A Geek With Guns

Apparently Verizon is sick of playing second fiddle to AT&T’s general dickery. During an investor conference call Verizon announced that they would be eliminating unlimited data plans, even for customers who have been grandfathered in:

Verizon Wireless subscribers who have held onto their $30-a-month unlimited data plans will soon be forced to upgrade to a new tiered offering the company plans to launch this summer, according to the Web site Fierce Wireless.

Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Technology Media and Telecom conference today, Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo told investors that the company’s 3G unlimited data plans that customers were allowed to hang onto last year when Verizon switched to a tiered offering will soon go away entirely. Instead, the company will migrate its existing and new 4G LTE customers to a new “data share plan.”

Way to go guys, I think you’ve finally made a move that will gain you more hatred than AT&T generally receives. I really hope the big four carriers; AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon; thank the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for enforcing the current monopoly of cell phone service in the United States.

If the FCC didn’t maintain a monopoly on spectrum and dole it out in auctions that bring in billions of dollars the current large carriers would actually have to face competition. Unfortunately no small company can enter the cell phone market because they can’t afford the billions of dollars needed to license spectrum from the FCC so we’re stuck with a cartel of four big assholes and a small handful of other carriers (who usually license the rights to use the big fours’ towers).

Image obtained from Chris Lyspooner’s Facebook page

The state is often schizophrenic when it comes to the messages it sends. One hand of the state will tell you to do ‘X’ while the other hand demands that you do ‘Y’ and the joke is that ‘X’ and ‘Y’ are mutually exclusive:

Hidden in weeds in Detroit’s Brightmoor area, Chevilott and his Wayne County crew discovered a loaded, snubnosed revolver as they were mowing the lawn mid-morning on May 3.

“It was damaged, so it could’ve went off. Surprisingly, it didn’t kill the guy on the mower,” Chevilott explained. “It got picked up, so we put [it] in the van, waited [for] police to drive by.”

However, Detroit police never did drive by, so Chevilott finished his work day, drove the gun home and later that same evening turned it into his local police department in Garden City.

He says the cops ran the gun and discovered the weapon had been stolen from St. Clair Shores in 2005.

“They said I did the right thing getting it off the street.”

Obviously Chevilott did a good thing. He found a discarded weapon and turned it over to the police so they could determine if it was stolen and/or used in a crime. Good on Chevilott for performing such a public service. Leaving loaded unsecured weapons lying around is certainly dangerous and we should encourage people to secure them, right? Not according to the Wayne Country Department of Public Services:

However, Chevilott’s superiors at the Department of Public Services had a much different opinion. His foreman, who had knowledge of the situation, was suspended for 30 days, and after 23 years on the job, Chevilott was fired for violating department policies.

According to a Wayne County spokeswoman and the rules, employees aren’t allowed to possess a weapon on work property.

While one hand of the state, the police, encourage people to secure discarded weapons so they will not be a danger the other hand, the Department of Public Services, says doing so will cost you your job. What’s a person to do? We’re often told that we should do the “right thing” but end up being punished for it. Chevilott will probably think twice about securing a discarded weapon since doing so this time cost him his job.

It’s sad that we now live in a society where common sense and decency are discarded for absolute adherence to rules and regulations. You can’t even help a dying man without fear of violating some law and thus facing a lawsuit down the road.

Remember that the people of the Middle East hate us for our freedom:

America’s top military officer has condemned a course taught at a US military college that advocated a “total war” against Muslims.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said the course was “totally objectionable” and “against our values”.

The voluntary course at the Joint Forces Staff College in Virginia also suggested possible nuclear attacks on holy Muslim cities such as Mecca.

I doubt suggestions of nuclear strikes on holy cities such as Mecca have anything to do with their anger. A rather interesting slide show [PDF] was obtained by Wired regarding this class and it’s worth a skim through. There isn’t anything I found too surprising in the slides but the presenter obviously has few kind thought regarding Muslims.

No words strike as much fear into many peoples’ hearts as “We’re with the government, we’re hear to help.” For example and innocent man had the state “help” him perform “repairs” to his property:

Two years ago today, Joe Del Rio was awakened to find city officials at the door of his lifelong home in East Austin, demanding entry. Before it was over, the Police Department’s SWAT team and the Fire Department had been deployed, and Del Rio said he was detained and questioned for about 10 hours because of what officials called a multilevel bunker-like space under the house with suspicious and unusual materials.

