Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

To the Rest of the World, I’m Sorry

Although there was no doubt it’s officially official now, Barack Obama has been nominated as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party meaning the next president of the United States will be a war monger.

I just want the rest of the world to know that I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can offer than my condolences as I’m powerless to stop the American war machine from murdering your people. All I can say is that there are many of us living in this country that don’t support what the United States government is doing and we are working as hard as we can to stop them.

Good luck to the rest of the world and may Odin have mercy on our souls.

Only Do Business with Those You Trust

Today’s life lesson is this: only do business with those you trust. If you do business with those you can’t trust then you may find yourself missing large quantities of money:

An invite-only online hedge fund that promised lucrative returns for investors called the Bitcoin Savings & Trust has shut down, and with it have disappeared the service’s administrator — a user known in the digital currency community as pirateat40 — as well as millions of dollars’ worth of the cryptocash, currently valued at around $11 USD per coin.

Pirateat40 claimed that Bitcoin Savings & Trust had collected from investors roughly 500,000 worth of the currency, or around $5.49 million in US dollars, but not before disappearing off the face of the Web. The virtual hedge fund went offline this month following pirateat40’s announcement that the site would be shutting down soon, but the investors that had their own Bitcoins tied up in BS&T say that they think the e-bankster in charge has bolted with their money.

From what I can gather nobody involved with the ponzi scheme actually knew who Pirateat40 was. Why would you trust a person you’ve never met with your money? More importantly, why would you trust a person whose identity is concealed from you with your money? The answer to both questions is you shouldn’t.

Socialism Appears to be Working as Expected in France

Earlier this year France elected a socialist as their new president, which I predicted would end badly for the country. Needless to say the unemployment rate hasn’t improved:

The number of French unemployed has broken through the 3-million barrier for the first time since 1999, the country’s leaders say.

The latest total adds pressure on President Francois Hollande, whose administration is under attack for doing not doing enough to fix the economy. France’s unemployment rate is currently 10 percent.

Perhaps the new socialist president has been too busy ordering the confiscation of property from French gypsies to address current economic issues. Either way, things aren’t looking good for those living in France.

Why the Political Means Will always Fail

The political means of achieving liberty cannot succeed because the deck is stacked too thoroughly in the state’s favor. This isn’t surprising since the political means is the state’s tool and the house always has the advantage.

Many cards are in the state’s decks from election regulations to controlling who can and can’t run for office. One of the cards seldom discussed is the dependency card. Possibly the most powerful cards in the state’s desk, the dependency card allows the state to get popular support by making people dependent on it. Dependency comes in many forms including welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and state-enabled monetary gains. Ron Paul’s campaign wasn’t just a victim of Republican Party shenanigans, it was also a victim of state-enabled dependency on behalf of those working in the campaign:

Jesse Benton, married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter, ran the Paul campaign and ran it badly, failing to take advantage of opportunities in states like Virginia where Ron might have actually defeated Romney head-to-head if a minimum of support had been forthcoming from the national campaign. Benton explains to The Times how he has had to reject those who “dress in black, stand on a hill and say, ‘Smash the state.’” Benton, who reportedly has morphed into a multitasking paid political consultant and deal-maker with several businesses registered in his name including offices in Washington, D.C., generously paid himself $586,616 along the way while keeping the revolutionaries in check. He also confuses passion with craziness, possibly because he lacks the former. Most Paul supporters that I have encountered are completely rational and dedicated to turning our country around. They support the message of small government, non-interventionism overseas, constitutionalism, and sound money policies all because they make good sense. But I suppose Benton would argue that he is, as The Times adroitly puts it, “balancing pragmatism and principle.” Too bad pragmatism wins out every time for those who are ambitious.

Benton is a skilled operator when it comes to lining his own pockets. He understands that his salary, $586,616 in the case of this election, is dependent on the political process. Rational self-interest will lead him towards supporting the current state as it is allowing him to collect a six figure salary. Furthermore, he also has a reason to make other politicians, such as Mitt Romney, happy since Benton may find himself in the future employ of another politicians who he made nice with.

Ron Paul’s message, reducing the size and power of the state, directly threatens the income of people like Benton. Notice how Benton said he had to keep out those “dress in black, stand on a hill and say, ‘Smash the state.'” Obviously he was referring to anarchists such as myself. What’s a bigger threat to his salary than those of us who want to eliminate the creature that enables him to collect a six figure salary? Ron Paul, anarchists, and everybody else attempting to take power from the state are a direct threat to those who are dependent on the state.

How can anti-statists run a political campaign without worry about creating state dependents? They can’t. Once people begin deriving their income from the state or from activities that result from the existence of the state there’s little hope of stopping them from sabotaging an anti-statist campaign. Benton did an excellent job of stifling Paul’s campaign, probably because he was more concerned with setting himself up to enter the employ of other politicians than liberty.

