Your Government Doesn’t Love You – Page 79

The Sex Offender Registry is Bullshit

The sex offender registry, like all government registries, is bullshit. How can I say that? Do I want neighborhoods to be ignorant of the sexual predators living within them? Do I want sexual predators to be free to roam the streets and prey on the innocent? These are the kinds of questions I’m asked when I state my opposition of the registry. Obviously I don’t want any such things. But I subscribe to Blackstone’s formulation, which states “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

When people think of the sex offender registry they think of creepy middle-aged men fondling children or raping women. The reality is far different. What’s the most common age of people charged with sex offense? It’s not 40. It’s not 50. It’s 14:

But in fact, the most common age that people are charged with a sex offense is 14. That’s according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Why so young? I explain:

Because people tend to have sex with people around their own age, which means young people tend to have sex with other young people. And much under-age sex is illegal.

So we keep throwing kids on the registry and labeling them sex offenders, as if they’re incorrigible monsters. But in Britain, a study recently commissioned by Parliament has recommended a totally different course: Trying to understand, treat and refrain from labeling the kids, since children often “make mistakes as they start to understand their sexuality and experiment with it.”

If a teenager takes a picture of their junk and consensually sends it to another teenager then both are in possession of child pornography and therefore fall under the criteria of the sex offender registry. The sex offender registry is ruining the lives of people who have done nothing wrong and aren’t even old enough to buy a cigarette or even face trail as an adult. In other words, we have a lot of innocent people suffering.

Nobody should be surprised by this. This is how government registries always work. They’re sold as a mechanism to keep track of the bad people in society but they end up filled with innocent people. I’m sure many of the teenagers who are listed as sex offenders got on the list because some judge decided that teenagers having sex is immoral and that putting them on the list would make an example of them.

Report Wrongthinking Children to the Ministry of Love

How dangerous are small children? Most rational adults would say that small children are’t very dangerous. The State, however, thinks that every child is a potential terrorist. Because of its irrational paranoia it often uses its ~~public indoctrination camps~~ schools to monitor children for wrongthink:

Are these the tell-tale signs of kids at risk of committing violence: An 8-year-old who wore a t-shirt saying he wanted to be like a seventh-century Muslim leader? A 17-year-old who sought to draw attention to the water shortage in Gaza by handing out leaflets? A 4-year-old who drew a picture of his dad slicing a vegetable?

Teachers and school officials in the United Kingdom thought so, and they referred these children for investigation as potential terrorists. They were interrogated by U.K. law enforcement. They’re likely subject to ongoing monitoring, with details of their childhoods maintained in secret government files potentially indefinitely.

[…]

Why should any of this concern Americans? Because the FBI wants to do something a little bit too close for comfort in U.S. schools, and American schoolchildren may come under similar suspicion and scrutiny.

While there’s no similar government-imposed duty on American schools, U.S. CVE initiatives are based on the Prevent model. Due to this, a core component of the U.S. CVE plan tasks teachers, social workers, and school administrators with monitoring and reporting to law enforcement on children in their care. An FBI document released earlier this year tells teachers to spy on their students’ thoughts and suggests that administrators essentially turn schools into mini-FBI offices. Rights Watch’s report shows what might happen if American schools actually follow the FBI’s proposals.

I wonder if teachers who turn in students receive a reward like people who call one of those crime tip lines?

When I express hatred for public schools I’m usually accused of wanting a world where only wealthy children can afford an education. It’s a straw man argument because I’ve never expressed an interest in restricting education to wealthy children. In fact, I’ve pointed out that education today is cheaper than ever before. My problem with public schools, besides the fact that they suck at providing education, is that they’re used as government indoctrination centers.

I remember a lot of my time in school was wasted with mindless flag worshipping. Until I entered middle school we were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. It was our mandatory morning prayer to the religion of statism. History was almost always focused on the United States and it wasn’t viewed with any critical thinking. The United States was almost always in the right and always the greatest country in human history. Geography wasn’t much different. We spent a tremendous amount of time learning the geography of the United States. Beyond that we covered a few European countries here and there and maybe one or two South American countries. What little economics education we received was, of course, nonsense Keynesian bullshit. You know the usual. A gold-based currency cannot work, inflation is good and deflation is terrible, only governments have the right to create money, etc. And there was D.A.R.E. Supposedly a program to keep kids off of drugs, D.A.R.E. was really a program to trick children into trusting the police. I still remember several police officers coming to the school under D.A.R.E. to tell us that the police are our friends (yet anything you say to them can and will be used against you).

