Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 75

Without Government Who Would Slaughter the Horses

Without government who would round up wild horses and slaughter them?

Last Friday, the Bureau of Land Management‘s (BLM) National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board made the decision to use euthanasia to kill 45,000 wild horses currently captive in government holding facilities throughout the US. The decision has come under great scrutiny by organizations who argue for using birth control to minimize population growth, instead.

This is a nice racket the ranchers have going for them. Instead of having to foot the expense of dealing with competition for their cattle herds the ranchers can just use their political clout to get the BLM to round up the competing wildlife at tax payer expense. Now the BLM is tired of storing the horses and wants to slaughter them at tax payer expense, which means the ranchers will have to compete against a glut of cheap horse meat, right?. Wrong. The cattle ranchers need not worry because the United States government protects ranchers from that form of competition as well.

If you have enough political clout you can socialize the expenses of doing business. Ranchers have a lot of clout in many regions of the United States and they use that clout to make the rest of us pay the expenses they would face otherwise.

How to Use a IMSI Catcher

International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers have remained one of the State’s more closely guarded secrets. In order for local law enforcers to gain access to one of the devices the Federal Bureau of Investigations requires them to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The FBI is even willing to drop cases rather than reveal how the surveillance devices work. But as Benjamin Franklin said, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” With multiple agencies having access to information about IMSI catchers it was inevitable that information such as the user manuals would leak:

HARRIS CORP.’S STINGRAY surveillance device has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in law enforcement for more than 15 years. The company and its police clients across the United States have fought to keep information about the mobile phone-monitoring boxes from the public against which they are used. The Intercept has obtained several Harris instruction manuals spanning roughly 200 pages and meticulously detailing how to create a cellular surveillance dragnet.

I haven’t read through the manuals yet but the highlights posted by The Intercept shows the software tools provided with the catchers to be robust and so simple even a cop can use them.

One might be compelled to ask why the State is so dead set on keeping this technology secret. Especially when anybody with the money can acquire one through the black market. The answer to that question is that the State is like any other criminal organization in that it tries to keep its operations as secret as possible. Sure, it maintains a public face just as Al Capone maintained soup kitchens. But the nitty gritty stuff is always hidden behind a veil of fancy words like “classified”. This is because the State knows what it’s doing is morally repugnant and wouldn’t be enjoyed by the people who think the State serves them. Fortunately the State’s secrets always leak out eventually.

What It Takes for a Police Officer to Be Fired

We’ve seen numerous cases where officers used an obviously unnecessary level of force and received little more than a paid vacation as punishment. It really makes one wonder what it takes for a cop to actually get fired. Apparently it takes a cop not killing somebody:

After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”

[…]

Mr. Mader — speaking publicly about this case for the first time — said that when he tried to return to work on May 17, following normal protocol for taking time off after an officer-involved shooting, he was told to go see Weirton Police Chief Rob Alexander.

In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”

Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”

On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”

As Radley Balko noted, Mader did exactly what people expect cops to do. He put himself on the line to protect a member of the community. For doing that he was terminated. Apparently the only option allowed, at least at his former police department, is to kill anybody in crisis.

This situation speaks volumes. We’re told that the police exist to serve and protect. Hell, they even have that local splashed on their squad cars in a lot of places. But time and again we see officers who are actively attacking members of the community walk away scot-free while officers who do work to protect the community end up being punished. This really illustrates the real purpose of the police, which is to expropriate wealth from the populace for the State.

Mader should have received recognition from his department for a job well done and given the opportunity to train his fellow officers in dealing with people in crisis. Other departments should have asked him to come teach their officers as well. What Mader did is what the words protect and serve imply. But protecting and serving doesn’t generate revenue for the State so he was made an example of. This is why the number of good cops is so low, when they manage to get into a department they are quickly weeded out.

Don’t Talk to Police

I know that it’s been said again and again but it bears periodic repetition: don’t talk to the police. Period.

Someday soon, when you least expect it, a police officer may receive mistaken information from a confused eyewitness or a liar, or circumstantial evidence that helps persuade him that you might be guilty of a very serious crime. When confronted with police officers and other government agents who suddenly arrive with a bunch of questions, most innocent people mistakenly think to themselves, “Why not talk? I haven’t done anything. I have nothing to hide. What could possibly go wrong?”

Well, among other things, you could end up confessing to a crime you didn’t commit. The problem of false confessions is not an urban legend. It is a documented fact. Indeed, research suggests that the innocent may be more susceptible than the culpable to deceptive police interrogation tactics, because they tragically assume that somehow “truth and justice will prevail” later even if they falsely admit their guilt. Nobody knows for sure how often innocent people make false confessions, but as Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski recently observed, “Innocent interrogation subjects confess with surprising frequency.”

People still mistakenly believe that the police are the good guys and that cooperating with them can only be beneficial if you’re an innocent person. In reality police are not the good guys, they’re the revenue generators for the State. Their goal of raising revenue can only be realized by charging people with crimes. So long as wealth can be expropriated it doesn’t matter to the State whether the person hauled in actually perpetrated the crime or not.

