and functional. The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him. He has attended college and just enrolled in welding school. His medications allow him to be somewhat functional but he will never be completely functional in life. His brain does not work like a normal person and never will due to the nature of his mental illness. He has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old. The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen none of which he had access to on his own. We know who their informant is and what the public should know is that he is that a drug-dealing criminal. On June 15, 2017, Jerry’s Father told the criminal informant “that he was not allowed back on our property and if he returned we would have him arrested for trespassing and drugs”. Apparently, he continued to sneak onto our residence. The FBI paid him to continue this operation and I believe they have cleared his criminal record.

The FBI found a paranoid schizophrenic who was judged mentally incompetent by the State of Oklahoma and was therefore entirely dependent on his parents, had an agent befriend him, and manipulated him into deploying a fake bomb that was provided to him by the agent. While the FBI might tout this as another terrorist attack thwarted by the agency’s efforts, in reality this attack wouldn’t have even been possible without the FBI’s involvement. Where else besides law enforcement could you receive credit for thwarting a crime that you created?

The FBI’s habit of creating the terrorists that it creates has a lot of ramifications. First, it completely skews the terrorism statistics. If you look at the raw numbers, the number of incidents of terrorism are artificially inflated because of the FBI’s antics. What are people supposed to do with bad data? Second, it shows that mentally ill individuals are nothing more than pawns for government agents. The FBI really has no choice but to prey on the mentally ill if it wants manufacture terrorists. But the various levels of government here in the United States often claim that they want to help the mentally ill. Those claims fall on deaf ears when agencies within the government are exploiting the same people the various other levels of government claim to want to help.

This problem isn’t likely to go away soon since the FBI hasn’t received any notable punishment for using this strategy. If that doesn’t demonstrate bad faith on behalf of the United States government, then I don’t know what does.

The State Doesn’t Provide Protection

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcers have no obligation to protect you even though you have an obligation to pay them. Being paid for services that haven’t been rendered leads to some unfortunate situations. For example, law enforcers refused to provide protection to a Jewish synagogue during the Charlottesville fiasco so they had to hire professionals:

The Jewish community in Charlottesville hired armed security to protect its synagogue for the first time after local police declined to provide a guard for the site despite hundreds of white supremacists congregating on the town over the weekend for a rally that resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

Unlike law enforcers, private security providers are motivated to provide protection because if they don’t then they don’t get paid.

This situation is a counterargument to the people who claim that the State is necessary to provide protection. These statists usually argue that in a society without a government poor people would be preyed upon because they wouldn’t be able to hire protective services. However, that situation doesn’t differ from the situation we currently live under. Even though there is a government people still have to hire private security if they want security because the State has exempted its own security providers from having to actually provide it.

Just More Heroes Doing Hero Things

While the majority of media outlets have been focused on Charlottesville, a threat that is far more significant than national socialists has continued waging war against the people:

Charnesia Corley was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when two cops from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office stopped her in June 2015 for running a red light.

After searching her car, police claimed to have found .02 ounces of marijuana. That was enough, they apparently felt, to justify a full-body cavity search. When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley’s pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley’s person.

The fact that an officer threw this woman to the ground and violated her for 11 minutes is goddamn awful. But the entire situation is made even more egregious by the fact that another officer participated.

Cop apologists, if they’re willing to admit to any corruption in modern policing, will often claim that there are just a handful of bad officers. However, if this were the case, we’d see a lot of incidents like this end with the bad officer’s fellow officers taking him down. That rarely happens. The chances of winning a lottery are probably higher than a bad officer being taken down by his fellow officers. If that doesn’t speak volumes to the severity of this problem, I don’t know what does.

Almost the Right Idea

On Monday a group of individuals in Minneapolis held a solidarity march with the people in Charlottesville who protested the national socialists. This wasn’t surprising in the least. There is a pretty solid Antifa movement here in the Twin Cities as well as a large contingent of international socialists (although the two groups often overlap there are also people who are members of one but not the other). What was rather surprising though was that some of the marchers actually remove the Hennepin County flag at the Hennepin County Government Center and replaced it with an Antifa flag. Afterwards, the Hennepin County flag was burned along with an effigy of a Nazi.

I think that the protesters almost had the right idea. Had they simply remove the flag and called it a day I’d have given them serious kudos. After all, I’m in favor of removing the State’s symbolism. But replacing the State’s symbolism with more tribal symbolism is, in my opinion, pointless. So I guess I’ll give the protesters half credit for that one.

The Importance of Values

Ken White wrote a great post that rebuts those who believe the government should curtail certain types of speech. It’s especially timely since, as he points out, we’ve reached the bottom of one hypothetical slippery slope brought up by proponents of government restricted speech: Nazis marching down the streets of American cities.

