Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Use a Damn Holster

If you’ve read any gun blogs or forums for more than a day you’ve likely come across a post or thread urging you to use a fucking holster. There’s a reason for that. Not using a holster can lead to a personal injury (or worse) that makes you look like a fool:

A Connecticut man, who accidentally shot himself while riding a bicycle, was arrested this week after lying to police and saying that a “gang” of men wearing black hoodies had attacked him.

[…]

But Docteur finally admitted that the gun in his waistband had gone off and he had shot himself after he was not able to explain why there was only a hole where the bullet exited from his pants. He was also not able to tell police what happened to his handgun after the incident.

I’ve mentioned the fact that I bike armed. When I ride my bike I lock my Glock 30SF into a Safariland ALS holster. My ALS serves two purposes: it prevents me from looking like a jackass like Mr. Docteur mentioned above and it prevents my firearm from coming out of the holster (it’s a potential problem when I’m mountain biking).

If you’re going to carry a gun buy a holster. Even a cheap, flimsy nylon holster made by Uncle Mike’s is better than nothing. An it’s far cheaper than the medical bills that you be accrue from sliding an unholstered gun down your waistband.

Being a Bad Person

Poe’s law, which states “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.” That’s the first thing that popped into my head when I read this:

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

Considering the source of the article I’m left to belief the author is being sincere. The article can only be an attempt for the gold metal in mental gymnastics. What the author proposes, that any parent who doesn’t send their child to a public school is a bad person, is asinine. The author actually encourages parents to disadvantage their children in the hopes of improving public schools for their potential great grandchildren:

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)

It seems that the author hasn’t thought her clever plan all the way through. Let’s assume that you, a highly educated parent who wants to improve the public education system, decides to inflict a mediocre education on your children. Because your plan requires generations to work you must plan for your children to pick up the fight after you’re gone. How is a child with a mediocre education going to properly articulate the need for improving public schools? Where is that child’s motivation going to come from? If a mediocre education is all he or she knows then they are unlikely to fight for something greater. The author has the advantage of private schools to compare public schools to. This advantage would disappear if people actually followed her plan because private schools would disappear. After a generation or two without any alternative to public education the number of people fighting to improve the system would dwindle. Instead of creating a society of brilliant people the author’s plan would create an idiocracy.

Authoritarians often fail to see the inevitable outcome of their plans. While us anti-authoritarians often suffer the same failure we aren’t trying to force everybody to follow our plans, we simply state what we’re going to do and let any interested parties join us if they want. If our plans fail there are other plans that may succeed. If the author’s plan fails America becomes the society envisioned by Mike Judge in Idiocracy.

Instead of demanding every parent send their child to a public school, the author should be demanding every parent try something different. Perhaps public education isn’t the best option. Charter schools, private schools, Montessories, home schooling, and unschooling are all alternatives to public education currently being perused by parents. If one of these alternatives ends up failing then the others are still free to continue. Survivors can learn from the mistakes of the failures and improve.

You’re not a bad person for sending your children to a private school but you are a bad person if you attempt to inflict what you think is best on everybody else.

The Vietnamese Government Doesn’t Understand How the Internet Works

I’m a fan of saying that statism is synonymous with halting progress. Statists always attempt to curtail advancements by forcing them into preconceived notions. A classic example of this mentality can be found in stories involving Japanese Samurai. Many works note that the Samurai believed firearms to be dishonorable weapons. Such a mentality made sense to an individual who spent decades learning the art of swordsmanship. All of the time spent mastering the sword became irrelevant when some peasant with little training could strike from many yards away. Instead of realizing that technology had advanced to a point where the importance of the sword was diminished, a master swordsman would be apt to argue that firearms aren’t honorable. Why change yourself when you can force everybody else to change to suit your desires?

Today we’re seeing this with the emergence of the Internet. Statists are trying to confine the Internet to their preconceived notions. They don’t believe anybody with a blog can be a journalist because journalists have traditionally been individuals who work for centralized state-recognized news organization. They don’t want to acknowledge that crypto-currencies are real currencies because it goes against their belief that money must be centrally issued paper notes. This is what leads governments around the world to implement stupid laws like this:

A controversial law banning Vietnamese online users from discussing current affairs has come into effect.

The decree, known as Decree 72, says blogs and social websites should not be used to share news articles, but only personal information.

The law also requires foreign internet companies to keep their local servers inside Vietnam.

A government could only issue such a decree if it lacked an understanding of how the Internet works. Enforcing laws requires that you can identify offenders. The beauty of the Internet is that one can maintain anonymity if they desire. How can the Vietnamese government enforce laws regulating blogs if those blogs are created on a computer that is connected to a random wireless network under a pseudonym and hosted on a location hidden service? Statists can pass whatever laws they want but reality isn’t going to reform itself to make enforcement of those laws possible.

