HAHAHAHA!

The backstory is here, and has much, much more. 

And the next time some mouth-breathing gun banner asks you why you need a 30 round magazine, tell them that the Rooftop Koreans had not just 30 round magazines, but (legal) full auto.  The LA Riot was in 1992, only six years after the super-sketchy Hughes Amendment, approved by voice vote rather than roll call.

The (Security) lamps are going out all across Europe

We shall not see them relit in our lifetimes:

Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker says her company will withdraw from countries that force messaging providers to allow law enforcement officials to access encrypted user data, as Sweden continues to mull such plans.

Whittaker said Signal intends to exit Sweden should its government amend existing legislation essentially mandating the end of end-to-end encryption (E2EE), an identical position it took as the UK considered its Online Safety Bill, which ultimately did pass with a controversial encryption-breaking clause, although it can only be invoked where technically feasible.

Basically the Sweden.Gov is asking Signal to get pregnant, but only a little bit pregnant.  But vulnerabilities (and that's exactly what a government mandated encryption backdoor is) don't work that way.

And from the Department of Irony, the Swedish military oppose this:

The Swedish Armed Forces routinely use Signal and are opposing the bill, saying that a backdoor could introduce vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors. 

I guess this is just Exhibit 14,543,928 that Europe is fundamentally unserious about their own defense.

This follows hard on the heels of Apple turning off encryption in the UK. 

Looking at what's going on over there, it makes me think that maybe we should just cut the whole of them loose, to sink or swim on their own.  Unwilling to defend themselves, increasingly despotic to their subjects at home, maybe JD Vance is right after all that we no longer have shared values.

 

 

Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK

Paging George Orwell:

A journalist with the London Telegraph has been visited unannounced at her home by police in the UK who told her they are investigating a “non-crime hate incident” over a tweet she posted a year ago.

...

Allison Pearson relates what happened on Sunday in an article, noting that police will not tell her which post is the subject of the investigation, nor will they tell her who her accuser is or what they feel offended about.

Well okay, then.  But the UK Plods seems to have forgotten the old saying to not mess with someone who buys ink by the barrel:

Way to shine a spotlight on your policy, dumbasses.  Streisand Effect much?

I've just caught up with this by @AllisonPearson. Fortunately, she is a member of the Free @SpeechUnion, but I hope the @Telegraph will also be vigorously defending her freedom of expression. The ‘non-crime hate incident’ industry is a malignancy.https://t.co/iLsuNX4MgQ pic.twitter.com/yf0Cr2f0Vr

— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) November 12, 2024

"Peaceful" protests

Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter.  Sadly, we do.  But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck.  After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.

The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers.  This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat.  So how'd that turn out for them?

Veni, vidi, vici.  I came, I saw, I conquered. 

- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors

But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name.  It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.

The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done."  Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.

Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated.  His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor.  In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome.  Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself.  That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.

That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem.  Once that was gone, it was anything goes.  The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight.  The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions.  As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.

Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters.  Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat.  Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood.  Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.  Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.

It feels like that's coming here.  It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize.  That's new in American politics.  It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt.  It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.

And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year.  Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers.  They'll be higher come the election.  It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.

Because Mos Maiorum is dead.  The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November.  What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?

What was done in Rome?  Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola): 

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

The Romans didn't screw around.

The Democrats aren't screwing around, either.  If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest".  The American public looks on, and many realize this.

So where does this go, come November?  Donald Trump will win without doubt; the Republicans will also retake Congress (remember, 29 Democrats in House districts won by Trump voted to impeach; we shall see how that plays out in the election).

I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior.  In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you.  If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them.  If they oppose you, you oppose them.  Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.

That's not what we have today.  What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election.  But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic.  That's gone.

And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way.  It's the Reckoning.

This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:

A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning.  Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad.  The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.

If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper.  It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.

This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan.  But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward.  The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:

God save this Republic.

The covenant of civilization

There is an unwritten - and ancient - agreement between the rulers and the ruled that underlies civilization.  It is so fundamental that it is basically the bedrock of civilization itself.  Back in the Dark Ages, "justice" was the responsibility of the people - specifically their extended family. Clan feuds were the norm - and this has echoed faintly down to our own times with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys. Government was weak then and so justice was rough. The deal that was negotiated between the states and their subjects over the next 600 years was that the State would administer justice, but do it as fairly as it could, making blood feud unnecessary.

Looking at what has been happening so far this year - the tyranny of Governors putting their citizens under house arrest, followed by those same governors allowing unhindered looting by mobs - makes me wonder when enough of the public decides that the government has reneged on the 1000 year old deal.  What percentage of the population needs to decide this?  My guess is less than 10%.

Looking at the rioters it calls to mind the endless ages of border raiding.  That ended a shockingly short time ago - the 19th Century in the United States as whites encroached on Indian land.  Remember, the deal was that the State would enforce justice fairly so that blood feud would no longer be needed.  

