Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Harry Reid is Confused

Harry Reid appears to be confused. In his world, likely created by the onset of dementia, he believes that the Tea Party and anarchists are equivalent:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says the Tea Party is the main reason why things are not getting done in Congress and views it as a party of modern-day anarchists.

Reid on Wednesday afternoon stood by comments he made on the Senate floor last week comparing Tea Party-affiliated Republicans to 19th century American anarchists.

“I believe that, my experience with the Tea Party, is that they are against government in any form. They throw monkey wrenches into the government,” Reid said during an interview on the “Rusty Humphries Show.”

The Tea Party isn’t ready to rock with us anarchists. They’re like the metalcore fans at the death metal show. While they know some of the lingo and can name a some well-known bands they still complain about their inability to understand the lyrics and won’t venture forth into the mosh pit. Given a few years to mature they may be ready to rock with the big boys but they’re not at that point yet.

Through my mistaken adventure in libertarian politics I attended several Tea Party rallies. Most of the people attending those rallies would qualify, in my book, as being quite patriotic. They love the United States of America, the Constitution, an believe the government has been hijacked by socialists but is still legitimate. What most Tea Party members seem to want want to kick the socialists out of the government and replacement with good all-American conservatives. Tea Party members generally seem to be OK with the concept of taxation and believe we’re simply being taxed “too much.” The neoconservatives in the Tea Party movement (of which there are many) support having a large standing army and even believe that defense is one of the few rightful duties of the federal government. To understand the Tea Party one need only use a layman’s interpretation of the Constitution (as opposed to the convoluted lawyerly interpretation used by the state).

Us anarchists differ by opposing the state in its entirety. We don’t believe in any taxation, oppose standing armies, and don’t believe there are any rightful duties of a state. Those of us who identify ourselves as anarchist don’t believe that the government has been hijacked, we believe the government is running as intended. Whether socialists or conservatives are in charge is of no consequence to us because politicians on both sides of the political spectrum want to expropriate from the general population.

It’s true that many members of the Tea Party may eventually give up their small government desires and transition to no government desires. Tea Party members who transition in such a way will likely become anarcho-capitalists. This isn’t unique to members of the Tea Party though, many socialists and communists may eventually transition to anarchism, specifically anarcho-communism. With that said members of the Tea Party, socialists, and communists haven’t made that transition and many never make that transition. They’re toes may be in the water but they haven’t decided if it’s too cold to jump in yet. To say any of them are equivalent to anarchists are is completely wrong.

Cooking the Books

I have some good news, the United States economy is going to show some improvement soon. I also have some bad news, the only reason the economy is going to show some improvement is because the state is going to manipulate the gross domestic produce (GDP) numbers again:

The U.S. government is about to tweak the way it measures the economy, and some of the biggest changes will affect the entertainment industry.

Under the current system, Sichel told me, Lady Gaga’s sales of concert tickets, online songs and CDs all count toward gross domestic product. But the value of the time she spends in the studio working on new songs isn’t counted. That’s about to change.

This is why one cannot rely on numbers put out by the state. When the numbers begin to look bad the state just cooks the books to make things appear better than they are. That’s why reported unemployment is around 7 to 8 percent but real unemployment is around 22 to 23 percent.

The Friendly Face of Fascism

Shutting down a large section of a city so the police can hunt for one man is the definition of a police state. However, many people seem to think the event that occurred in Boston didn’t qualify as a police state action because it happened here in America. This is the land of the free after all. In fact the tried and true way of demonstrating facts on the Internet, memes, are now being used to demonstrate the event in Boston wasn’t tyranny. Feast your eyes on the following meme:

Since the police were being nice and helping out a family in need they obviously weren’t being tyrannical, right? Let’s set aside the fact that the police officer was only alleviating a problem that he and his fellows created and look a the tactics used by two tyrannical regimes. Tyrants have a long history of providing goods and services to people in need in order to buy their loyalty.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazis, established an organization in 1933 called the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare (NSV) to provide welfare to those in need. As you can guess, the purpose of the NSV was to provide financial services to poor families, daycare centers for working families, and schools for students.

