Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Suicide by Cooperation

I give credit to the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) for developing a successful alternative strategy to political lobbying. But every time its founder opens his mouth about background checks I cringe:

“The gun rights lobby has to wake up and realize we need to lead, not follow,” the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and the the chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms told Guns.com in an interview at the at the NRA’s 143rd Annual Meetings and Exhibits in downtown Indianapolis last weekend.

Gottlieb’s desire to strike a deal on an enhanced background check measure that would cover private sales made over the Internet and at gun shows is based on the premise that fighting UBCs is a losing battle over the long run.

Do you know what a great way to commit suicide is? Cooperating with your enemies. Trust me, they will find a convenient way for you to die if your work with them. Gottlieb obviously has some powerful gray matter in his brainpan as his organization has lead several successful lawsuits that ended in favor of gun owners. But his belief that the gun rights movement needs to strike a deal on background checks is, to put it nicely, really fucking stupid.

Fighting universal background checks isn’t a losing battle. Private sales remain legal in many states (Minnesota being one of them). It also looks like most of those states will continue to allow private sales without mandating they go through a federally licensed dealer. There is also the fact that firearms are simple mechanical devices that can be built by small groups of people. Distributing the knowledge on home gun manufacturing would render universal background checks of any sort impotent.

The history of gun control in this country is proof that cooperating with anti-gunners is a losing strategy. First they said they only desired to control machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, suppressors, and a few other odds and ends. Then they wanted the purchase of machine guns by non-state entities to be entirely verboten (and only settled on newly manufactured machine guns being verboten). After that they wanted aesthetically offensive rifles, which they erroneously called “assault” rifles, prohibited and all magazines to only be legally allowed to hold 10 rounds. Every time the gun control advocates got what they wanted they demanded more and the same will happen with universal background checks. If gun rights activists cooperate with gun control advocates on universal background checks the initial bill may not be as bad as it would otherwise be. But then the anti-gunners will demand more. And they will likely get it because the precedence was set by the law gun rights activists initially helped pass.

Shot Down in Flames

Rand Paul has obvious aspirations of the presidency (everybody has dreams, some dreams are just stupid). Anybody who has researched presidential politics knows that becoming president requires one to kneel down and perform fellatio on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). For those of you who don’t know the AIPAC labels itself as America’s biggest Jewish lobby. In reality the group is America’s biggest pro-zionist lobby and not all Jews are zionists. But the point is you must appease the AIPAC to stand a realistic chance of attaining the presidency.

So Rand Paul decided to demonstrate his loyalty to it by presenting the Stand With Israel Act of 2014:

Sen. Rand Paul today introduced the Stand with Israel Act of 2014. This legislation halts all U.S. aid to the Palestinian government until they agree to a ceasefire and recognize the right of Israel to exist. The bill, S. 2265, can be found HERE and below:

“Today, I introduced legislation to make all future aid to the Palestinian government conditional upon the new unity government putting itself on the record recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and agreeing to a lasting peace.”

Too bad for Rand but the AIPAC is having none of his shit:

While the legislation is expected to garner widespread backing in Congress, AIPAC is quietly expressing reservations about it, according to those familiar with the group’s position.

“We are not supporting the Paul bill,” said one AIPAC insider. “We believe the law currently on the books is strong and ensures that aid is contingent on key conditions that help maintain America’s influence, keep Israel secure, and advance the peace process.”

“I want to be very clear, AIPAC supports a cut off of aid to any Palestinian government that includes an unreformed Hamas, and this is what is provided for in current law,” the AIPAC insider said.

In other words it’s not fucking stupid. The United States already has a policy of not providing funding [PDF] to any organization in Palestine that could possibly be against Israel. You can’t buy off one of the most politically powerful lobbies in the United States by simply making something that is currently against policy more against policy.

I could point out how Rand Paul’s attempt at picking sides in a foreign conflict isn’t a libertarian thing to do. But commenters over at The Daily Paul reminded me Rand Paul’s “liberty” supporters will perform fantastic feats of mental gymnastics to explain away any of Rand’s anti-libertarian actions as part of his super secret plan to bring libertarianism to America. If that’s what Rand’s supporters want to believe so be it. But one thing is certain, if Rand doesn’t figure out how to play the game better he’s never even going to become president.

Don’t Worry Mr. President, The Senate Has Your Back

The best thing about having three branches of government is that you can get three separate affirmations for all government activities. I kind of feel bad for dictators, kings, and other monarchs. When they make a decision they don’t have anybody else to back them up. But here in American when the government does something it’s first written and voted on by Congress, signed by the President, and ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.