More concerning than the indoctrination though was the pursuit of wrongthinkers. I was one of those wrongthinkers and was therefore specifically targeted. Were I going through high school today I’m sure my principal would have reported me to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) instead of the local police department and my entire existence would have been surveilled for the remainder of my life.

If you put your children into the public education system the State is going to do its damnedest to turn them into unthinking patriotic boot lickers. If your children fail to take to the programming they will be labeled wrongthinkers and may get themselves an FBI record before they’re old enough to buy a beer. Keep your kids out of the fucking public indoctrination camps if at all possible. They won’t get an education there but they will come to the attention of Big Brother.

Republicans Versus Democrats Versus Libertarians

The Republicans are selling a world where tall concrete walls topped with barbed wire surround the good God fearing white people of American so they can have sex in the missionary position without worrying about getting their throats slit by the evil barbarians they’re bombing killing.

The Democrats are selling a world where the disarmed populace is entirely at the mercy of the lawless but remain safe from unapproved, dangerous speech and any potential transgression against Mother Gaia, real or imaginary, is punished via summary execution.

The libertarians are selling a world where everybody has the right to snort cocaine off of a hooker’s ass in the middle of a private road while both individuals are wearing nothing but gun belts with automatic Glock pistols in their holsters.

How the fuck are libertarians the ones having a hard time selling people on their ideas?

Don’t Think of It as Rigging, Think of It as Investing

This year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) may be the greatest public display of cognitive dissonance in history. Through leaked e-mails we’ve learned that the Democratic Party primaries were being manipulated by the DNC to favor Hillary. I was hoping that Bernie’s supporters were going to react by flipping every table at the DNC and storming out. Instead many of them are latching onto the suspicion that the e-mails were acquired by Russia as fact and using that to sweep the entire affair under the rug. Apparently factual information ceases being factual if Russia acquired it.

Political corruption is nothing new. Politics itself is an exercise in corruption. But the e-mails give us an interesting insight into the payoffs. Take the DNC’s former chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The leaked e-mails revealed that she used her position to rig the election in Hillary’s favor. Although this revelation forced her to resign, she was immediately snapped up by the Hillary campaign:

Ms. Wasserman Schultz was widely criticized during the Democratic primary by supporters of Bernie Sanders of using her position at the DNC to tip the race toward Mrs. Clinton. At least some of that was confirmed at the weekend by the release by Wikileaks of internal DNC emails, which forced her to announce her resignation Sunday.

But in a reaction statement to reporters Sunday, Mrs. Clinton gave Ms. Wasserman Schultz a soft landing by announcing that she would join the Clinton campaign.

Corruption is becoming more blatant now than ever before. It used to be that a scandal like this would require somebody like Wasserman Schultz to stay out of the public limelight for at least a few weeks before joining another political organization. Now corrupt politicos can jump right into the next political organization and nobody gives a damn.

Wasserman Schultz is just one example of the corruption going on in the DNC. Another example revealed by the leaked e-mails is how the DNC planned to give large donors federal appointments:

Democratic National Committee documents recently released by WikiLeaks include spreadsheets and emails that appear to show party officials planning which donors and prominent fundraisers to provide with appointments to federal boards and commissions.

[…]

The records, which WikiLeaks released along with nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails and other documents on Friday, also expose one of the Beltway’s worst kept secrets: that wealthy politicos can often buy their way to presidential appointments.

Worst kept secret is right. Like most corrupt activity that occurs in the political realm, the fact that big donors received special privileges was well known. What these e-mails provided was proof. Writing off accusations of such payoffs can no longer be relegated to the realm of conspiracy theories.

What’s the lesson from these leaked e-mails? The same lesson we always learn about democratic systems: your vote doesn’t matter. Every dollar and hour donated to Bernie’s campaign was wasted. Not only did Bernie sell out in the end by endorsing Hillary, but he had no chance of winning anyways because the DNC itself was manipulating things behind the scenes to ensure Hillary received the nomination. Bernie, effectively, only existed to create the illusion that there was a choice for the Democratic Party presidential nominee. But the DNC had already decided on its candidate and from there on it was predestined that Hillary would win by hook or by crook.