A false confession is just as good as a truthful confession to the police. Either one achieves their goal of raising revenue. That means any belief you have in justice prevailing is wrongly held.

When an officer wants to question you about something you should immediately shut up and lawyer up. Most politicians are lawyers and they have crafted the system to benefit lawyers. The downside is that you’re basically stuck handing money to lawyers if you’re accused of a crime. The upside is that a lawyer knows the ins and outs of the system far better than most police officers and can therefore provide you with decent protection (assuming they’re not incompetent). A lawyer, for example, knows what to say without confessing you were guilty of a crime. They also know the rules regarding admissible evidence and whether or not the police have a case without a confession. You (and me), as a layperson, are likely to naive about the legal system that you don’t even know what you don’t know. And that ignorance can land you in a cage for a crime you didn’t commit.

United States Presidential Politics in a Nutshell

Have you used a private e-mail server for public business? Did you make most of your e-mails disappear when the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) started to investigate? Did you purposely remove classification headings so you could continue using your private e-mail server? Have you been directly involved in the perpetration of war crimes during your stint at the State Department? No problem, you won’t be arrested.

Did you spray paint some graffiti on a bulldozer blade? Well you’re going to be arrested you dastardly mother fucker:

CANNON BALL, N.D. — A North Dakota county has issued a warrant for the arrest of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who is accused of spray-painting construction equipment during a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein may both be running for president but only the former is in the Big Club.

Rigging the Trial

The trial of Ammon Bundy and six of his cohorts is ramping up. Their crime, for those unfamiliar with the case, occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But it’s already obvious that the trail is a formality and the verdict is predetermined as the judge is rigging the trail:

The judge also said she intends to question each juror on whether they were handed a flier outside court about jury nullification, and to instruct them that they must follow the law even if they disagree with it. Judge Brown said deputy U.S. marshals indicated there may be people outside court distributing such fliers.

Regardless of what you think about the occupation itself, the fact that the judge is telling jurors that they can’t exercise their rights should be concerning. It goes against the very purpose of having jury trials and all but guarantees a guilty verdict for Bundy and his buddies.

If you research how juries work you will learn that they don’t have to rule based on the written law. A jury isn’t punished regardless of its ruling or the reason behind that ruling. If a jury rules against the written law that’s entirely acceptable. The lack of punishment for juries was deliberate and was meant to act as a check against erroneous laws. But more and more courts are applying pressure to juries to rule in the “right” way. As this pressure increases jury trials will shift away from being a mechanism of determining actual fault and towards being mere legal formalities. As that shift continues one of the last avenues of saving people from the depravities of the State will be lost.

I won’t be surprised if we see a day where juries that rule the “wrong” way are punished. Perhaps in the near future jurors will be told what the “right” verdict is by the judge and any jurors who rule otherwise will be held in contempt of court.

Ka-Ching

Scott Adams may have described civil forfeiture better than anybody:

Just change out the text slightly. In the first panel Dogbert could say, “I’ve declared a law that allows cops to steal property if they can claim it might be tied to a drug crime.” In the second panel he could say, “When the cops seize the property we’ll put the burden of proving it wasn’t tied to a drug crime on the owner.” The third panel can be left unchanged.

The Wyoming Supreme Court recently refused to hear an appeal of a man who had $470,000 stolen from him under civil forfeiture laws without even being charged with a crime:

CHEYENNE — The Wyoming Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal from a man who contends it was unconstitutional for the state to seize $470,000 in cash from him and then seek to forfeit it on the grounds that it was drug money, all without charging him with a crime.

How can the State claim the money is related to a drug crime if it doesn’t even have enough evidence to charge him? That’s a trick question. Civil forfeiture laws have nothing to do with fighting verboten drugs. The laws are about one thing: giving the State yet another legal justification for stealing your wealth.

What about your constitutional rights? The government can’t just steal your money, right? That’s unreasonable search and seizure, is it not? George Carlin probably illustrated constitutional rights the best:

Now, if you think you do have rights, I have one last assignment for ya. Next time you’re at the computer get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, i want to type in, “Japanese-Americans 1942” and you’ll find out all about your precious fucking rights. Alright. You know about it.

In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was…right this way! Into the internment camps.

The Bill of Rights sounds like a wonderful idea on paper but that’s the only place it exists, on paper. Unfortunately the very Constitution that supposedly guarantees you your rights also gives a monopoly on law to the State. So the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, means whatever the fuck the State says it means. If you don’t agree you can take it up with the law enforcers who will tell you that they’re “only doing their jobs” as they beat your with a truncheon for refusing to surrender your cash on constitutional grounds.

Proof that the Islamic State is a Government

People continue to refer to the Islamic State (IS) as a terrorist group but it really should be referred to as a state at this point. Granted, there is precious little that separate a terrorist group from a state. The only appreciable differences a state manages to hold a near monopoly on violence within a controlled territory for an extended period of time. That monopoly gives the state the power to issue arbitrary and conflicting decrees. IS is now to the point where it can do exactly that:

The Islamic State group has reportedly banned women from wearing a burka, a veil that covers the entire face, as a security precaution in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The alleged new rule is striking in part because the militant group also known as ISIS has beaten and killed women in the past for refusing to wear the conservative garment.