Today Golden Dawn, Greece’s main fascist party, has been opening soup kitchens to feed the hungry:

Far-right Parliament party Golden Dawn started soup kitchens providing hundreds of people with food in Ilion, Athens and other areas. The first day the kitchen soups were initiated, masses marched to the area demonstrating their unemployment cards or papers certificating their having large-families.

As with any fascist organization Golden Dawn has gone the extra mile to win the admiration of the people. Not only are they opening soup kitchens but they’re doing it with state money and purchasing from Greek producers:

Each item in the food supply was bought from state money the party received in proportion to the acquired parliamentary seats (according to the legal framework for elected parties). Everything was bought from Greek firms and Greek producers exclusively. In a symbolic show, in this way, Golden Dawn MPs ‘return’ the Greek people the money they gave them with their vote.

Providing goods and services to people is nothing new for fascism, it’s actually one of the philosophy’s favorite tactics. Most people aren’t willing to accept a totalitarian regime unless there is something in it for them. Usually these regimes promise food, shelter, and protection to everybody or a subset of people in a society. At first these regimes may try to deliver on those promises but they eventually move away from such tactics once their power is cemented.

A police officer bringing milk to a family is not a demonstration that Boston wasn’t suffering under a fascist-esque regime. Quite the opposite is true. Seeing the police officer delivering milk demonstrates that the police were actively buying the obedience and loyalty of the people in the affected area. This is how and why tyranny works. It starts off nice. People receive food, shelter, and clothing from the tyrants and once everybody has rolled over the real pain begins. Don’t let little memes such as the one above trick you into thinking the event in Boston was anything other than a demonstration of the police state we live under here in the United States.

The Central Banks are Flying Blind

Are you ready for some surprising news? You may want to sit down for this. As it turns out, the central banks haven’t a clue as to what they’re doing:

Growing concern at the International Monetary Fund over the long-term side-effects of interest rates close to zero came as some of the leading figures in central banking conceded they were flying blind when steering their economies.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, the former member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, captured the mood at the IMF’s spring meeting, saying: “We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.”

But the best part of the article the following paragraph:

It is troubling for monetary policy experts that their crisis-fighting tools – rates stuck at zero, money printing operations to bring down longer-term interest rates and encourage private sector spending, and efforts to calm financial market fears – might have nasty side-effects.

Who would have thought that artificially lowering interest rates to nothing, printing billions upon billions of dollars, and sucking people into malinvestment would have any harmful side-effects? Just everybody with an elementary school understanding of basic economics. Unfortunately the politicians decided that Keynes’s mysticism sounded much better than Mises’s deductive logic, which isn’t surprising since Keynes’s mysticism basically said anything the state does to bolster the economy is good whereas Mises said the state should take an entirely hands off approach. Needless to say the state liked the idea of monopolizing the monetary system and it has been downhill ever since.

Gun Owners Being Sold Out, Again

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that gun owners are being sold out in another political maneuver. Things started heating up with Alan Gottlieb of Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) fame announced that he supported the Toomey-Manchin Amentment. Joining Mr. Gottleib is Cheaper Than Dirt, who generated a bit of anger last year when they ceased selling firearms online and jacked up their prices on standard capacity magazines (which, let’s face it, under a shortage is going to happen) after the Connecticut shooting:

I had a chance to sit down with Allen Gottlieb from the Second Amendment Foundation and get the straight scoop about the gun related legislation pending in the Senate. The following is the summary from my conversation with Gottlieb.

First, let’s start from the point where we lost the cloture vote. The vote lost by a huge margin with 68 senators voting in favor of cloture. Once reached, it was evident something was going to go to the floor and Schumer’s background check bill was simply draconian, bad, evil, and needed to be stopped.

As for Senators Manchin and Toomey, both have “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and care tremendously about the Second Amendment and gun rights. The Toomey-Manchin bill was crafted in Sen. Manchin’s office as a response to Schumer’s proposal. A representative from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was present to suggest talking points and provisions for inclusion.

