You’re Doing it Wrong – Page 46

Meet the New Narrative

I remember not too long ago when everybody was beautiful. At least that’s what we were told to say. We were told to say this because eating disorders were becoming a thing of concern, predominantly with girls who believed they were fat. But the narrative has changed. Now we’re all a bunch of fat fucks who are too stupid to buy food without being patronized by our grocery carts:

The panel came up with six preferred strategies: discount coupons for SNAP recipients; rebates of up to $60 for healthy purchases on EBT cards; buy one get one free deals for SNAP recipients; a targeted marketing plan to promote healthy food; a USDA loyalty card; and new specialized shopping carts.

The “MyCart grocery cart” would provide dividers for shoppers to make sure they are selecting enough items in each “MyPlate” category, the USDA’s food icon.

“MyCart is a nonfinancial approach that would use behavioral economics to encourage healthier purchases by any consumer, including SNAP participants,” the report said.

The cart would be color-coded, physically divided, and have a system installed so that when the shopping cart reaches its healthy “threshold” it would congratulate the customer.

“The algorithm would group the purchases to classify them using the MyPlate designations and to provide consumers with a message of support or encouragement (e.g., “You achieved a MyCart healthy shopping basket!”),” the report said.

As with most things, this idea is being aimed first at people on government assistance. It’s an easy category to target since the government can justify its targeting by claiming that it’s footing the bill. But it also knows that grocery stores aren’t going to ask customers if they’re shopping with food stamps and, if so, give them a different cart. Instead grocery stores would be more apt to just make every cart a “MyCart” or whatever other stupid patronizing name the government comes up with for its program.

I often wonder if the government’s sudden push to call us all a bunch of fat fucks is causing or will cause an uptick in the number of people with eating disorders. Maybe that’s the plan. After all, the government only cares about the statistics. It doesn’t matter to the bean counters if there are less obese people due to healthier eating and more exercise or anorexia.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Damn I love government. Well, OK, I hate government but it gives me a never ending fountain of things to write about. For example, California has been suffering from major droughts (because turning a bunch of arid desert into farming land was a stellar idea). Because of this Michael Korte and Laura Whitney, wanting to be good citizens, decided to cut back on watering their grass. You would think the local government would be ecstatic about the idea. This could convince other fine citizens to stop watering their grass and save scarce water for most important uses. But that’s not how the local government responded. Instead it is planning to punish the couple because their grass isn’t green enough (must be part of the government’s green initiative):

(Reuters) – A Southern California couple who scaled back watering their lawn amid the state’s drought received a warning from the suburb where they live that they might be fined for creating an eyesore – despite emergency statewide orders to conserve.

Michael Korte and Laura Whitney, who live near Los Angeles in Glendora, said on Thursday they received a letter from the city warning they had 60 days to green up their partially brown lawn or pay a fine ranging from $100 to $500.

Talk about mixed signals. On the one hand the government is complaining that there is a drought and water needs to be conserved. On the other hand the government bitches when somebody’s grass isn’t green enough. What the fuck is a person caught in that situation supposed to do? It’s almost like the entire system is rigger so that no matter what you do the government gets to take your fucking money.

It was Bound to Happen

Remember that substandard police training I was talking about? It was finally combined with modern policing’s love of puppycide to its logical conclusion. Via Uncle I learned that Douglas, Georgia shot a 10 year-old kid while trying to gun down the family dog:

Sheriff Wooten said a deputy, who was not named, was on approaching the property when a dog ran up to him. The deputy fired one shot, missing the dog and hitting the child. It was not immediately clear if the gun was accidently fired by the deputy.

It was only a matter of time until this happened. When you combine inadequate weapons training, an almost complete absence of consequences for wrongdoing, and a standard operating procedure to shoot any dog on sight you have a recipe for an innocent bystander getting shot.

If history is any indicator the offending officer will receive a paid vacation while this story blows over. After the weekly news cycle has forgotten about the kid the officer will return to active duty so he can shoot another kid while attempting to gun down another family pet. Because this is America and taking responsibility for your actions is only for the people without badges.

The Fix is In

Speaking of democracy Afghanistan apparently doesn’t understand how to do it. The country recently had a presidential vote. It was a close election, as elections between two worthless twats often are, but the Afghan people apparently chose incorrectly because we had to send John Kerry in to fix things:

Afghanistan’s current President Hamid Karzai, who came to office after the US-led overthrow of the Taliban, is stepping down after more than 10 years.