The Sheer Stupidity of the American Legal System

Even with all of the stories I’ve read about corrupt judges, police officers, and politicians I can still be left dumbfounded. For example, how does this make any fucking sense:

HOUSTON (CBS Houston) – A 10-year-old girl is facing rape charges from playing an alleged game of “doctor” with a group of children from her housing complex.

The girl, who is only identified as “Ashley,” was charged by police for aggravated sexual assault.

Where can I possibly begin? I guess I’ll start with the inappropriate action of the accused. Children do inappropriate things all the time. Their sense of right and wrong are different than an adult’s. In cases where children perform a misdeed it is generally up to the parent to take disciplinary action. It would be appropriate for the girl’s parents to sit her down and have a talk about what is appropriate touching and what is inappropriate touching.

Another thing that would be good to know is where the girl picked up this behavior. It could be such a thing where she’s merely at the age where she’s becoming curious about such matters. She may have seen part of a porno. Or, more concerning, she may have been molested by somebody. Children tend to either mimic behavior or explore. Finding out whether she was merely exploring or mimicking behavior she’s encountered before could be important.

We also have the fact that children play “doctor.” I’m sorry, but that’s a fact of life. Once again, we return to the fact that children are curious and satisfy their curiosity by exploring. Welcome to childhood development.

But let’s not let common sense get in the way of good legal chicanery. It would make far more sense to take a 10 year-old, run her through the legal system, and tag her as a sex offender for the remainder of her life (if she’s really lucky she may get that expunged from her record when she turns 18, but you never know these days). Traumatizing the child will certainly teach her a lesson about… something, I guess. Seriously, fuck everything about this story.

The Nonissue of Chelsea Manning

You have to give the state’s propaganda arm credit, they known how to cover up an important story with a unimportant one. If you were to believe the media you would think the news that the person formerly known as Bradley Manning is now Chelsea Manning is new. Truth be told, everybody who has been following this story has known that, during her deployment to Iraq, Chelsea had communications with a gender councilor. Manning even contacted her master sergeant, Paul Adkins, and informed him that she was suffering from gender dysphoria. So this news isn’t new.

But the media is giving it wall-to-wall coverage. Why? I’m unable to read minds but I’m guessing the reason major media outlets are covering this story is to discredit Manning. In the United States people suffering gender dysphoria are often treated as weird or somehow lesser. This attitude is strong enough in some people that they will now view Manning negatively no matter what good deeds she did or does.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Manning, regardless of her gender identity, is a hero. She provided proof that supported the accusations of war crimes being made against the United States. In my opinion she was executing a warrant against a suspected wrongdoer. Now that the collected evidence has been sifted through and proof has been found of criminal activity we should be focusing all of our attention of prosecuting the evildoers. Instead we’re wasting our time with nonissues, such as Manning’s preferred gender, and prosecuting the person who brought us the evidence.

James Clapper to Front Privacy Review Committee

What happens when you’re the Director of National Intelligence and lie to Congress during a review of your actions that clearly violated the privacy of the American people? You’re appointed to head a review committee that is tasked with determining whether or not you violated the privacy of the American people:

At the direction of the President, I am establishing the Director of National Intelligence Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies to examine our global signals-intelligence collection and surveillance capability.

The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.

I know many people are outraged by this but if you look at it from a political standpoint it makes sense. Congress was briefed on and approved the National Security Agency’s (NSA) widespread spying operations. Clapper provided Congress with an out by lying to it, which gave it the opportunity to claim it was misinformed about the NSA’s operations. Since Clapper was a good sport and gave Congress a means of covering its ass, he is being rewarded by being placed in a position where he can further cover Congress’s, and the president’s, ass.

Politics is a dirty game that rewards the meritless.

NSA Planning to Lay Off 90 Percent of Its System Administrators

In a mad panic to ensure another whistle blower doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Edward Snowden the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning to eliminate 90 percent of its system administrators:

(Reuters) – The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.

Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.

“What we’re in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,” he said.

Although Keith Alexander is selling this move as a security enhancement it’s really nothing more than shuffling around potential weaknesses in the NSA’s networks. In order to replace so many system administrators their jobs will have to be automated, which will require developers to create new administrative tools. Instead of worrying about a system administrator leaking information to the public the NSA will now have to worry about a back door being created in its new automation tools. As the Underhanded C Contest has demonstrated numerous times, hiding malicious code is surprisingly easy. Replacing human administrators with automated systems will also give attackers a new source of potential exploits.