Ending or just weakening the state is an extremely difficult task. The political means can’t accomplish either goal because the political means enriches people involved in the political process. It’s a tactic that is doomed from the beginning because it requires overcoming individuals’ self-interest. Since all human action is a result of self-interest you can see the problem.

Par for the Course

Reddit was abuzz yesterday because Obama decided to do an Ask Me Anything (AMA). For those who are unfamiliar with Reddit an AMA is where Reddit users can post questions for the person doing the AMA to answer. They can lead to interesting information being volunteered by popular individuals or they can be a total bust when political figures do them. Obama’s was a total bust and you can read the pointless endeavor here but Slate summed it up pretty succinctly:

Obama Joins Reddit, Invites Tough Questions, Leaves Without Answering Them

Obama did what Obama does; He pretended he was going to take questions and then ignore any questions that could have made him look bad:

Popular questions about medical marijuana, soldiers with posttraumatic stress disorder, and the president’s failure to close Guantanamo, meanwhile, went unanswered. “20 bucks says he doesn’t address this,” one Redditor predicted, correctly, about the marijuana question. “Should have been titled, Ask Me Almost Anything,” another grumbled.

I don’t think anybody is surprised, Obama is great at dodging questions. He’s also effective at answering entirely different questions than ones addressed to him.

Let’s Blame the Anarchists Again

Once again the state is trying to justify the tens of millions of dollars being spent on security at the Republican National Convention (RNC). As expected the state has chosen anarchists to be its boogeyman:

The FBI and police warn, in a vague, but ominous sort of way, that anarchists and other “extremist” folks are planning scary things for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Now, is there a good chance that when thousands of people, including some of the radical political persuasion, gather, some not okay property damage will happen? Of course. However, is there an even bigger chance that the rumored threats, which this time ’round include anarchists using improvised explosive devices and “acid-filled eggs” are wildly overhyped? Definitely.

It’s kind of funny how the state sets anarchists up to be the evildoers at political conventions even though the real evildoers are inside the convention itself. While a handful of anarchists may be going around causing mischief the politicians inside are trying to nominate a warmonger, anti-rights, corporatist, monster for the presidential race. Even if the anarchists did what the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is warning of their actions will be absolutely minor compared to Romney’s if he becomes president. Under Romney’s rule we will likely see more bailouts, more wars, and more of our rights eroded away. Perhaps the FBI should be warning about the actions of the politicians at the RNC instead of the anarchists outside.

Compounding Stupidity

Todd Akins basically destroyed his political campaign by saying one of the dumbest things spouted by a would-be politician:

Asked if he would like abortion to be banned even if a pregnancy was the result of rape, the 65-year-old replied: “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that is really rare.

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

“But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

I’m not sure if Akins is legitimately stupid enough to believe woman rarely get pregnant from “legitimate” rape (I wonder what “illegitimate” rape is), mentally deranged, or so invested in his moral crusade that he’s willing to outright lie. Since he’s a politician I’m betting the latter is most likely the case but I digress.

After being handed this on a silver platter what do you think Obama does? Makes a hypocritical statement:

Mr. Obama tried to tie the comments more broadly to views of the Republican Party.

“Rape is rape,” Mr. Obama said. “And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and doesn’t make sense to me. What I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians – the majority of whom are men – making decisions” about women’s health.

Emphasis mine. All Obama had to say was, “Akins is a fucking idiot.” He could have used those exact words and nobody would have held it against him. Instead he comes out and rightly condemns Akins but then makes a hypocrite of himself by saying politicians shouldn’t be making decisions about women’s health even though he wants the government to control the healthcare market.

Obviously Obama’s statement wasn’t nearly as offense as Akins’s but you would think the president would be smart enough to condemn Akins without also arguing against his own political beliefs. Oh well, it’s just another pointless drama-filled episode of Politics: The Reality Television Show for Suckers.

Segregation Never Left

People mistakenly believe that segregation was eliminated from our society with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Segregation never left, the targets have merely changed throughout time. Anybody on the sex offender registry, regardless of the reason they were put onto the list, finds themselves cast into areas outside of arbitrarily defined radiuses from school properties. Felons, regardless of the violation that put them on the felony list, find themselves segregated from gun stores and voting booths. Now, as Uncle points out, permit holders wanting to attend Colorado universities are now being tossed into “separate but equal” living spaces:

The University of Colorado Boulder today announced it is amending housing contracts to ask students who live in undergraduate residence halls and hold a Colorado concealed carry permit, or CCP, to forgo bringing a handgun to campus. The campus also will accommodate those who hold a CCP in a graduate student housing complex off the main campus, provided the permit holders store their weapon in a safe within their dwelling when they are not carrying it.

