You’re Doing it Right – Page 17

Don’t Make Vague Threatening Statements When You Carry A Gun

Sometimes I become complacent in my assumption that gun owners as a whole are a pretty cool group. This is probably because most of my friends who own guns are really awesome people. But then a social issue hits the headlines and I’m reminded that a lot of gun owners are just as big of assholes as a lot of anti-gunners. This post is about one of those gun owners.

Target reiterated its bathroom policy, which is a sensible policy that allows transgender individuals to use the facilities of their gender, and now a bunch of social conservatives are announcing their plan to boycott the store. I have no issues as far as that goes since everybody should be free to associate or disassociate with anybody they choose for whatever reason they choose. But a handful of these social conservatives seem to be having a competition over who can be the biggest asshole about it.

The current winner of this competition may be Anita Staver. Staver felt the need to make a special announcement to alert the world that she will be carrying her firearm into a very specific place:

After Target announced its transgender customers and employees can use store bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, Orlando-based Liberty Counsel president Anita Staver said she would be taking her Glock .45 into Target’s restrooms, saying the gun “identifies as my bodyguard.”

Most of us who carry a firearm don’t feel the need to specifically announce every single place we’re going to carry it. In fact when one go out of their way to make a special announcement that they’re going to carry a gun into a place that is currently being featured in heated debates — especially when that announcement contains language that belittles one side of the debate — it might come off as a bit threatening. Just maybe.

If you want to carry a gun, just carry the damn thing. Don’t be an asshole about it. And especially don’t make statements about the fact you carry that could very easily be perceived as threatening to a group of people you openly hold distain for. In other words, don’t be this asshole.

The New Twenty Dollar Bill

The Treasury has announced that Andrew Jackson will be replaced with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. And this is hands down the best possible design for it.

Harriet Tubman holding one hand out as if to say, “Come on you son of a bitch, do you want to be free or not?” and holding a pistol in her other hand to demonstrate she will not be fucked with.

Too bad the Treasury won’t use this design in all likelihood.

The Only Argument In Favor Of A Cruz Nomination

I find almost nothing redeemable about Ted Cruz. The same goes for his competitors — and his party — and the opposing party — and its candidates. But somebody has finally given a valid reason to support Cruz as the Republican nominee:

Just when it seems that Rep. Peter King must have exhausted his venom for Ted Cruz, he fires off another poisoned dart.

“I hate Ted Cruz, and I think I’ll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination,” the New York Republican told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, as voters prepared to cast ballots in the state’s primary.

I admit that the thought of Peter King voluntarily consuming cyanide fills my heart with joy.

Sometimes A Judge Displays Some Common Sense

Although the system of “checks and balances” that make up this nation’s various governmental bodies more commonly looks like a circlejerk, sometimes a judge displays some good, excuse the pun, judgement:

A west-central Minnesota judge has tossed out the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ highest-profile deer-poaching bust in recent memory, saying a GPS device that conservation officers attached to the suspect’s pickup was illegal.

[…]

Van Hon said in his ruling that had the DNR asked for a search warrant to place the tracking device on Liebl’s truck, the request probably would have been granted.

“Although the [tracking order] application provided sufficient basis for finding probable cause to issue a warrant, no finding of probable cause was requested or made,” Van Hon wrote in his decision. He added:

“The court cannot retroactively transform what is not a warrant into a warrant. The tracking order is not the equivalent of a warrant. … In the present case there was ample information to support a finding of probable cause for a warrant to issue for the GPS device.”

This cases falls under that legal category loathed by so many prosecutors: a technicality. In this case the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), according to the judge, likely had enough evidence get get a warrant. But the agency didn’t get a warrant so the judge threw the case out instead of bending the rules to favor his employer, the State.

So much of what people, especially law enforcers and prosecutors, see as bureaucratic red tape is often the only thing standing between a prosecutor desperate to get a guilty plea and an innocent person. Sometimes that red tape lets a guilty person walk free but, as William Blackstone once said, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the DNS chooses to appeal this case and, if so, whether the next judge will “transform what is not a warrant into a warrant.”

A New Hero Arises

Setting aside my general hatred of intellectual property, I want to discuss an especially heinous abuse of intellectual property laws. A lot of research done in the United States is funded by tax dollars. We’re told this is necessary because the research wouldn’t be done if it was left to the market and that we shouldn’t complain because the research benefits all of us. But the research fueled by tax funding seldom benefits all of us because the findings are locked away being the iron curtain of publisher paywalls. We may have been forced to fund it but we don’t get to read it unless we’re willing to pay even more to get a copy of the research papers.