How the Tables Have Turned

I wasn’t alive for the height of the Cold War but I remember my teachers constantly pounding into my head that the Soviet Union was a land where the government spied on everybody and any dissenter was whisked away to a labor camp. America was the land people defected to in order to flee the Soviet Union. The tables have turned. Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on every American for years and, in so doing, was forced to flee to Russia in order to seek asylum from the United States government, which was hunting him down like a rabid dog. Now, as a form of punishment for housing Snowden, Obama is calling off his meeting with Putin:

US President Barack Obama has cancelled a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Russia’s decision to grant asylum to intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, the White House said.

But Mr Obama will still attend the G20 economic talks in St Petersburg.

A White House aide said Mr Snowden’s asylum had deepened the pre-existing tension between the two counties.

The former intelligence contractor has admitted leaking information about US surveillance programmes to the media.

The decision to cancel the talks, announced during a trip by the president to Los Angeles, comes the morning after Mr Obama said he was “disappointed” with Russia’s decision to offer Mr Snowden asylum for a year.

If you ask me it sounds like Obama is rewarding Putin. Seriously, who wants to be stuck in an boring political meeting? Nothing exciting happens during those meetings. Two politicians, who are overly concerned with how they appear to the general public, make continuous bland statements that lack any real content just so they can appear on camera.

But it’s interesting to see how different things are today. Americans, fearing the wrath of the United States government, are forced to flee to Russia. The Cold War may restart because of the United States and its determination to have an all pervasive surveillance state without any dissenters.

Prosperity

News outlets have been abuzz with good news about the job market here in the United States. During the second quarter the job market added 183,000 jobs:

Economists predict that employers added 183,000 jobs — a figure that would show that businesses are growing more confident despite weak economic growth. More jobs would boost consumers’ ability to spend, allowing for stronger growth in the second half of the year.

The unemployment rate is expected to have dipped last month to 7.5 percent from 7.6 percent. The Labor Department will release the report at 8:30 am EDT Friday.

The depressions is over, everybody can go home! Well, not quite. As it turns out the jobs added to the market aren’t full time positions. A majority of jobs are part time:

The 162,000 jobs the economy added in July were a disappointment. The quality of the jobs was even worse.

A disproportionate number of the added jobs were part-time or low-paying — or both.

Part-time work accounted for more than 65 percent of the positions employers added in July. Low-paying retailers, restaurants and bars supplied more than half July’s job gain.

“You’re getting jobs added, but they might not be the best-quality job,” says John Canally, an economist with LPL Financial in Boston.

So far this year, low-paying industries have provided 61 percent of the nation’s job growth, even though these industries represent just 39 percent of overall U.S. jobs, according to Labor Department numbers analyzed by Moody’s Analytics. Mid-paying industries have contributed just 22 percent of this year’s job gain.

In other words, the jobs being added aren’t jobs people can survive off of. This is one of the many problems with labor statistics in the United States. The numbers reported fail to tell the actual story. While an estimated 182,000 jobs were added to the economy makes everybody feel happy the truth is that most of those jobs are crap. In other words the labor market hasn’t actually improved any notable amount, it’s merely sucking in a different way.

I guess the depression is still on.

Another Day, Another Dog Shot by Police

The sun has risen again, which can only mean another dog has been shot by a police officer. This time the shooting appears to be part of a new police program to help families forget about the loss of a family member by killing one of their pets:

Hamiel’s nephew, Ricky Ellerbe, 33, turned up shot to death hours later, about eight blocks from his home and just yards from the all-night convenience store on Mechanicsville Turnpike that had been his destination.

[…]

Henrico investigators swarmed the area with forensics technicians and tracking dogs, but no arrest had been reported Wednesday night. Ellerbe was one of five children; a brother, Gary, died in 2010 from a heart attack, three years after he’d been repeatedly stabbed.

And in a horrific turn of events, a Henrico police officer shot and killed the Ellerbe family pitbull, Tiger, as it charged toward the officer off its leash.

This harkens back to yesterday’s post discussing the practice in our society, especially with police officers, to use violence as a default reaction. Many people have been quick to point out that the dog was a pitbull; which I’m told is a breed that hunts down and eats small, worships at the alter of Lucifer, and has a propensity to breath fire while spawning small demons around it; that wasn’t on a leash. Even if the dog was active aggressively, which running towards somebody isn’t generally a sign of aggression (dogs run towards people in a friendly manner all the time), police officers generally have a non-lethal, yet very effective (especially on animals of the four-legged variety), option of pepper spray. But when the words “officer safety” are spoken the police are able to get away with whatever form of violence gets their rocks off.

More and more it seems to be the case that death follows police wherever they go. Next time they want to report on a murder they can do the decent thing and just make a phone call.