He has welcomed the audit and agreed to delay his successor’s inauguration to allow time for the review, which is expected to take several weeks.

At a news conference with the two candidates, Mr Kerry said that every single ballot would be audited.

“This is the strongest possible signal by both candidates of a desire to restore legitimacy to the process and to Afghan democracy,” he said.

The thing I don’t understand is that the supposed winner, Ashraf Ghani, seems pretty pro-American. Perhaps we’re just unhappy that he won by such a small margin and are looking to make the margin larger. Who knows. Either way it appears that Afghanistan doesn’t know how to do democracy how we want them to do it.

More Democracy

Somebody started a campaign to put a meaningless item on the ballot in California. That meaningless item is a proposal to split California into six states:

SAN FRANCISCO — A plan backed by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split California into six states has gained enough signatures to make the November 2016 ballot, the plan’s backers say.

A Twitter account belonging to the nonprofit Six Californias tweeted on Monday that “#SixCalifornias will be submitting signatures in Sacramento tomorrow for placement on the November 2016 ballot. Stay tuned for coverage!”

On Tuesday, Draper told USA Today the campaign had garnered 1.3 million signatures, well over the approximately 808,000 needed.

I say that the ballot item is meaningless because even if it does pass the California and federal government will never allow it to happen. But that hasn’t stopped people from getting their panties in a bunch over this. Not surprisingly lovers of democracy have demonstrated once again that they will only love so much democracy because the biggest debate surrounding this proposal is the fact that it would create 10 new senators. This is apparently bad because, well, I don’t fucking know.

I just don’t understand most advocates of democracy. They spend a lot of time talking about the need for choices to vote for but when you give them a lot of choices they complain. When Minneapolis had 35 mayoral candidates people started bitching because there were too many and demanded that the filing fee be increased to $500.00. People here are also bitching about the governor race. As it turns out the fact that the Independence Party has fielded a candidate has pissed off a lot of people because they only want a choice between a Democrat or a Republican. Again, they spend a lot of time talking about the need for choices but when they get choices they complain.

Now a proposal that would create 10 new senators is being put to a vote and fans of democracy are again complaining… because it would create more senators. I guess this could tip the scale of balance between the two party facade in this country or something. Like I said, I don’t understand it. What I do understand is that everybody loves democracy so long as the only choices available are the choices they personally approve of.

In regards to the proposal itself I think it falls a bit short. I believe California should be split up into approximately 38.04 million separate states. But cutting it into six is a start.

Salon Goes Full Retard Again

You writers at Salon are like an enteral fountain of stupid ideas. That’s probably because…

More to the point, you’re all a bunch of state worshiping socialists. As far as you’re concerned the only problem in this world is that we don’t have a state boot stomping on our faces quite enough yet. And that leads you to say really stupid things like this:

They’re huge, they’re ruthless, and they touch every aspect of our daily lives. Corporations like Amazon and Google keep expanding their reach and their power. Despite a history of abuses, so far the Justice Department has declined to take antitrust actions against them. But there’s another solution.

Is it time to manage and regulate these companies as public utilities?

No. No it’s not. And I’m going to tell you why it’s not by using your own stupid arguments against you. You see, every argument you use against Google and Amazon can be equally applied to the state.

Big Tech was created with publicly-developed technology.

Publicly-developed technology are built by private companies. Think of the state’s major technologies. Fighter jets, bombers, tanks, drones, missiles, and aircraft carriers are all built by private companies. The technology that runs the Internet? Yup, it’s all made by private companies such as Cisco, Dell, HP, and IBM (which has quite a history of building things for governments). When the state wants something it throws money at private companies that actually build it. Without private companies there would be no “publicly-developed” technology.

Big Tech’s services have become a necessity in modern society.

Then why ruin it by giving it over to the state? The only thing the state does competently is steal and break shit. While it does throw some money at private companies to build substandard roads much of its resources are invested in militarizing the police so they can better murder our pets, building more efficient ways for our military to blow up people overseas, and protecting the politically connected private companies from its not as well connect competitors.

If Google and Amazon were nationalized the would use them to collect even more data on you and I. Gmail would exist to allow the state to know when we’re communicating about something illegal and our purchases on Amazon would be scrutinized to see if some tangible connection to terrorism could be made. Google Maps would probably be used to drop Hellfire missiles on whoever used it as well.