A few days ago President Obama was concerned that he might actually have to release details about the people who he ordered to be executed by drones. Fortunately the Senate reassured him that it had his back:

WASHINGTON — The Senate has quietly stripped a provision from an intelligence bill that would have required President Obama to make public each year the number of people killed or injured in targeted killing operations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States uses lethal force.

The move highlights the continued resistance inside the government about making these operations, primarily carried out using armed drones, more accountable to public scrutiny. In a letter to the Senate earlier this month, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, expressed concern that a public report would undermine the effectiveness of the operations.

And with that simple removal the Senate affirmed that the President’s practice of withholding information about those executed by drones is totally cool. We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court’s affirmation of this behavior but that should be coming soon since the case is moving through the judicial system:

A federal appeals panel in Manhattan ordered the release on Monday of key portions of a classified Justice Department memorandum that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who intelligence officials contend had joined Al Qaeda and died in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.

The unanimous three-judge panel, reversing a lower court decision, said the government had waived its right to keep the analysis secret in light of numerous public statements by administration officials and the Justice Department’s release of a “white paper” offering a detailed analysis of why targeted killings were legal.

I’m sure the Supreme Court will reverse this decision quick, fast, and in a hurry. We can’t have the government going around disagreeing with itself, it creates a bad image.

Relevancy of Evidence

Byron Smith was found guilty of first degree premeditated murder and most people (myself included) seem to believe that this ruling was correct. But there are some people who believe everything Smith did was totally cool because those teenagers broke into his house. Those people are now in the process of grasping at straws in an effort to discredit the trial, which has lead to complaints about what the judge didn’t allow the jury to hear. This is most common article I’ve seen passed around regarding the supposedly omitted data:

Now, for the first time, MailOnline can reveal the story the jury DIDN’T hear, the history suppressed by the prosecution and the truth behind the hideous explosion of violence in Smith’s Little Falls home that Thanksgiving morning.

Because though the prosecution argued that Smith did not know whom he was pulling the trigger on that day, he DID know both his teenage victims.

Oh. My. God. This changes everything! Just kidding. But this does open the door to discussion relevancy of information in trials. According to Smith’s few advocates the history of the teenagers (you see they were evil drug using gang bangers who knew Smith personally) was critical information withheld from the jury and that caused the horribly unjust ruling.

How is such information relevant to Smith’s actions? The trail wasn’t a simple case of Smith shooting two teenagers who broke into his home unexpectedly. Evidence presented at the trial strongly suggests that Mr. Smith setup an ambush. Even if he didn’t setup an ambush he still continued the use of deadly force after the threat of death of great bodily harm was no longer a reasonable fear. After his initial shots he moved the bodies to another location in the house, said some disparaging remarks about the teenagers, and eventually put a gun under one of the teenager’s chins and shot her dead.

Does it matter if Smith executed complete strangers or people he knew? Not under the law. In either case he would be guilty of murder. And that is why Smith’s prior interactions with the teenagers and the teenagers’ histories of criminal activities were irrelevant to the case and thus not presented to the jury.

Mozilla Releases Chrome, Err, Firefox 29 and It’s Basically Chrome

Yesterday Mozilla released the latest version of its Firefox web browser. The most significant change is the user interface, which received a complete overhaul:

Mozilla is launching its most important release of Firefox in a very long time today. After almost two years of working on its Australis redesign, the company is now finally ready to bring it to its stable release channel.

After loading it for the first time, chances are you’ll be slightly confused. This is Firefox’s most radical redesign since it moved to its rapid release schedule a few years ago.

The new user interface is basically Google Chrome’s user interface:

I think this move demonstrates that Mozilla’s developers are desperately thrashing in the water without purpose. Mozilla’s business model now seems to be do whatever Google does. That’s not necessarily a bad strategy as Google does a lot of really amazing things. But there are far better features to lift from Chrome than its user interface. Why doesn’t Mozilla lift Chrome’s behavior of isolating each tab in a separate process? When a single tab in Chrome crashes it doesn’t take the entire browser with it. As a security measure isolating tabs in separate processes is also beneficial. I would love to see Mozilla copy that feature.

There’s nothing wrong with copying (in my intellectual property hating opinion). Good ideas should proliferate. But differentiation is also important. Unique features are what you can market to convince users to use your product. If Firefox and Chrome are identical, at least in the eyes of most end users, what can Mozilla do to convince people to use its browser instead of Google’s? Right now the only thing Firefox really has over Chrome, that I can think of, is extensibility. That’s not a lot to market a browser on, especially when Chrome has several features that Firefox lacks (such as isolating each page in a separate process).