Their support, along with Mr. Gottleib’s support, seems to stem primarily from the fact that the proposed Toomey-Manchin Amendment isn’t as bad as the bill proposed by Schumer. In other words they’re being pragmatic and you know how I feel about pragmatists. The primary thing that concerns me about the recent support for the Toomey-Manchin Amendment is that many of the claims being made by advocates are, according to David Kopel, not true. Specifically the Cheaper Than Dirt post claims that the Toomey-Manchin Amendment prohibits the creation of a national registry but Kopel, who I might add is a lawyer, says otherwise:

The limit on creating a registry applies only to the Attorney General (and thus to entities under his direct control, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). By a straightforward application of inclusio unius exclusio alterius it is permissible for entities other than the Attorney General to create gun registries, using whatever information they can acquire from their own operations. For example, the Secretary of HHS may consolidate and centralize whatever firearms records are maintained by any medical or health insurance entity. The Secretary of the Army may consolidate and centralize records about personal guns owned by military personnel and their families.

The Attorney General may not create a registry from the records of “a person with a valid, current license under this chapter.” In other words, the AG may not harvest the records of persons who currently hold a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Thus, pursuant to inclusio unius, the AG may centralize and consolidate the records of FFLs who have retired from their business.

If you support or are considering supporting the Toomey-Manchin Amendment it would be well worth your time to read Kopel’s analysis. It’s a sucker’s deal reminiscent of what us Minnesotans had to suffer earlier this year. Don’t let yourself be suckered into publicly supporting gun control legislation. While people like Mr. Gottleib and organizations like Cheaper Than Dirt will lie and strike fear into you by claiming that we either take the Toomey-Manchin deal or suffer Schumer’s bill remember that they are giving you a false choice. They are conveniently forgetting to mention the third option: opposing all proposed gun control legislation. You don’t have to carry water for your ideological opponent. If gun control advocates want to prohibit us from owning guns then make them do all the damned work.

Kansas City Police Kick Homeless Individuals Out of Unused Tunnels

While I agree with the expressed idea of self-proclaimed progressives that society should better care for the homeless I disagree with their tactics. Self-proclaimed progressives always want the state to get involved and, as I’ve explained, the state would rather see homeless people die off because they have on wealth to expropriate. Demonstrating the conflict of interest I talked about Kansas City police found a community of homeless people living in unused tunnels. What did the police do? Kicked the homeless out of the tunnels that they then filled in to ensure nobody could return:

Police and volunteers from Hope Faith Ministries first visited the camps on Tuesday to advise the residents they had to clear out by Friday. After repeated visits, they encountered only four people, but it was obvious that many others lived there. Cooley said three of the four either accepted services offered or said they would.

On Friday, city public works crews used a Bobcat to close up the tunnels and holes after they were searched by a police robot with a camera. Representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs also were on hand to offer services. Animal Control came because police had reason to think there might be a dangerous pit bull on site, but they did not encounter one.

Whenever the police strike out against the homeless they always concoct some excuse. Usually they claim to be enforcing health or safety regulations but this time around the police merely used the excuse that cooper had been stolen in the area:

It was found while police were investigating copper thefts in the industrial area of the East Bottoms, some of which are very costly. Police have previously encountered evidence of copper thefts at other camps and think some homeless people are responsible for some thefts and may serve as lookouts for larger theft operatives.

Even though the police had no evidence (at least no evidence has been put forward that I can find) that the homeless individuals in the tunnels were the thieves they rousted them anyways. In all likelihood the accusations copper thefts was merely a convenient excuse to kick the homeless out of the area so they could become some other city’s problem. Most large municipalities seem to believe that the best way to deal with the homeless is to make their lives so miserable that they flee to somewhere else. That’s the kind of “charity” you get from the state. If a person isn’t a revenue source they are roughed up and told to go elsewhere, locked into a cage, or outright murdered. Using the state to help those in need will never succeed because the state has no use for those who truly have nothing to expropriate.

Progressives Will Never Accomplish Their Expressed Goals Through Statism

Today’s political climate is so muddled with doublespeak and doublethink that it’s difficult to have any meaningful conversation. Consider the term progressive. The term indicates a forward movement for society that will hopefully mean a better future for everybody. People who identify themselves as progressives generally claim a desire to support the poor through government programs. They tend to advocate universal healthcare, a guaranteed living wage, welfare, and other programs supposedly aimed at ensuring everybody has the bare necessities of survival. In practice their goals tend to oppose one another.