After the city billed Del Rio in April for about $90,000 in repairs it said were critical to make the home on Canterbury Street safe, Del Rio sued the City of Austin last week for what his lawyers say was a heavy-handed and unconstitutional seizure of his property without compensation.

Let me get this straight, a SWAT team stormed this man’s property, detained and questioned the man, and performed “repairs.” I wonder what kind of repairs were performed:

Del Rio also said officials concreted in the basement, fenced and locked the perimeter of the home and removed utility meters, making the house, in its current state, uninhabitable. The suit says that at the time of the seizure, Travis Central Appraisal District records put the house’s reasonable fair market value at upward of $172,000.

I guess if you have an insanely twisted mind filling a basement with concrete could qualify as a repair.

Stephen King wrote an article that has the entire progressive movement cheering his name. In the article King expresses his desire to have the state tax him more. While I give a great deal of credit for the comedic value in this article (seriously, I never knew King was such a vicious writer, kudos to him) I have to take that credit away from him due to his total lack of understanding of the nature of the state. His closing paragraph says it all:

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

King wants the government to tax him more so they can pay for maintaining roads, education, repairing the faltering infrastructure, and caring for the sick and poor. Unfortunately that’s not what the state will do with the extra money. What will the state do? Buy more bombs.

This is something I don’t get, a vast majority of my friends who demand the rich be taxed more also claim oppose the police state and war. They’ve been duped into holding hypocritical beliefs. On one hand they decry any expansion of the police state and military intervention but on the other hand they advocate people give more money to fund the same beast that’s implementing the police state and killing innocent people overseas. Giving the state more money enables it to buy more military hardware such as drones, tanks, bombs, and bullets. The more money they have at their disposal the more they can spy on you here and the more people they can kill overseas. During the Vietnam War people actually advocated tax protests in an attempt to starve the beast that was sending American men and women to die needlessly in a foreign country that never attacked us. What does it take to get these people to wake the fuck up? Do we have to kidnap their children and send them off to war? Do we have to install spy cameras in their homes?

Let’s address King’s next claim of “American responsibility.” He claims that charity and private investment cannot fix environmental issues (he specifically states global warming but I would like to give him a little more credit than just using a random talking point). What’s the solution than? Give the state more money? The very same state who causes most of our environmental problems in the United States by granting legal protection to polluters? Yeah, that’s worked out well so far. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an organization that exists solely to protect wealthy polluters. Terry Anderson wrong an excellent book titled Political Environmentalism that goes over some of more egregious instances of environmental cronyism. Instead of protecting the environment the EPA protects its cronies by ensuring the business environment is hostile to competition while allowing the emission of as much pollutants as their cronies demand. Does King really want to give the primary instigators of our environmental problems the power to further intervene on environmental matters? That would be akin to handing a serial killer a chainsaw and telling him has full immunity from legal prosecution for any murders he commits with that chainsaw.

The state has mastered duping people. They can get the same people who demand the banks be allowed to fail support a bank bailout. How the fuck did they get so good at fooling people? Is the average person so lacking in the department of critical thinking that they’re unwilling to stop and consider issues more deeply than the talking points they’re fed by the 10 o’clock news? Do these people not actually read bills before stating their support of them? These aren’t even clever scams, anybody who spends 15 minutes looking into them can see what is really going on.

It’s amazing how the state gets so many suckers to back mutually exclusive demands. Are you against war? Demand more taxes to fund the war machine! Do you want the banks to fail? Support a bank bailout! Want the environment cleaned up? Fund the political machinery that allows polluters to dump toxic waster into the water and air from lawsuits! Do you believe two plus two equals four? Believe it equals five instead!

The federal government hates independent farms. I understand this because large agricultural companies spend a lot of money lobbying for laws that hinder their smaller competitors. First the federal government attempted to make a rule that would require anybody driving farm equipment to obtain a commercial drivers license then they attempted to prohibit anybody under the age of 16 from working on a farm that wasn’t owned by their parents and now they’re trying to prohibit anybody under the age of 18 from doing many standard farm chores:

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

As a former member of Future Farmers of American (FFA) (it got me out of school several days a year) I would just like to state that I’d much rather have that organization do safety training than the federal government. FFA, at least when I was in it, was a well run organization that did some damn good work. The last thing I want is an organization that has been attempting to shut down independent farmers be the sole entity that deals with safety training certification.

Sadly with the power large agriculture corporations hold there is almost no hope for independent farms to continue legitimately. If you’re an independent farmer let me just say it’s probably time for you to acquaint yourself with agorism, because that will be the only way for you to continue farming.