I fear that we’re looking at the slow demise of Firefox. Mozilla seems to think that copying Chrome is a sufficient business model. As far as I know most of its income is still derived from users making Google search from Firefox’s search bar. Firefox isn’t as important to Google’s business model as it was in the days before Chrome so that money is likely to dry up at some point. What’s Mozilla’s answer to this likely inevitable future? Sell ads:

(Reuters) – Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Internet browser, will start selling ads as it tries to grab a larger slice of the fast-expanding online advertising market.

The company said in a blog posting on Tuesday that it has reached out to potential corporate sponsors about its fledgling “Directory Tiles” program, targeted at first-time users.

Novice Firefox users now see nine blank tiles when they open up the browser, which fill in over time with their most-visited or recently visited websites. Now, Mozilla intends to display the most popular sites by location, as well as sponsored websites that will be clearly labeled as such.

That’s a frightening road. If the “Directory Tiles” program turns out to be a money maker Mozilla will be motivated to include more and more ads in Firefox. Ads have a tendency to ruin software products. If I see ads pop up on a program that I’m using I will almost reflexively begin searching for a replacement and I’m not alone.

Mozilla needs to get its shit together and come up with something besides doing what Google does. Because if my options are Chrome or a cut-rate version of Chrome I will just use Chrome. Somehow I doubt that I’m alone in this.

Pentagon to Destroy $1 Billion in Ammunition; Paul Krugman Applauds Its Efforts to Stimulate the Economy

Only an organization so vast, inefficient, and dumb could put itself into a position where it willingly destroys $1 billion worth of ammunition:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to destroy more than $1 billion worth of ammunition although some of those bullets and missiles could still be used by troops, according to the Pentagon and congressional sources.

It’s impossible to know what portion of the arsenal slated for destruction — valued at $1.2 billion by the Pentagon — remains viable because the Defense Department’s inventory systems can’t share data effectively, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by USA TODAY.

Most of this story focuses on the Pentagon’s shitty inventory system. I will save you some reading by providing you a TL;DR. The Pentagon has a shitty inventory system, it wants a fancy new inventory system, and it needs to make up claims about the potential to save billions of dollars so Congress will fund it.

I believe the more important question is why the Pentagon is destroying all of that ammunition. Obviously Stripes couldn’t be bothered to scrounge up an answer. My guess is that the ammunition is being destroyed as part of the effort to demonstrate how badly a new tax victim funded inventory system is needed.

Setting aside my cynicism I must ask if destroying all of that ammunition is necessary. If the ammunition slated for destruction is handgun and rifle cartridges then I feel the need to propose an alternative. Handgun and rifle ammunition, so long as it’s stored properly, keeps almost indefinitely. That being the case there is no reason that handgun and rifle ammunition needs to be destroyed in most cases. If the Pentagon is simply tired of having the ammunition around it could release it for sale to use mere civilians who can put the ammunition to good work at the firing range.

It’s the Thought that Counts

Unless you’ve been living under a pile of rocks you know that the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual meeting last week. From what I’ve heard there was an estimated 70,000 NRA members in attendance. Every year there is a traditional protest held by whatever gun control group happens to be prominent (relatively speaking, of course). This year the Michael Bloomberg funded group Moms Demand Something or Other Action were the protest holders. According to gun control advocates the people of the United States desperately want stricter gun control laws. But if the number of protesters who turned up to this year’s annual protest are any indicator the demand only exists in their heads:

I was interested in seeing what Shannon Watts and her allies at Moms Demand Illegal Actions From Mayors In Everytown (MDIAFMIE) were to say during their trip to Indianapolis. The group had promised to “send NRA leadership a message.”

Apparently, their message was “we don’t want to be anywhere near where you are,” because when I decided to attend their rally, I found that I had to hike down W Maryland Street, hang a left on N Illinois, turn right on E Market, hang a left around Monument Circle, and then schlep four blocks up, to see this.

Most of the MDIAFMI members attending the rally were convincingly camouflaged as an empty lawn, but there were perhaps 100+ people (some have claimed as many as 200, but a good 10%-15% appeared to be media, so that number seems inflated) clustered around the stage, roughly matching the numbers of supporters that Bloomberg paid to attend.

Roughly 100 people? Wow. No wonder they held their protest several blocks from the NRA meeting. It would be embarrassing to have your protests outnumbered by the people simply going to and exiting from the meeting you’re protesting.

This is par for the course. Every year the NRA protests fails to attract any real numbers. But, as they say, it’s the thought that counts. And it’s nice to know that the gun control crowd is thinking about us.

The Fourth Amendment Takes Another Hit Right to the Heart

Once again the Nazgûl have done an outstanding job of serving their master. This time they drove another stake through the heart of the already heavily staked Fourth Amendment:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous 911 tip.

The 5-4 decision split the court’s two most conservative justices, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority and Justice Antonin Scalia penning the dissent.