They’re at or near monopoly status – and moving fast.

The state is a monopoly. In fact it is the monopoly that makes all other monopolies possible.

They abuse their power.

And what does the state do? Let me think. It sends heavily armed men to kick down people’s doors at two in the morning, shoot their dogs, and kidnap them for possessing a fucking plant. Then you have the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the state’s apparatus for spying on our phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, and other communications. When it finds a little free time it also likes to put people to death even though the evidence supporting those people’s guilt is nonexistent. I haven’t even gotten to the number of foreigners it slaughters.

They got there with our help.

So did the state. It acquires its resources by stealing them from us. Sometimes it’s in the form of taxes other times its in the form of fines and other times its in the form of slave labor (which it rather humorously refers to as prison labor).

The real “commodity” is us.

Guess what? The state’s commodity is us. We’re nothing more than tax cattle and cannon fodder to it.

Our privacy is dying … or already dead.

Edward Snowden really brought this point to light. The NSA has been spying on our digital communications for years. While I dislike many of the data collection policies used by Google and Amazon there is a major difference between what they do and what the state does with my data. Google and Amazon use my data for personal profit and to find more shit for me to buy from them. The state uses my data to decide whether or not it will send armed thugs to my home at two in the morning so they can shoot my pets and kidnap me. I’d say that’s a pretty big difference.

Freedom of information is at risk.

Are you referring to the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA)?

The free market could become even less free.

And your solution is to preemptively restrict it by putting Google and Amazon under the state’s direct control? That’s not a solution to the hypothetical problem of the free market becoming less free; that’s making the hypothetical problem a reality.

They could hijack the future.

So could the state. The difference, of course, is that Google and Amazon hijacking the future doesn’t lead to people being locked in cages, bombed, and otherwise brutalized.

Expensive Porn

Lest somebody believe that the Republican Party has a monopoly on candidates saying really stupid and offensive shit I present you the words of Mike Dickinson, a Democratic candidate for the Virginia House:

Mike Dickinson, the Virginia liberal Democrat seeking the House seat currently held by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., despite not being on the ballot, offered a $100,000 reward for nude photos and videos of Kendall Jones, the 19-year-old Texas Tech cheerleader who recently made news with a series of hunting photos on her Facebook page.

“I have 100k to anyone who has nude photos or videos of #kendalljones at Texas tech (sic),” Dickinson tweeted. “She deserves to be a target.”

$100,000 for nude pictures of a teenage girl? Is this guy a fucking idiot? Does he not know that you can get all of the nude teenage pictures you want on the Internet for free? Somebody tell this man about Google stat!

OK, I admit that I’ve tried to stay out of this entire debate. My guess is that the outrage over Kendall Jones is mostly manufactured. I’m guessing she wants to do a hunting show or something like that and got ahold of a good marketing agency that started drumming up this controversy. Before all of this is said and done the people who oppose safaris will have the people who support safaris so fired up that they’ll buy whatever Mrs. Jones is selling just to spite their opposition. Is it cynical for me to think this? Absolutely!

However when you have candidates offering $100,000 to get nude pictures of a girl for the expressed purpose of embarrassing her just because he disagrees with what she does shit needs to be called out (at least if your hobby is making politicians look more like idiots than they normally do). Such activities indicate deep seated psychopathy, which was already indicated by the fact that he is running for office.

Minnesota Gun Rights Continues to Look Like a Scam

Minnesota Gun Rights (MGR) is a local affiliate organization of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). If you’re never heard of NAGR, and I wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t, it’s an organization that labels itself as a “no compromise” gun rights advocacy group. In reality it is an organization that appears to exist solely to separate gullible gun owners from their money. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of MGR. It’s a fairly new organization in Minnesota that mirrors its national affiliate organization in providing gun owners no tangible benefit whatsoever but constantly begging them for money.