Like any good dictator President Obama has been unhappy with the legislative process and therefore has decided to simply bypass it whenever it becomes inconvenient to his goals:

One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism.

“We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,” recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. “The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.”

For Mr. Obama, that meeting was a turning point. As a senator and presidential candidate, he had criticized George W. Bush for flouting the role of Congress. And during his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled Congress, Mr. Obama largely worked through the legislative process to achieve his domestic policy goals.

[...]

Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers. When he announced a cut in refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages last month, for example, he said: “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them.”

The real story here isn’t that Obama is using executive orders to bypass Congress, many presidents have done that. No, the real story is that Obama is actually blatantly stating that he’s using executive orders to bypass Congress. Traditionally a president issuing an executive order doesn’t brag about the fact that they hold dictatorial powers, that’s something that should be kept under the radar so the proles don’t get riled up that the political process isn’t what they were taught in college.

Apparently Obama has become so brazen that he might as well just come out of the dictatorial closet. He doesn’t need to keep up the charade of a republic anymore so why pretend he’s a president and not a king?

Let’s say you’re an advocate of a hypocritical organization that claims to want to save the children in Joseph Kony’s army by bombing the living shit out of the children in Joseph Kony’s army. You want to pressure the United States, United Nations, and everybody else into invading Uganda even though Kony hasn’t been in Uganda in over six years. What would be the best way to get your message out that also mirrors your ideological hypocrisy? Vandalize a well-known landmark of course:

The sculpture that signifies Minneapolis now bears the name of an African warlord whose reputation has recently gone viral.

The Walker Art Center’s “Spoonbridge and Cherry” sculpture, created by Claes Oldenburg, bore the word Kony as of Sunday evening.

The graffiti is an apparent reference Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

For those of you who haven’t been following this story the whole Kony 2012 campaign is nothing more than a propaganda machine trying to get Americans behind yet another war in a country 90% of the population probably couldn’t point out on a map if their lives depended on it. Perhaps I’m just being cynical, after all the United States only likes to invade countries that have resources for us to grab and it’s not like Uganda has oil or anything:

The refinery is a key element of the strategy to maximise revenue from Uganda’s newfound oil resources; 2.5bn barrels have been confirmed along the Albertine rift in western Uganda, and the oil sector is expected to generate more than $2bn annually – equivalent to 70% of the country’s current GDP – once commercial production begins in three to five years.

Never mind.

When the United States “left” Iraq we apparently forgot to take our Blackwater Xe Academi mercenaries with us. What happens when you leave a bunch of unaccountable crusaders behind in an Islamic country? Shit like this:

Stumbled upon this video that allegedly shows Blackwater contractors going wild in Iraq. Here is the original video description posted with this: “Videos posted by Harper’s Magazine show the private contractor formerly known as Blackwater in Iraq running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqis’ cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic. The behavior by Blackwater seen in the videos adds even more fuel to evidence that the company “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

With top notch employees like that it’s not wonder many Iraqis hate our guts to this day.

Hot on the heels of MSNBC being forced to issue an apology for fabricating evidence showing Zimmerman as a racist, CNN is now backpedaling:

Recently, CNN enhanced audio of George Zimmerman — the man who shot Trayvon Martin — to try and determine if he did, in fact, use a racial slur while calling police on the night of the shooting. Back then, it sounded like Zimmerman might have used the phrase “fu**ing coons,” and his critics have cited it as evidence of a racially-motivated attack. But now CNN has enhanced the audio again, and the reporter is casting doubts that the term was used.

“It certainly sounds like that word to me,” Gary Tuckman said when the audio was first enhanced. But after the latest enhancement, he’s not so sure:

“Now it does sound less like that racial slur. … From listening in this room, and this is a state-of-the-art room, it doesn’t sound like that slur anymore. It sounds like … we‘re hearing the swear word at first and then the word ’cold.’ And the reason some say that would be relevant, is because it was unseasonably cold in Florida that night and raining.”

Shows like CSI would have you believe one can easily and accurately enhance any audio or visual data to get data that isn’t stored in the source material. How many times have we seen the TV cops take a low definition video and “enhance” it to the point of crystal clarity? The real world is an asshole and doesn’t abide by precedents set by Hollywood so the whole idea of “enhancing” audio or visual data and getting reliable data from it is foolhardy.

Sadly the damage to Zimmerman’s name is done. Stating outrage over an apparently race driven crime is fun because it makes one’s self feel righteous, but later admitting you were suckered into the media’s cheap attempt to boost ratings isn’t.