But you cannot destroy a value in order to save it. Nazis — like terrorists — hope that we will abandon principles and fundamentally change who we are out of fear. Assault is assault, threats are threats, murder is murder, and all of them should be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. The allowance for self-defense by those threatened by Nazis should reasonably be generous. But despicable speech is protected by the First Amendment, and should remain so. Our present circumstances show why it is sheer terrified madness to entrust a broad power to prevent or punish speech upon a fickle state. We’ve flirted with that madness of abandoning rights in pursuit of safety for our nation’s whole life. The flirtation has turned sordid and degrading during the War on Crime and frankly self-destructive after 9/11. It would be philosophical suicide to hasten it now by giving a government — a visibly terrible and amoral government — the power to regulate speech. This is the final hypothetical come to pass: if the state asked you to give up freedoms in exchange for a dubious promise it would make you safer, would you do it? Would you convince yourself that the state would only use the power against Them, and not you?

Handing the government more power always sounds like a good idea when the people you agree with are in charge of that government. But that power looks frightening when its in the hands of the people you disagree with.

When the First Amendment Applies

Since there is some confusion about what free speech actually means, I gave an example of what doesn’t constitute a violate of free speech. Today I will give an example of what does count as a violation of free speech:

Can the government ban the text of the First Amendment itself on municipal transit ads because free speech is too “political” for public display?

If this sounds like some ridiculous brain teaser, it should. But unfortunately it’s not. It’s a core claim in a lawsuit we filed today challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) restrictions on controversial advertising.

The ACLU, ACLU of D.C., and ACLU of Virginia are teaming up to represent a diverse group of plaintiffs whose ads were all branded as too hot for transit: the ACLU itself; Carafem, a health care network that specializes in getting women access to birth control and medication abortion; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA); and Milo Worldwide LLC — the corporate entity of provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

WMATA is a government agency, which means its decisions to allow or prohibit certain forms of speech constitute government censorship and therefore fall under the First Amendment.

This case brings up something I’ve often wondered about. Public transport in the Twin Cities is operated by Metro Transit, which is part of the Metropolitan Council government organization. Metro Transit’s buses and trains are plastered with advertisements. If Metro Transit rejects a proposed advertisement, does that qualify as a violation of the First Amendment. I believe it does but I’ve been curious what the courts would say (not because I think the decisions of courts are meaningful but because I have a morbid curiosity).

A Disturbance in the Bordertarian Force

Bordertarians, a term I like for referring to “libertarians” who advocate for closed borders, were on the receiving end of some rather hilarious karma. Members of the band Backwordz, a band that raps about libertarian concepts, was recently ejected from Canada:

One of the people sympathetic to this idea, Eric July of the libertarian-themed band Backwordz, was on his way to a gig in Canada with the rest of his bandmates when they were stopped and held at the border going into Canada.

They were denied entry into the country. They were turned around. They have to cancel their date in Toronto.

One of the members of the band had a DUI on his record and, according to Canadian law, enough time had not passed to allow him entry into the country with that mark on his record.

The border was closed to them.

Justifiably, Eric July was not at all happy about what had happened. That seems like a ridiculous rule to have in place. But more importantly, an uninvited third party, the government of Canada, stepped in between Eric July and the venue that was supposed to host Backwordz. Without any actual authority to do so, they prevented the concert from occurring even though none of the private property owners involved had any issue over the arrangement.

For some reason this has upset some bordertarians. It turns out that they didn’t quite understand what closed borders entail.

In the fantasy utopia of bordertarians, governments pass laws that prevent people they don’t like from entering the country but allow people they do like to enter the country. But that’s not how things work here in the real world. When governments can decide who can and cannot cross their imaginary lines the people aren’t given a say. If, for example, the government decides that people with a DUI charge are prohibited from entering the country even if a majority of the people living in that country find such a rule stupid, people with DUI charges don’t get to enter the country.

As a radical individualist, I oppose any interference with voluntary association, which means I necessarily oppose closed borders. In my world, unlike the world of bordertarians, Backwordz would have been able to play its show because the venue wanted them to play there. The venue’s desire to associate with the band is all that should be needed for Backwordz to play there.

You reap what you sow. If you’re a bordertarian, you should be jumping for joy at this news since a government did exactly what you advocated.

Voluntary Association

If a homosexual couple asks a baker who is a devout Christian to bake their wedding cake and he refuses for religious reasons, should the State force him to bake the cake? A lot of people, predominantly those on the progressive side of the political spectrum but even some self-proclaimed libertarians, would say yes. Now let’s turn this around. Let’s say the mother of a child who is a fan of Donald Trump asks a baker who hates Trump to bake her son a Trump themed cake, should the baker be required to bake it:

Nine-year-old Dylan Harbin, aka “Pickle,” is such a big fan of President Donald Trump that his mother SueAnn tried to get him a Trump cake for his birthday. However, according to the Washington Post, bakeries in the Harbins’ home state of California have refused to make the cake, forcing the mother to bake the cake herself.