Checkpoints should be much easier to setup now that this ruling has been made. Just have a gun on a cellphone a few miles away from the checkpoint call in an “anonymous tip” on every vehicle the passes. Reasonable suspicion has been a bit too rigorous for cops wanting to search a vehicle. Thankfully this ruling means that they can “receive an anonymous tip” and search go ahead with the search. Many opportunities have been opened by this ruling and I’m sure we’ll get to see them all as creative officers wanting to throw around their power put their minds to the civil rights bypassing grind stone.

NYPD Experiences the Internet

The Internet, as we know it today, was created largely by people who weren’t fans of authority. This is rather evident when you look at the mostly decentralized nature of the system. In fact the very protocols that make the Internet work are proposed through Requests for Comment (RFC) and the only deciding factor for whether or not they achieve widespread adoption is peoples’ willingness to adopt them. So what happens when a very anti-authoritarian network meets a very authoritarian organization? Hilarity:

For another case study in the perils of using Twitter for branding, look no further than the #myNYPD hashtag that is now trending for all the wrong reasons in the New York City area.

What started out as an attempt to solicit pent-up good feelings among the New York Police Department’s constituents is turning out to be a troll-fest of epic proportions.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) wanted to use Twitter as its propaganda arm by having users post heartwarming pictures of its officers helping New Yorkers. What they got instead were pictures of brutality carried out by NYPD officers.

There is a lesson to be learned by the NYPD from this. The department’s image sucks and for good reason. Officers in the NYPD have a long history of committing acts of brutality and being generally corrupt. Thanks to readily available recording equipment, namely cell phones with cameras, the amount of evidence of the NYPD’s brutality is voluminous. What this means is that any attempt to solicit the help of the Internet, which is heavily composed of people who are not big fans of brutality, will end in disaster.

What the NYPD should do now is accept that its image sucks, understand why its image sucks, and work to improve its image but not doing horrible things. What will probably happen is the person who though up the #myNYPD idea will be fired and more traditional routes of distributing propaganda will be utilized.

National Association for Gun Rights Leaking Personal Information

The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) is an organization that I’ve heard nothing good about and that hasn’t changed with the most recent news I came across via Shall Not Be Questioned. It turns out that the NAGR has been leaking information submitted to their contact page:

On Friday evening we were contacted by Jeff Hulsey, a retired gunsmith from the Gulf Coast region of Texas. Jeff had a problem. Starting back in August of 2013 He began receiving emails at his personal email inbox, which is through the popular Gmail domain, that it did not appear were intended for him.

[…]

What concerns Jeff is the fact that even though he is trying to point out the fairly obvious error that they are making that they are leaking personal information to an unknown source. We asked Jeff if these emails were truly unsolicited. He replied, “Absolutely unsolicited. The only dealings I’ve ever had with the NAGR were to score a couple of stickers for the side of my toolbox. I’m not even a member.”

When asked if the rest of the emails looked like the email he provided to us he stated, “Yes. It’s random questions from people who visited their “Contact Us” page, then forwarded by someone within their organization for follow-up or review. Some of them contain some very specific personal information, like the USPS worker who details which facility he works at in pursuit of an answer to a legal question.”

If you’re advertising yourself as a gun rights organization you need to realize some accepted practices within the gun rights arena. What may be the most important practice is privacy. Gun ownership is under constant attack by politicians and gun control activists. Because of this gun owners tend to desire privacy. Unless you’re willing to respect the privacy of gun owners you’re unlikely to gain much ground as a gun rights organization. But what makes this apparent misconfiguration or mishandling worse is the NAGR’s response:

To Jeff, this looked like a simple mistake. It looked like someone had the wrong email address and was forwarding him email incorrectly. He tried to contact NAGR and got no response. He has since received about one email a month from them following the same pattern.

Misconfiguration an e-mail forwarder or mishandling data, although bad, are mistakes that any system administrator in a hurry can make. Failing to acknowledge and correct the problem after it has been pointed out is unacceptable.

Handling personal information isn’t trivial. There are a lot of mistakes that can lead such information be leaked to unauthorized individuals. We see this even with well reputed organizations such as Target. What I find most telling about an organization is how to respond to their mistakes. The lack of response from the NAGR shows me that the organization is either disorganized or unconcerned. If it’s too disorganized to fix a simple mistake how can it expect anybody to trust it with fighting for gun rights? Political fights require a great deal or organization. On the other hand the NAGR may be unconcerned about its users’ privacy. If that’s the case how can anybody trust the organization to be seriously concerned with gun rights?

I haven’t supported the NAGR because I’ve never heard anything positive about the organization. But news like this leaves me urging people not to support or interact with the organization. Any information you give the NAGR, including payment information for all we know, could end up in unauthorized hands.