Aaron Swartz fought against this and was ruthlessly pursued by the State for his actions. Now that he has left us a new hero has risen to the call. Alexandra Elbakyan is the creator and operator of Sci-Hub, a website created to distribute research papers currently secured behind paywalls:

But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research’s Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who’s living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like “hacker” and “criminal.”

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It’s a portal that offers free and searchable access “to most publishers, especially well-known ones.” Search for it, download, and you’re done. It’s that easy.

“The more known the publisher is, the more likely Sci-Hub will work,” she told Ars via e-mail. A message to her site’s users says it all: “SCI-HUB…to remove all barriers in the way of science.”

I fear many libertarians will be quick to dismiss Alexandra because she espouses anti-capitalist ideals. But it’s important to focus her actions, which are very libertarian indeed. She is basically playing the role of Robin Hood by liberating stolen wealth from the State and returning it to the people. The money has already been spent so it cannot be retrieved but what it bought, research, is still there and should be returned to the people as compensation for the original theft. That is all freely releasing tax funded research is and for her part Alexandra should be treated as the hero she is.

An Armed Society Is A Polite Society

Muslims are a minority in the United States. Anti-Muslim sentiments are also at a high. Those two points create the perfect conditions for anti-Muslim bigots to act brave and mighty. Heinlein wrote, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” From this one can infer that an unarmed society is an impolite society. Manners are bad when one faces no consequences for their actions.

A group of anti-Muslim bigots planned to hold a protest at a mosque in Dallas. I’m sure the participants had crusader-like visions of appearing brave and powerful compared to the infidels they planned to protest. Especially since they were brining weapons and likely assume their targets were going to be unarmed. But things didn’t turn out quite as they expected:

A few hundred South Dallas residents, mostly black, flooded Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to oppose a planned demonstration by a mostly white group that routinely protests outside mosques.

Both sides were armed.

Dallas police stood guard on a funeral home’s roof as black counterprotesters swarmed the parking lot of Eva’s House of Bar-B-Q, vowing to defend their streets and chanting “black power.”

“This is what they fear — the black man,” said activist Olinka Green. “This is what America fears.”

The anti-mosque group showed up in camouflage, carrying guns and an American flag, FOX 4 reported. They left soon after and the protests ended without incident.

Instead of protesting an unarmed group of Muslims the protesters found themselves up against armed counterprotesters. As is usual in case when two equally armed but disagreeing groups come into contact, the conflict ended peacefully. The protesters, seeing their perceived advantage vanish, decided to withdraw rather than risk a conflict with a group that could put up an effective resistance. In effect the protesters saw that they might actually have to back up their actions with their lives and decided it would be smarter to take the polite route than to continue their impolite actions.

Time and time again history has shown us what happens when one group enjoys overwhelming force over another: genocide. I advocate that everybody wanting to bear arms do so. But I especially encourage members of oppressed groups to bear arms. The biggest enabler of oppression is force disparity. This is why oppressors always try to disarm their intended victims. After the Civil War the State passed arms control laws specifically aimed at disarmed newly freed blacks. In the aftermath of the 1857 Indian rebellion Britain passed weapon control laws aimed at disarming Indians. When the Third Reich came to power it passed laws expressly forbid Jews from owning firearms. But without force disparity oppression is much more costly to perpetrate. With the risks of oppressing a target group increased most would-be oppressors tend to keep their actions to mere words whispered behind closed doors.

Paranoia I Appreciate

My first Apple product was a PowerBook G4 that I purchased back in college. At the time I was looking for a laptop that could run a Unix operating system. Back then (as is still the case today albeit to a lesser extent) running Linux on a laptop meant you had to usually give up sleep mode, Wi-Fi, the additional function buttons most manufacturers added on their keyboards, and a slew of power management features that made the already pathetic battery life even worse. Since OS X was (and still is) Unix based and didn’t involved the headaches of trying to get Linux to run on a laptop the PowerBook fit my needs perfectly.