The university also is asking residence advisers and faculty who live in university housing to sign the same housing agreement as a condition of their residence in these facilities.

Emphasis mine. You have to love the language, holders of carry permits will be “accommodated” as if they somehow have differing needs than students that don’t holder carry permits. What is this really about? Control. The administrators of the University of Colorado Boulder don’t like guns or gun owners and, like any good statist on a power trip, demand the students comply with the administration’s desires. After being defeated in court the administrators had to change their tactics. The Colorado Supreme Court merely ruled that carrying firearms on campus couldn’t be prohibited, it didn’t say that students holding valid carry permits couldn’t be tossed into a ghetto off campus.

What can be done to fix this problem? Another court case could rule that students with valid carry permits can’t be segregated but that will merely require the school administrators to find another way to penalize permit holders. The root of this problem is the fact that school administrators can find out which students hold valid carry permits. Thus the real issue here is that a registry of permit holders exists. These registries need to be abolished and the right to bear arms must be acknowledged as an extension of self-ownership instead of a state granted privilege.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

Collectivists like to throw around words such as bourgeois, proletariat, exploitation, etc. One of the most interesting words they seem to enjoy haphazardly tossing here and there is nationalize. In the eyes of collectivists nationalizing businesses will make them more “socially responsible” by transferring ownership away from a single or handful of wealthy individuals to the public. What actually happens is that the ownership is transferred from a single or handful of individuals to a single or handful of individuals. Nationalization transfers ownership from private individuals to the state, which is why this article in Slate is so incredibly stupid:

Over the last several years, Facebook has become a public good and an important social resource. But as a company, it is behaving badly, and long term, that may cost it: A spring survey found that almost half of Americans believe that Facebook will eventually fade away. Even the business side has been a bit of a disaster lately, with earnings lower than expected and the news that a significant portion of Facebook profiles are fake. If neither users nor investors can be confident in the company, it’s time we start discussing an idea that might seem crazy: nationalizing Facebook.

Let me see if I follow the author’s idea. Facebook has been performing poorly compared to expectations and, in general, behaving badly. The solutions to this problem is to prop Facebook up by nationalizing it. Interesting. Here I thought the best way to deal with a problematic company was to let it go broke and fade into the irrelevance of market failures. If the author’s accusations are true then Facebook is misallocating resources that could be put to more productive uses, shouldn’t we allow those misallocated resources to be freed so that they could be used to provide services that people actually want? Wouldn’t it be wrong to force everybody to continue giving Facebook resources as since shown a propensity to use those resources poorly?

Let’s see what the author has to say:

By “nationalizing Facebook,” I mean public ownership and at least a majority share at first. When nationalizing the company restores the public trust, that controlling interest could be reduced. There are three very good reasons for this drastic step: It could fix the company’s woeful privacy practices, allow the social network to fulfill its true potential for providing social good, and force it to put its valuable data to work on significant social problems.

What? Excuse me, I need to get some Aspirin to continue with this post.

In Odin’s name, where does the author come up with the idea that nationalizing Facebook would fix the company’s woeful privacy practices? The the fuck is “social good” and how does nationalizing help Facebook provide it? What significant social problems can Facebook work on after being nationalized that it couldn’t work on before?

I want to focus on the claim that nationalizing Facebook will improve its privacy practices. As I explained earlier, when a company is nationalized ownership is transferred from private individuals to the state. The state that would gain ownership of Facebook in this case is the United States, the same state that said it was legal to wiretap your phone and track your cellular phone without a warrant. Does that sound like an entity that has the protection of your privacy in mind? I want to emphasize the stupidity the author is advocating:

It would be better to have a national privacy commissioner with real authority, some stringent privacy standards set at the federal level, and programs for making good use of some of the socially valuable data mining that firms like Facebook do. But in the United States, such sweeping innovations are probably too difficult to actually pull off, and nationalization would almost get us there. Facebook would have to rise to First Amendment standards rather than their own terms of service.

Since there are concerns about privacy on Facebook the author wants to put the federal government in charge of enforcing Facebook’s privacy policies. Yes, the same federal government that ruled wiretapping and tracking cellular phones doesn’t even require a warrant. I wonder if the author, fearing babysitters may molest his child, uses the sex offenders registry in the find babysitters.

I’m completely baffled by the author’s claim that putting the federal government in charge of Facebook would require it to rise to Fist Amendment standards when that very same federal government doesn’t itself rise to such standards.

With 80 percent of market share, Facebook is already a monopoly, and being publicly traded hasn’t made it more socially responsible.

No, it’s not a monopoly. Monopolies aren’t defined by arbitrary market shares, monopolies are defined by whether or not competition can freely enter a market. The fact that the state hasn’t made any laws protecting Facebook’s market share, demonstrated by Twitter and Google entering the social networking market unhindered, proves that no monopoly exists. Once again the author makes an accusation that Facebook isn’t “socially responsible” without actually stating what does or doesn’t make a company “socially responsible.”