Things are not made any better by the collapse in credibility of the media.  When a majority of the population thinks they are being consistently lied to, that adds fuel to this fire.

Anarcho-tyrrany in action

Denver business fined for not cleaning up human poop left by the vagrants that the city allows to flourish unhindered.

And this bit is a short way of describing Rich People's Leftism:

The Progressive defense of the Deep State has proven beyond a doubt that the purpose of government, at all levels, is to create sinecures for people too incompetent to succeed in the private sector.

College kids are coming out of school (college and public) less educated than ever before, school tuition or per student cost is at an all time high, and our schools have more non-teaching administrators making more money than ever.  This is not a coincidence, this is the system.

Rich People's Leftism is one of the clearest explanations I've ever seen for the utter failure of government in Blue States:

With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).

RPL thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.

RPL favors equality and so rejects upward mobility. PPL favors upward mobility via capitalism, since it sees that “egalitarian” schemes never work and are really disguised hierarchies with wealthy leftists at the top.

RPL respects wealthy liberals for wanting to help the poor. PPL observes that these wealthy liberals ensure that they are well paid for what they do and prefers to support wealthy conservatives, who at least are honest about where they are coming from.

RPL thinks capitalism is horrible, while socialism or even communism is best. PPL thinks that capitalism is fine or at worst a necessary evil, while socialism and communism, since the best jobs in such systems usually go to the wealthy, are nothing but systems that allow wealthy leftists to assuage their feelings of guilt about being wealthy while not actually doing anything for the poor.

There's ever so much more over there, and it all hits center mass.  The only thing to add is that nobody embodies the entirety of Rich People's Leftism than Elizabeth Warren.

But all of them are 100% constitutional

No doubt.

Looks like the Red States are the worst abusers of Red Flag laws.

At the intersection of stupid gun laws and stupid drug laws

Pregnant Mom Kills Home Invader in Justified Shooting, Now Going To Prison For the Gun She Used:

Do convicted felons have the constitutional right to defend themselves with a firearm? The answer to the question, in most U.S. states is a resounding no. Those who do, like Arkansas native Krissy Noble, face years in prison, all for choosing to protect their lives and the lives of their loved ones with a firearm.

Noble was cleared of all wrongdoing in the Dec. 7th shooting death of Dylan Stancoff, who attacked her in her own home. Noble was pregnant at the time of the shooting when Stancoff, calling himself Cameron White, stopped by her home and asked to speak to Noble’s husband who was not home at the time. Saying he was a friend from the military, Stancoff left but returned later, pushed himself into Noble’s home, attempted to cover her mouth to prevent her from screaming, and began to struggle with the mother-to-be.

Noble escaped briefly and retrieved a .40 caliber handgun, fired three shots, and killed her attacker. But because Noble pleaded guilty (before the shooting in 2017) to felony possession of marijuana, she now faces six years in prison, all for the crime of using her husband’s handgun, a gun she successfully used to defend herself and the life of her unborn baby.

The term "anarcho-tyranny" describes a situation where the Organs Of The State refuse to control criminals (hence, the anarchy) by puts strict controls on the law abiding (hence, the tyranny).  Sure, it's hard to control criminals and easy to control the law abiding, but that's hardly a justification.

It's hard to think of a group with a stronger claim on society's protection than expecting mothers, and yet the police failed her.  No doubt that is because the woman lived in a rural area, but her moral claim on protection stands.  The State is making things worse - adding to their moral failure - by prosecuting her for using not her firearm, but her husband's firearm to defend herself and her unborn baby.

The State is effectively saying that not only do they have no moral duty to protect these two people, but that Mrs. Noble has no legal authority to protect herself and her baby - and that the state will imprison her for 5 years if she does.

Let that sink in.

All because she was busted with some pot once.  What a miserable failure of the stupid War On Drugs.  Future generations will judge us by our works, and the judging will be harsh.  Fair, but harsh.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

The "Knock Out Game" comes to Castle Borepatch

Well, not Castle Borepatch itself, but within its shadow.  Some "youths" killed a guy at the Frederick County (MD) Fair.  A group surrounded him, one distracted him by asking for a dollar, and the hero of the group cold cocked him from behind.  While he was lying on the ground, another "youth" spit on him.

They flew him to the shock and trauma center in Baltimore where he died.  He was 59 years old.  The local newspaper has been giving this pretty good coverage.  There was a video of the incident posted to snapchat but it looks like it has been scrubbed from the 'net.  This local TV coverage is decent.



The kids involved are 15 and 16, but the District Attorney says that they will be charged with manslaughter and tried as adults.

This all happened ten miles from Castle Borepatch, in a nice middle class town in broad daylight.