One may wonder how I came to my conclusion regarding MGR. It’s simple really, I hang out with a lot of the people it targets. By calling itself a “no compromise” gun rights organization it targets people who believe the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) has compromised too often in the battle for gun rights. Many of these people are members of the local liberty-lite (my name for people who call themselves liberty advocates but continue believing that there should be a government) and liberty (anarchists) movements. Whenever one of these people posts about their dissatisfaction with GOCRA somebody jumps in to promote MGR. On July 4^th one of my friends posted about his dissatisfaction with GOCRA. Within hours a person who I know to be one of the kingpins in MGR swooped in (please note that I have anonymized all comments except my own because it may be possible to determine the identity of my friend by using me and the commenters as connections):

This is always the tag line they use. If I didn’t know otherwise I would believe this commenter to be an automated bot written by some stooge at MGR. Either way I don’t take scammers targeting my friends lightly so I decided to jump into the fray:

My attempt at both trolling MGR and preventing a friend from giving money to a, as far as I know, scam organization elicited a response from a second MGR shill:

In all honesty this is the most information I’ve ever gotten out of an MGR shill. Apparently the only way you can find out what the organization does is by attending its super secret (since they’re not posted anywhere on MGR’s website) weekend classes (which MGR probably charges for). The last time I heard about an organization that required people to attend super secret meetings just to find out what it does there were tests for thetan levels involved.

Since antagonization seemed to be working (at least better than any other tactic I’ve used to get information out of MGR shills) I decided to try some more:

I guess he must have been in contact with the mothership because after divulging information about MGR’s super secret weekend meetings (which, I’m now convinced, may actually involve thetan level testing) he resorted to the usual MGR shill tactic when pressed for information: deflection:

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I decided to go for the jugular. Now that I know MGR hosts biannual super secret weekend meetings that supposedly explain what the organization does I decided to ask why that information wasn’t posted on its website. After all, you would think any organization that held regular events would have a schedule posted on its website letting people know when and where they are:

I even performed a courtesy check of MGR’s website just in case some evidence of its super secret weekend meetings was posted since the start of the conversation (after all, it’s possible that nobody from MGR had thought to post information about its meetings to its website). Nothing was. Instead the shill simply said he would keep me in mind the next time one of these super secret weekend meetings occurred:

How he planned to inform me of the next meeting when he doesn’t know me and we’re not friends on Facebook is beyond me. He didn’t send a friend request or anything. But I digress. If MGR has actually held any of these super secret weekend meetings in the past I would think some information about them would have been posted on its website (you know, so its shills could point to said information when somebody like me accuses it of not doing anything):

What followed was a misunderstanding on my behalf:

I believe my misunderstanding was honest. After all, if somebody said evidence that your organization has done something is entirely absent from your website and you said “Actually there is.” you should assume that that person will assume that you are referring to evidence existing on your website. But that wasn’t the case here:

MGR must have been founded by the most operator of operators that has ever operated in areas of operations because it practices some extraordinary operational security. Its super secret weekend classes are, in fact, super secret. If you want to learn what the organization does you will have to wait for it to contact you, probably through a ninja courier, so you can get a personal invitation with the time and location of the next meeting. And you will probably have to memorize the information on your invitation because it will almost certain self-destruct five seconds after you receive it.

This, above everything else I have learned about the organization, reinforces my belief that the organization is a scam. It will gladly swoop in on vulnerable gun owners and ask them to give it money by whispering “no compromise” into their ears. But if its targets actually want to know what the organization does before giving it money that’s just tough shit. And, yes, I did let the shill know this:

It was obvious that I wasn’t going to get further information out of him so I gave up. However I do want to take a moment to point something out here. Political and business tactics are often kept secret. But if I want to know what a politician is claiming to fight for or what a business is selling I need only ask. Both are more than happy to provide me with such information. Likewise if I want to know what a politician or business has done I need only ask. Again both are more than happy to provide me with such information. They both know that you need to entice people. If you’re a politician you get people’s attention by telling them what you’re fighting for. If you’re a business you get people’s attention by telling them what you’re selling. Providing a track record of past successes helps assure people that you’re not just trying to scam them.

No politician or business, upon being asked what it has done, is going to tell you to attend a super secret weekend meeting at an undisclosed location and time.

My recommendation is to avoid MGR. I can’t find any evidence that indicates it is anything other than a sad attempt to separate Minnesota gun owners from their money. Red flags should go up when nobody involved with an organization is willing to tell you what, exactly, the organization has done. Even if you have misgivings about GOCRA its members are more than happy to provide you with a list of things it has done, and proof that verifies that list, so you can make an informed decision. MGR’s members are unwilling to even do that.

Why Advocating for Gun Control in Gun Publications Carriers Consequences

The Atlantic has an article titled Why We Can’t Talk About Gun Control. In it the termination of Dick Metcalf from Guns and Ammo is discussed as an excuse for why this nation, supposedly, can’t have a discussion about gun control (you know, except for all of the discussions about gun control that happen every damn day):

In the column, Metcalf wrote that he did not believe it was an infringement of the Second Amendment to require some training before a person can have a concealed carry. He added that states can have a universal background check law without him feeling infringed upon.