One of the demographics often exploited by modern progressives is the homeless population. Progressives often claim that they want more government programs to help the homeless. Helping the homeless is a noble cause that I want to see society embrace. However, unlike progressives, I want to see voluntary methods used. Voluntary methods tend to avoid the hypocrisy that runs rampant in statist solutions. On the one hand progressives claim to want to support the homeless, on the other hand they support programs that make it difficult or impossible to help the homeless. There have been numerous instances where state officials used force to stop individuals from providing food to the homeless. Most of these instances were done under the guises of health safety. State officials claimed that there was no way to ensure the donated food met nutritional or safety standards. Instead of being allowed to partake in the generosity of giving individuals the homeless were forced to go hungry because some government thug in a city health department didn’t issue a stamp of approval.

Such an outcome in inevitable when medical costs are paid by the state. As I explained in my post about the state and its love of surveillance, the state has a vested interest in keeping its costs down. Programs that return little, no, or, worst of all, negative profit are either axed or retools to be more profitable. Military might, by allowing the state to expropriate from other states, and police, by allowing the state to expropriate locally, will always receive priority for funding. Healthcare, on the other hand, would normally cost the state money. In order to get around this issue states have done several things. First, most states that claim to offer universal healthcare also maintain an ever diminishing list of covered operations. Second, those states generally maintain a skeleton crew in the healthcare sector meaning the wait time for operations becomes great (and if you die the state doesn’t have to foot the bill for your operation). Third, and for this post most importantly, these states implement regulations aimed at reducing their healthcare costs. Any behavior that may incur healthcare costs by the state are made illegal. New York, being one of the most progressive cities in the United States, has continuously implemented prohibitions aimed at reducing the state’s healthcare costs. The most famous prohibition was the one placed on the sale of sugary drinks exceeding 16 ounces.

In addition to axing or retooling unprofitable programs the state also tries to shed itself of unprofitable population. A homeless individual, being without income and able to buy very little, is unprofitable for the state. They generally pay no income tax and very little, if any, sales or use taxes. Compounding the issue is their general lack of possessions. If you have a home, a bank account, or any other property you have value that the state can seize from you. Therefore you, in the eyes of the state, are profitable population. Just as a dairy farmer has an interest in maintaining the health of his dairy cattle the state has an interest in maintaining your health, so long as you’re not consuming so many of its available resources that you become unprofitable (in other words if you actually need a major medical operation the state would rather see you dead).

Here is where things come full circle. In the hopes of reducing healthcare costs the state ends up waging war against the homeless. In the state’s eyes donated food is a potential healthcare cost because it has set itself up to cover the healthcare costs of those who don’t have insurance or possession to seize. Homeless individuals don’t have insurance or possessions so the state is literally better off if the homeless are dead. Preventing the homeless of eating donated food reduces the state’s infinitesimal risk of caring for uninsured individuals who have nothing to steal. If homeless individuals end up starving to death the state has shed unprofitable population. In other words shutting down programs aimed at providing food for the homeless is a win-win for the state.

Herein lies the problem with progressives: their goals are mutually exclusive. By involving the state in healthcare progressives ensure that the state wages a war against the homeless. Voluntary methods of providing healthcare and helping the poor don’t suffer from such conflict of interests because the interests of the people involve is to help those in need. In other words those donating food to feed the homeless are doing so because they want to help feed the homeless. Since they’re not expropriating wealth they don’t suffer from helping those without wealth. I believe that most self-declared progressives mean well but their strategy ensures that their expressed goals will never be accomplished. Only through voluntary cooperation can people help one another. Once the voluntary component is removed costs will inevitably be faced by those who don’t want to face them. At that point the primary focus moves away from helping those in need to reducing costs.

The Police Suck at Acting Like Regular People

The police spent a great deal of time and money trying to track down and punish nonviolent individuals. Oftentimes the police have to assume the identities of regular individuals in order to catch some of those nonviolent individuals. Fortunately, for those of us who are nonviolent but likely under the watchful eye of the police, the police suck at acting like regular people:

As anyone who’s watched a single crime story on TV or film knows, undercover detective work is dangerous business. There inevitably comes a moment when the crime boss gets suspicious. Scary, sure, but at least police officers have a working knowledge of the rules of the crime game. They’ve trained their whole lives to pull off this deception.