Interestingly enough, some of the people who wanted the State to force a Christian baker to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage don’t hold the same opinion in regards to this scenario.

I support the principle of voluntary association, which includes voluntary disassociation. A devout Christian should be allowed to not bake a cake for a wedding they morally disagree with. Sure, I find them foolish for not taking the job but my personal morals rate coercing somebody into action they don’t want to take far worse than personal discrimination. Likewise, I think the bakers who refused to bake a Trump themed cake are rather foolish, they’re just leaving money on the table, but I also believe they have the right to decided whether or not they want to associate with customers who oppose their political beliefs.

If voluntary association doesn’t exist, no other rights can really be said to exist. Moreover, if somebody can force you to do something against your will, you’re not really free.

How Civil Asset Forfeiture Reduces Economic Mobility

Believers in the American dream still talk about how people who had nothing managed to pull themselves up by their bootlaces and make it big. Proponents of socialism point out that such economic mobility almost never happens. Are believers in the American dream right? Can somebody from poverty elevate themselves to the middle class or higher? Are the socialist right? Is such economic mobility a pipe dream? They’re both correct.

In a free market and where property rights are recognized it is certainly possible for a person to elevate themselves from poverty to a comfortable or even luxurious life. However, such mobility seldom happens this day an age. Where both parties get things wrong is believing that the United States has a free market and property rights.

There is no free market in the United States and there sure as the fuck isn’t a concept of property rights:

Asset forfeiture primarily targets the poor. Most forfeitures are for small amounts: in 2012, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that has focused heavily on asset forfeiture, analyzed forfeiture in 10 states and found that the median value of assets seized ranged from $451 (Minnesota) to $2,048 (Utah). Given that law enforcement routinely take everything they find in a forfeiture case, these small values suggest the relative poverty of the victims.

The procedural hurdles for challenging asset forfeiture also mean that poor people are less able to get their money back. The average forfeiture challenge requires four weekdays in court; missing four days of work can be a prohibitive expense for Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Additionally, claims are challenged in civil court, where the right to counsel doesn’t apply, meaning that claimants need to hire their own lawyer.

Asset forfeiture is especially dangerous for the unbanked, because police and federal agents consider high amounts of cash to be suspect. In 2013, half of all households with incomes of less than $15,000 were either unbanked or underbanked. In a report on non-criminal asset forfeiture, the Center for American Progress argues that “low-income individuals and communities of color are hit hardest” by forfeiture.

Civil asset forfeiture allows the State to seize your property if one of its law enforcers accuses you of a drug crime or affiliation with terrorism. The only time proof comes into play with civil asset forfeiture is when the accused party has to prove that the officer’s accusation was incorrect, which is nearly impossible to do under ideal circumstances. However, as the article notes, poor individuals aren’t operating under ideal circumstances. Many of them cannot afford to take several days off of work to plead their case in court. This makes them prime targets for civil asset forfeiture because law enforcers know that they chances of the property being returned to its rightful owner is practically zero.

As I noted, economic mobility requires property rights because you have to be able to keep what wealth you acquire. If you’re able to scrape together some capital to start a side business but then have that capital stolen, your ability to elevating yourself economically through entrepreneurship is also stolen.

A Shocking Development in Venezuela

I think Venezuela just shocked the entire world. In a totally unprecedented move for a socialist country, the newly established constitutional assembly has granted itself practically unlimited power:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The new constitutional assembly assumed even more power in Venezuela by declaring itself as the superior body to all other governmental institutions, including the opposition-controlled congress.

That decree came Tuesday just hours after the assembly delegates took control of a legislative chamber and put up pictures of the late President Hugo Chavez, who installed Venezuela’s socialist system.

Delcy Rodriguez, the head of the ruling socialist party and leader of the body, said the unanimously approved decree prohibits lawmakers in congress from taking any action that would interfere with laws passed by the newly installed constitutional assembly.

“We are not threatening anyone,” said Aristobulo Isturiz, the constitutional assembly’s first vice president. “We are looking for ways to coexist.”

Leaders of congress, which previously voted not to recognize any of the new super-body’s decrees, said lawmakers would try to meet in the gold-domed legislative palace Wednesday, but there were questions whether security officers guarding the building would let them in.

History may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.

The coup is complete. While the leaders of congress may have voted against recognizing the assembly’s decrees, the only thing that matters at this point is which side has the most armed thugs at its disposal. If the members of congress who oppose the assembly can muster a fighting force great enough to take on the assembly then it has a chance to enforce its oppositional vote. Otherwise those members of congress who refuse to “get with the program” will likely find themselves against the wall in short order. Meanwhile, while the elites have their pissing match the people of Venezuela will continue to starve.