But Facebook can also make mistakes with political consequences. The company has come under fire for missteps like prohibiting photos of women breast-feeding and suddenly banning “Palestinian” pages at one point. Facebook communications are an important tool for democracy advocates, including those who helped organize the Arab Spring. Yet the user policy of requiring that democratic activists in authoritarian regimes maintain “real” profiles puts activist leaders at risk. And dictators have figured out how they can use Facebook to monitor activist networks and entrap democracy advocates.

But since the security services in Syria, Iran, and China now use Facebook to monitor and entrap activists, public trust in Facebook may be misplaced. Rather than allow Facebook to serve authoritarian interests, if nationalized in the United States, we could make Facebook change its identity policy to allow democracy activists living in dictatorships to use pseudonyms.

Just a second, I need more Aspirin.

How does transferring ownership of Facebook to the federal government stop it from serving authoritarian interests? The United States government is an authoritarian regime.

Nationalizing Facebook would allow more resources to go into data mining for public health and social research.

We must nationalize Facebook to protect user’s privacy by violating their privacy! War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! It’s kind of impressive to see an author invalidate almost nine paragraphs of argumentation in one 17 word sentence.

Many academics are finding that big social network data sets can generate surprising and valuable information for addressing social problems—for instance, public health and national security.

National security? I think it’s a well-known fact at this point that the words “national security” are mutually exclusive with “protecting privacy.”

Nationalization could allow us to review the ethical implications of their management decisions.

We’re going to put an entity that assassinates American citizens without a trail in charge of determining whether or not management decisions are ethical? Can anybody explain how that would work out?

I know the author was thinking, “Gosh, nationalizing ownership of Facebook would take ownership away from those evil bourgeois pricks and transfer it to The PeopleTM!” The author must have read a great deal of socialist propaganda and decided the writings about the evils of private ownership were great while the writings about the evils of the United States government could be ignored. Even the most ardent socialist wouldn’t dream of nationalizing Facebook under the current United States regime. Nationalizing Facebook wouldn’t suddenly turn the service into a guardian of privacy, it would merely grant a gross violator of privacy absolute ownership over the service’s data. Facebook wouldn’t be wrenched from the hands of evil bourgeois and put into the hands of The PeopleTM, it would be wrenched from the hands of investors and put into the hands of a state that ceased representing The PeopleTM long ago (if it ever did in the first place).

When All You Have is a Hammer

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. That’s what a few doctors are proving in their advocacy to treat gun control as a public health issue:

Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.

What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.

One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.

“People used to spear themselves, and we blamed the drivers for that,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis.

It wasn’t enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn’t enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.

The analogy is flawed from the beginning. Take the given example of guardrails, they mention how people used to get impaled on them so the guardrails were redesigned. What do such incidents have in common with acts of violence? Little. We make changes in guardrails, automobiles, chainsaws, etc. safer to prevent injuries in accidents. Violence isn’t accidental, a person who initiates violence against another is making a conscious purposeful action. The shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin weren’t the result of a person failing to pay attention to trigger discipline and accidentally shooting people, it was the result of two individuals who decided they wanted to bring violence against their fellow human beings.

Between 1990 and 2009 the number of annual automobile accidents ranged from a high of 39,386 in 1990 to a low of 30,797 in 2009 [PDF]. Part of the reason the number of accidents resulting in fatalities has been diminishing isn’t due to stricter automobile control laws but increases in safety features. Such actions work when the result of fatalities are accidental in nature. When the actions are purposeful increasing safety features doesn’t work because individuals wanting to cause harm will bypass said safety features. Gun control is an attempt to create safety features around firearms in the form of background checks, mandatory mental evaluations, etc. and people willing to harm others will also bypass these “safety” features.

When the threat is purposeful action the only real way of protecting yourself is purposeful action. You can’t stop an enraged ex from killing you by simply passing a couple of laws. Killing people is already illegal so somebody willing to kill has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the law. In such cases you must have a means of defending yourself, of taking purposeful action. When measures are put into place to control access to firearms they merely prevent those willing to obey the law from obtaining said firearms. In other words gun control puts the lawful at a disadvantage while advantaging the lawless. To compare gun control to redesigning guardrails, it would akin to welding six foot spikes onto guardrails once it was shown people were being impaled on the current design. The redesign would put those involved in collisions with guardrails at a disadvantage while not affecting those don’t collide with guardrails.

I understand doctors deal with health issues and therefore they are biased towards seeing everything as a health issue. In this case they need to take a step back and analyze the issue. Violence doesn’t stem from accidents or making poor health decisions, it stems from some people wanting to hurt other people. The failure isn’t on the patient’s end, there is seldom anything the patient can do to prevent it.