Passing yourself off as a credible music scenester, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude more difficult. Never mind drug lords—no one can identify a poseur more quickly than a hipster; sniffing out fakes is essentially the entire job description. That’s what Boston police are finding out as their bungling efforts to infiltrate the underground rock scene online are being exposed.

A recently passed nuisance control ordinance has spurred a citywide crackdown on house shows—concerts played in private homes, rather than in clubs. The police, it appears, are taking a particularly modern approach to address the issue: They’re posing as music fans online to ferret out intel on where these DIY shows are going to take place. While police departments have been using social media to investigate for years, its use in such seemingly trivial crimes would be rather chilling, if these efforts didn’t seem so laughably inept. It’s a law enforcement technique seemingly cribbed from MTV’s Catfish—but instead of creating a fake persona to ensnare the marks in a romantic internet scam, it’s music fandom that’s being feigned.

The story is hilarious and I’m not sure how the police can perform such acts and not feel embarrassed. Adding insult to injury the embarrassment is unnecessary because finding nuisance house parties should be easy, wait for an annoyed neighbor to call the police. When the police arrive to investigate they will probably be able to hear the music from outside and have grounds to write one of those noise violation citations they’re so fond of. If the show can’t be heard by the neighbors then it is not a nuisance and the police don’t need to waste everybody’s time by shutting it down.

While it’s disappointing to see the police sinking so much time and money into shutting down house parties it’s great to see they’re entirely incompetent at it.

Perhaps I’m Becoming more Paranoid

Perhaps I’m becoming more paranoid in my old age but I find it suspicious that one day after Paymar announced that he wouldn’t pursue universal background checks a news story broke that there was a reported active shooting at a middle school in New Prague, Minnesota:

Authorities in New Prague responded this morning to a 911 call concerning an “active shooter” at the middle school, but a staff member later said everyone is safe and there is no danger inside the building.

“We are in the process of trying to clear all the schools at this time,” Scott County Sheriff Kevin Studnicka said at about 8:30 a.m. “We have not come across any injuries at this time.”

At about 9:30 a.m., administrators told families that classes in all schools were canceled for the day.

A School District official said the middle school was on a “code red” lockdown soon after what 911 police scanner chatter termed a “weapon complaint.”

Was the caller a student looking to cause some chaos or a gun control advocate hoping to reignite demands for gun control? I have no idea but the zealous manner in which gun control advocates danced in the blood after the Connecticut shooting leads me to believe they would stoop to almost any level to push their political agenda. My paranoia aside, this story also demonstrates the issue with knee jerk reactions. When the news first broke I saw numerous comments on Facebook saying there was an active shooting happening at the New Prague middle school. It wasn’t until I did some digging that I found out that the only source of this information was a new report saying somebody had called 911 about a weapons complaint. Taking a news story about a 911 call and conjuring up an active shooting is a massive departure from logic and demonstrates how quickly people can take a rather mundane report and turn it into a wild story.

Always take a moment to gather all the available facts before believing what you read or hear. Words that indicate potentiality are often dropped from second hand reports. When you read a friend’s post about an active shooting on Facebook take a moment to determine whether their comment is accurate or conjecture.

Another Article Claiming Gun Owners are Terrorists

Another day, another mainstream media report trying to label gun owners as terrorists:

There are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.

They’re not jihadists. They are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.

No, the greatest danger to the lives of American is the United States government. Considering the Attorney General stated that it’s legal to murder American citizens on United States soil with drones I don’t think there is any way to claim that those who oppose the state are a real danger. I do lover this excerpt:

Patriot groups are motivated by a host of anti-government attitudes, but their primary focus is guns. They are convinced that the government is out to seize their weapons, even though most legislation is focused on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals or restricting the types of weapons that can be sold.

I would say the “patriot” movement’s primary focus is to make the United States government abide by the Constitution, which is why I’m not part of the movement (I want to abolish the government entirely). What the Los Angeles Times is trying to do with that statement is isolate gun owners from the general populace, divide them from the large group so they can be easily conquered. The irony, of course, is that the Los Angeles Times is trying to make gun owners look dangerous while their city’s police department shoots up random trucks and burns a man down instead of following due process. Denizens of Los Angeles should be well aware of the fact that the state is far more dangerous than independent gun owners.

On the upside, at least they’re not blaming the anarchists this time.