Police Blast Yet Another Nonthreatening Person

In addition to having a carry permit while black, being a therapist while black is also grounds for being shot in the United Police States of America:

Charles Kinsey, who works with people with disabilities, told WSVN television he was helping a patient who had wandered away from a facility.

Mobile phone video shows Mr Kinsey lying down with his hands in the air, and his patient sitting in the road with a toy truck.

The latest shooting follows weeks of violence involving police.

North Miami Assistant Police Chief Neal Cuevas said officers were called out on Monday, following reports of a man threatening to shoot himself.

Police ordered Mr Kinsey and the patient to lie on the ground, he told The Miami Herald.

The video shows Mr Kinsey lying down while trying to get his patient to comply.

It seems therapists lying on the ground trying to help mentally disabled patients who have toys trucks is grounds for an office fearing for his life now. These officers are either the biggest cowards on the face of the planet or they’re the most psychotic. Either way, they shouldn’t be given power over others.

The progression we’re seeing is as interesting as it is alarming. Before this year the people being gunned down by the police tended to have a criminal history for boot lickers to use to justify the shooting. But now the police are becoming so brazen that they’re gunning down people who have little or no criminal background to speak of. Since they’re not being punished for their actions they’re also not motivated to stop escalating situations to deadly force.

This situation also demonstrates that the boot lickers’ claim that people won’t get shot if they obey the orders of officers is false. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air as the officers had ordered him to do and they still shot him. When you use threats of violence as a compliance mechanism and you fail to uphold your end of the bargain, that is to say you still attack your victim even if they do comply with you, you wreck what little trust you have between yourself and your victim. That makes future scenarios more difficult. Your new victims may decided to fight back instead of complying because they believe you’ll kill them either way but they might possibly survive if they resist. By shooting a complying person the officer increased the danger of future situations involving officers using threats of violence as a compliance mechanism.

The problem of police brutality will only continue to get worse since few seems to have the will to take action to curtail it.

Submit, Slave

Remember what I said in the previous post about the police not liking any of our government granted privileges? Here’s another example:

[Waterbury Conn.] Police Chief Vernon L. Riddick Jr. brought a message of cooperation with police to a mostly African-American crowd of more than 200 people at Mount Olive A.M.E. Zion Church on Wednesday night.

If an officer stops your car, if they ask to search your person or vehicle, if they demand entry into your home, comply and then complain later to the department’s internal affairs office and police chief’s office if you feel your rights have been violated, Riddick said.

In other words, when an officer asks to search your vehicle or home you should just roll over and be a good little slave.

The exact opposite is true however. If an officer requests to search your property the only response you should give them is, “Come back with a warrant.” Officers asking to search your property are on fishing expeditions. They’re asking permission because they don’t believe they have enough grounds to get a warrant issued. Fishing expeditions can’t help you but they certain can hurt you. As police are required to tell you when reading you your Miranda warnings, anything you say can and will be used against you in court. Likewise, anything an officer finds during a fishing expedition can and will be used against you in court.

Always keep in mind that the police are out to get you. That’s their job. The politicians pass laws and then task the police with finding and dealing with anybody who breaks them. Many of these laws, such as traffic citations and drug offenses, include a nice kickback to the department that makes the arrest. So do yourself a favor and always exercise what few privileges you have against the police.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Law enforcers have a proud tradition of hating any government granted privilege that inconveniences them. The Fourth Amendment irritates them because it throws up roadblocks between them and searching every vehicle and building. The Fifth Amendment irritates them because it stands between them and forcing suspects to incriminate themselves. The Second Amendment irritates them because they want to be the only ones carrying guns:

In Cleveland, police union head Steve Loomis said he made the request to protect officers following recent fatal shooting of three police officers in Louisiana on Sunday and the killing of five officers in Dallas on July 7. Kasich said he did not have the power to circumvent the state’s open-carry law.

[…]

Across the country, similar battles are playing out in states where municipal authorities, often backed by police departments, are clashing with state lawmakers over how to regulate the open carrying of firearms.

Dallas’s police chief drew criticism from gun rights advocates for saying open carriers made it more “challenging” for his officers to respond to a shooter who killed five policemen at a demonstration this month.

[…]

Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have been trying and failing to restrict the open carrying of guns for years. The state attorney general argues that citizens have a constitutional right to publicly display weapons, which cannot be overruled by city authorities.