That did not go over well.

The column appeared in the December 2013 issue of Guns & Ammo, but subscribers started getting it in late October. Within three days, Metcalf said, as responses poured in—by mail, in forums, and on social media—from what he called the pointed end of the bell curve, people who “think the constitution is the only law we need,” Metcalf was labeled a “gun control collaborator” and “modern-day Benedict Arnold.”

“What struck me most about what happened to me was that this huge media corporation [Intermedia, the owner of Guns & Ammo] was absolutely unprepared for the onslaught of social-media negativity,” Metcalf said, “when we went over that line and dared ask the question, whether people might think about whether or not regulation is by definition infringement.”

The tone of the article insinuates that us gun owners are such extreme nut cases that we tirelessly censor any attempt in the media to discuss gun control. Let me explain this from a different angle, namely from the angle of a gun owner and gun rights activist. As a gun owner I am the demographic that Guns and Ammo targets. It makes money by selling magazines primarily to its target demographic. When your target demographic involves gun owners and gun rights activists publishing articles that basically raise a gigantic middle finger to them is bad for business. Not surprisingly when Metcalf went on his little rant about supporting mandator background checks for all firearm transfers, a legalese way of making something as simple as gifting one of your firearms to your own fucking child a crime unless you also paid $20 to a federally licensed dealer to do nothing more than make a phone call to a federal agency, it irked Guns and Ammo’s target demographic. Why would gun owners and gun rights activists want to pay money to be told that they are potentially dangerous people who should not be allowed to possess a firearm unless some faceless bureaucrat working for one of the most violent governments currently in existence says so?

But here’s the thing, Metcalf hasn’t been silenced by us evil gun owners. His employment with Guns and Ammo was terminated but he’s still free to write for another publication. In fact there are many publications, including The Atlantic itself, that are more than happy to pay writers money to toe the gun control advocates’ line. Hell Michael Bloomberg would probably pay big money for a writer who was bullied by us big mean gun owners.

So The Atlantic’s assertion that there can’t be a conversation about gun control is flat out bullshit. It’s true that many of us who own guns aren’t willing to pay money to have gun control preached at us but we’re not stopping anybody from preaching. I’m also not willing to pay writers to call me a misogynist. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have a conversation about whether or not I’m misogyny for liking an author’s works, it simply means that I won’t fund the damn conversation.

Mercenaries Threaten Government Official

Mercenaries are an interesting wildcard to study. They play some part in almost every major conflict yet are seldom mentioned in the history books. For example, when the United States declared an end to combat operations in Iraq it decided to leave a bunch of mercenaries behind. This receives little coverage by major media outlets who were simply declaring and end to the Iraqi conflict.

I referred to mercenaries as wildcards because their allegiances are often murky at best. Even if you’re paying them they might turn on you if one of your opponents makes a better offer. They may also turn on you simply because they feel as though you’re meddling in their affairs:

On Aug. 20, 2007, Mr. Richter was called in to the office of the embassy’s regional security officer, Bob Hanni, who said he had received a call asking him to document Mr. Richter’s “inappropriate behavior.” Mr. Richter quickly called his supervisor in Washington, who instructed him to take Mr. Thomas with him to all remaining meetings in Baghdad, his report noted.

The next day, the two men met with Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s project manager in Iraq, to discuss the investigation, including a complaint over food quality and sanitary conditions at a cafeteria in Blackwater’s compound. Mr. Carroll barked that Mr. Richter could not tell him what to do about his cafeteria, Mr. Richter’s report said. The Blackwater official went on to threaten the agent and say he would not face any consequences, according to Mr. Richter’s later account.

Mr. Carroll said “that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit.

You read that correctly. A member of ~~Blackwater~~ Xe Academi threatened to kill a United States official. Between all of the other shenanigans members of Academi have pulled in Iraq I think it’s safe to say that it basically does whatever the hell it wants do. Considering this happened in 2007 and Academi is still there it appears as though the United States isn’t too concerned about it’s dog biting at its hand. I’m interested in seeing what kind of atrocities committed by Academi we’ll learn about in the coming years. If it felt safe enough to threaten a United States official chances are it felt safe enough to violate Iraqi citizens at will.