Fast forward to today. Between then and now I’ve lost confidence in a lot of companies whose products I used to love. Apple on the other hand has continued to impress me. In recent times my preference for Apple products has been influenced in part by the fact that it doesn’t rely on selling my personal information to make money and displays a healthy level of paranoia:

Apple has begun designing its own servers partly because of suspicions that hardware is being intercepted before it gets delivered to Apple, according to a report yesterday from The Information.

“Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the report said. “At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips.”

Anybody who has been paying attention the the leaks released by Edward Snowden knows that concerns about surveillance hardware being added to off-the-shelf products isn’t unfounded. In fact some companies such as Cisco have taken measure to mitigate such threats.

Apple has a lot of hardware manufacturing capacity and it appears that the company will be using it to further protect itself against surveillance by manufacturing its own servers.

This is a level of paranoia I can appreciate. Years ago I brought a lot of my infrastructure in house. My e-mail, calendar and contact syncing, and even this website are all being hosted on servers running in my dwelling. Although part of the reason I did this was for the experience another reason was to guard against certain forms of surveillance. National Security Letters (NSL), for example, require service providers to surrender customer information to the State and legally prohibit them from informing the targeted customer. Since my servers are sitting in my dwelling any NSL would necessarily require me to inform myself of receiving it.

AR Hacking

When you think about starting points for hackers what comes to mind? For many people images of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis connected to strange looking robotic parts are the first things they think of. But there’s no reason you have to start there. Deviant did a good presentation about hacking the AR-15. If you’re into firearms and want to get into hacking it’s a good video to watch since it explains how the two intersect very well:

No Matter Who You Are, No Matter Where You Are, The Black Market Has Your Back

What is the enemy of tyranny? Is it the ballot box? Is it the bullet box? No! It’s the black market:

North Korea’s isolation from most of the world is not just economic and diplomatic, but technological too. Only about 3 million of its people have access to its domestic telecommunications network, which does not permit access to outside countries. Its internet, meanwhile, is accessible only to the nation’s elites.

But some North Koreans have been able to circumvent these restrictions, thanks to the spread of illegal black market phones into the country. A new report from Amnesty International explains that these smuggled devices—referred to as “Chinese mobile phones,” even if they’re not actually from China—have become an important tool for North Koreans looking to connect with loved ones who have left the country and want to stay in touch.

If their relatives or friends at home don’t already have a “Chinese mobile phone,” the report explains, “often the person who has left will try to send them a phone, for example one bought in South Korea, Japan, or China.”

North Koreans who obtain one of these smartphones can connect with people outside the country by installing a Chinese SIM card in their device. They then must go to a part of the country close to the Chinese border, where they might pick up signal from a neighboring Chinese network.

No matter how repressive of a regime you suffer under the black market is there to provide you the goods you want. Are your overlords preventing you from communicating with the outside world? Never fear! The black market is here to provide you unrestricted telecommunications. Do your overlords prohibit you from owning the most effective means of self-defense? The black market is here to provide you with guns and ammo. Is there some government agency that artificially restricts your access to medication? The black market is here to provide you the medications you need.

The black market has been and continues to be the single greatest enemy to tyranny. By flagrantly providing illicit goods the black market shows that the emperor wears no clothes.

Facebook Trolling The United Kingdom

In general I find Facebook to be one of the creepiest surveillance corporations. But in this case I’m willing to give the company a pass. Facebook has announced that it is giving each of its United Kingdom (UK) employees a $1.1 million bonus in order to avoid paying taxes:

Facebook is to award bonuses of £280 million ($396 million) to its U.K.-based staff over the next three years in a bid to offset the amount of tax it has to pay to the U.K. Treasury.

Each employee will receive an average of £775,000 ($1.1 million), which Facebook will list as a taxable expense.

This raises an interesting question. Who will win between the statists demanding Facebook to pay more taxes or the statists demanding Facebook pay its employees more. Since the same people are often demanding both this is probably causing some severe headaches.

But that’s not all! In addition to this trolling Facebook also threw in an additional complimentary troll:

The new tax blow is all the more frustrating for the British government after data emerged recently to show that the Treasury pays more to Facebook for advertising placement than it receives in taxes from the Silicon Valley giant.

Why is the UK Treasury paying Facebook for advertising? What does a State have to advertise? It makes its services compulsory for everybody. Either way, it’s nice to see Facebook draining some wealth away from the State. While Facebook’s employees will likely have to pay income taxes on their substantial bonus the amount the UK will receive will likely be far less than if Facebook paid what was being demanded of it directly. It also sends a terrific message.