“I wish more of our legislators could see past the ideology,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn. “They have no concern about the impact in urban environments that are already plagued by too many guns and too much violence.”

These officers are focusing on open carry, not because it makes their job more challenging (after all, it’s pretty easy to distinguish a person with a holstered gun from a person actively shooting people), but because it’s currently the most controversial form of carry. This is how these fights always play out. You start with the most controversial aspect of the thing you’re trying to crush because it’s the aspect you can get popular support for. Once you’ve crushed the most controversial aspect the next aspect can be made controversial.

These officers aren’t against open carry, they’re against carry. If they achieved their goals and managed to get open carry abolished they would then move on to claim that concealed carry makes their jobs difficult because it’s hard for them to know who is legally carrying a firearm and who is a drug dealer illegally carrying a firearm.

In the end these officers want a world where us mere serfs have no protections whatsoever against them.

Implied Licenses are Bullshit

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been thoroughly fucking over people in the United States since 1998. One of the things that the DMCA accomplished was effectively abolishing property rights on anything that includes copyrighted material. This has had wide reaching ramifications including preventing farmers from repairing their own equipment:

In fact, the craziness of this goes even further: In a 2015 letter to the United States Copyright Office, John Deere, the world’s largest tractor maker, said that the folks who buy tractors don’t own them, not in the way the general public believes “ownership” works. Instead, John Deere said that those who buy tractors are actually purchasing an “implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

[…]

But what this has meant is that tractor owners can’t repair their own tractors—and if they do, they’re in violation of the DMCA. So, if a machine stops working, its owner can’t pop the hood, run some tests, and find out what’s going on; he or she is legally required to take the tractor to a service center (one owned by the manufacturer, since that’s the only entity allowed to analyze the tractor’s issues).

I’m against the concept of copyright, in part, because it is an implied license.

That is to say it’s a contractual agreement that the purchaser didn’t agree to. If you manufacture something and want to restrict the user of that thing then you need to get them to agree to contractual terms. For example, if you want to sell a book and prevent the buyer form copying it then you need to write up a contract that states the signer agrees not to copy the book and include penalties if the contract is broken. Then you need to convince the buyer to agree to it.

Copyright doesn’t work that way though. When you buy a book you don’t sign a contract binding you to an agreement not to copy the book. The agreement is implied, which is a fancy way of saying you were bound to it involuntarily. As the article notes, John Deere stated in a letter to the United States Copyright Office that people who had purchased its equipment were restricted by an implied license. The company is changing the rules after the fact by trying to force an agreement upon farmers through the State. In any sane sense of contract theory that is nonsense but in the statist interpretation it’s a perfectly sound method of getting buyers to agree to specific terms.

People should not be subject to involuntary agreements of any sort and nobody should be allowed to change an agreement willy nilly after the fact without the other party agreeing to those changes.

An Honest Cop

The Republican National Convention is happening in Cleveland this year. As part of the standard convention process of turning the city into a dystopian prison state, the head of the Cleveland Police Union wants open carry banned. The best part is how blatant his he about not caring whether or not such a ban is even legal:

“We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something — I don’t care if it’s constitutional or not at this point,” Cleveland Police Union president Stephen Loomis told CNN.

Law enforcers are supposedly tasked with upholding the law. If Governor Kasich were to issue an unconstitutional, that is to say illegal, executive order then the police, if they were actually interested in upholding the law, should arrest his. But we have the president of the Cleveland Police Union stating in no uncertain terms that he’s okay with the governor breaking the law. Once again we see that laws only apply to us little people, not to the State.

Philando Castile Had a Carry Permit

A lot of boot lickers have called Castile’s girlfriend’s claim that he had a carry permit into question. If he did have a carry permit that necessarily means he had no felonies, history of domestic abuse, or any notable history of violence. Since those are the go-to excuses boot lickers usually use to justify what appears to be an egregious use of lethal force by police, the fact he had a carry permit really threw a wrench into their mechanisms.

Earlier this week the Star Tribune said it had confirmed that Philando Castile had a carry permit. The boot lickers called this claim into question as well because the source was anonymous (due to the privacy laws surrounding permit holder data in Minnesota anybody with access to the data who shares it can get into trouble). However, the family of Castile has released a copy of the letter sent by the Hennepin County Sheriffs Office when they issued Castile his permit.

I think we can put the issue of whether or not Castile had a carry permit to bed now.