I wonder if the French government and Gary “Ban the Burqa” Johnson will express support for IS now.

Islamophobes of all sorts but neocons especially have been jumping for joy because of this decree. In their minds it proves that the practices of Islam are so dangerous that even IS can’t live with them. In reality IS has about as much to do with Islam as most Christian kingdoms of Europe had to do with Christianity. Religion is just the justification for seizing power just as the struggle of the proletariat was the justification used by the Bolsheviks. But the justification a government uses for existing is never the actual goal. Now that power has been seized IS is acting like any other government that has obtained power by tossing aside its justification for existing and focusing on maintaining its power instead. Maintaining that power comes in the form of issuing decrees that are contradictory to is original mission statement. Anybody who believes this particular arbitrary decree invalidates IS as an organization should take a close look at their own government because it does exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason.

Simultaneously an Adult and a Minor

The legal system we suffer under in the United States is nothing more than a long list of arbitrary decrees written by men in suits in marble buildings. There is no logic to it and it often contradicts itself. Take this case for example:

A North Carolina 17-year-old caught in a sexting scandal faces charges of sexually exploiting a minor that could land him in jail for up to 10 years, since the law considers him an adult. But one of the minors he supposedly exploited is himself—which raises an obvious question: how can a teen be old enough to face adult felony charges, but not old enough to keep a nude picture of himself on his phone?

Unfortunately, that’s the Kafka-esque nightmare in which Fayetteville-area high schooler Cormega Copening finds himself after exchanging private nude photos with his girlfriend—with whom he is legally allowed to have sex, but not to sext.

He’s 17-years-old, which puts him in an odd gray area in regards to his status. On the one hand he’s legally considered a minor and therefore cannot possess pictures of his naked self because that’s legally child pornography. He can have sex with another minor though without it being considered statutory rape. Unfortunately for him he was in possession of pictures of his naked self and the girl he was legally having sex with and is close enough to being an adult that he can be tried as one. If you can find any logic in this paragraph please feel free to explain it to me because I can’t wrap my brain around this.

This is yet another demonstration of the fact that we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system. Justice can only be delivered if somebody has been wronged. Possessing naked pictures of yourself wrongs nobody just as consensually exchanging naked pictures harms nobody. There is no justice to be delivered in this case because there is no victim. But the law states what he is doing is wrong and the law doesn’t give a damn if victims exist or not. The only thing that matters under a system such as ours are the words written by the politicians.

Federal Court Rules Medical Cannabis Users Have No Right to Defend Themselves

In addition to the massive increase in government violence, another side-effect of the war on drugs is the stripping of so-called rights. Under United States law, a person in possession of verboten substances cannot legally exercise their Second Amendment privilege. Some people have asked whether or not cannabis users who have been given permission to treat their medical condition by the State are an exception to that rule. A federal court recently ruled that they’re not:

A federal ban on the sale of guns to medical marijuana card holders does not violate the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals applies to the nine Western states that fall under the court’s jurisdiction, including California, Washington and Oregon.

It came in a lawsuit filed by S. Rowan Wilson, a Nevada woman who said she tried to buy a firearm for self-defense in 2011 after obtaining a medical marijuana card. The gun store refused, citing the federal rule banning the sale of firearms to illegal drug users.

This ruling is ridiculous for two reasons.

First, this ruling is really stating is that people suffering from certain medical conditions have no right to self-defense. If, for example, you suffer from chronic pain and have only had success treating it with cannabis the State has declared your life so lacking in value that it’s not even worth protecting.

Second, this ruling also declares that your gun ownership privileges can be revoked without due process:

Wilson said she was not a marijuana user, but obtained the card in part as an expression of support for marijuana legalization.

[…]

The 9th Circuit in its 3-0 decision said it was reasonable for federal regulators to assume a medical marijuana card holder was more likely to use the drug.

According to the federal court it’s reasonable for federal regulators to assume holders of medical cannabis cards are using cannabis. The key point here is the word assume. Federal regulators don’t have to actually prove that you’ve broken federal prohibition laws to strip you of your gun ownership privileges. It merely has to assume you’ve broken the prohibition. Gun rights activists should be flipping their shit about this because it’s the exact same logic used by people demanding that anybody on the terrorist watch lists be prohibited from owning firearms. No due process is necessary for the State to declare your gun ownership privileges null and void.

Robert Anton Wilson founded the Guns and Dope Party under the premise that if you could get all of the gun nuts and all of the drop smokers united together you’d have a majority of voters. The downside is that the gun nuts tend to not like the dope smokers and vice versa. But the two groups really should be united because they’re fighting the same battle, which is the battle over who owns you. Both the gun nuts and the dope smokers are, whether they know it or not, arguing for self-ownership. The right of self-ownership necessarily requires the right to defend yourself, which the gun nuts are fighting for, and the right to put whatever you please into your body, which the dope smokers are fighting for. If these two groups would unite to tell all of the prohibitionists to go fuck themselves we might see some positive change in this forsaken police state of a nation.