The coverage has been evolving over the last 3 or 4 days.  The initial shock led to the media reporting things in plain language, but now there are more and more weasel words as the story gets massaged to fit the narrative.  Both the stories and the District Attorney have started saying that this wasn't a hate crime, even though we know that a group of white teenagers attacking a black man would be described as precisely that.  And despite the video showing one kid spitting on the man when he was on the ground.

Initially there was a lot of talk about the "knockout game", but that's been swept down the memory hole.  It's not The Narrative to talk about how groups of black teens target whites to sucker punch them, although this is why The Queen Of The World and I have not been to Baltimore's inner harbor - it's just not safe.

And Maryland is a "May Issue" State, and the police won't give carry licenses unless you're politically well connected.

Police corruption in Houston

Lawrence has a very interesting update on the "no knock" raid in Houston that went catastrophically wrong: both homeowners dead and five officers wounded.  It's long and detailed (spoiler alert: it appears that one of the Undercover officers made the whole thing up, lied to the Court to get the warrant, and that this isn't the first time he's done it).  Here's his sum up, but you should read the whole thing:

So it turns out that two people died and five cops were shot in a no-knock raid of an alleged dealer’s house where no significant narcotics were found on information provided by, well, possibly no one. Something obviously stinks here.

There's no word that describes this other than "appalling".  Prosecutions should result.

We turned into the Soviet Union so slowly that I hardly noticed

I'm so old that I remember that we thought it was the Soviets who had nighttime police raids on political dissenters' houses.

This post is tagged "fascists" because, well, you know.

But "fascist" is not too strong a word.  All fascist governments have paramilitary street thugs to intimidate its opponents.  The lynch mob after the Covington Catholic High School boys is still baying for blood, even when it's the blood of those who weren't even there:

DOUGLAS COUNTY, Colo. — A Douglas County School District teacher has resigned from her role on the teachers union’s board after being placed on paid leave following online comments calling a Covington Catholic school student “Hitler Youth.”

Images of Twitter posts from a now-deleted account, attributed to Mountain Ridge Middle School teacher Michelle Grissom, appeared to be an attempt to doxx, or publicly identify, the high school student from Kentucky seen standing face-to-face with a Native American activist in Washington, D.C. last Friday.

...

The student identified in the posts attributed to Grissom was not in Washington, D.C. at the time, according to his family, but rather playing a basketball game in Kentucky. Dr. John Jackson told 9NEWS on Tuesday that he is the father of 17-year-old Jay Jackson, who was wrongly identified in the posts.

Ready, fire, aim.  I did not read Pasternak but I condemn him.

Never mind that the Covington kids were set up by not one but two leftie groups.  Never mind that the Covington kids have the right peaceably to assemble.  The mob got their High School shut down because of death threats.



That's the nature of Anarcho-tyranny: it's not stable.  The combination of oppression from the Organs of Government combined with the encouragement of (approved) street thugs is a Devil's brew.  This is not the time to have an Attorney General antagonistic to gun ownership.

I don't see how this doesn't spin out of control.  The Democratic Party has no interest at all in reining in the street muscle, and the Deep State - especially the FBI/NSA/FISA Secret Police - has no interest in backing off the official oppression.  I wish I were more optimistic, but now I'm wondering if maybe this will be the year that people start shooting back.

Remember, the shooting has already started.  So far, it's just been one side.

UK Police losing war with smuggled guns

Shockingly, it seems that Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle is not so protected by the English Channel as Her Majesty's Government would like:

Police and border officials are struggling to stop a rising supply of illegal firearms being smuggled into Britain, a senior police chief has warned. 

Chief constable Andy Cooke, the national police lead for serious and organised crime, said law enforcement had seen an increased supply of guns over the past year, and feared that it would continue in 2019. 

The Guardian has learned that the situation is so serious that the National Crime Agency has taken the rare step of using its legal powers to direct every single police force to step up the fight against illegal guns.

These are new guns, not existing ones stolen in burglaries.  Some are shipped into the country in packages - the explosion of online shopping has led to new smuggling channels.  Not surprising, as drugs are smuggled by the ton and are available for sale on every street corner.  Of course, this was easily foreseeable - and in fact I blogged about this 8 years ago:

So there was another mass shooting in gun-free Great Britain. To those who think that Yet Another Tweak of the gun control laws will prevent this in the future, to those who believe in their heart of hearts that "Common Sense Gun Control" really is possible, I have one question: 

Which weighs more, a ton of cocaine, or a ton of Glocks?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

But fear not, the UK Police are on it.  Well, they're on something, at least:

British citizens trying to craft a New Year's resolution for 2019 don't have to worry. Your government is taking care of it. You're going to commit to eating less food. 

It doesn't matter whether you want to or even need to eat less food. Public Health England has decided that growing obesity numbers require all British citizens to eat less food. And they're going to force the matter by controlling the size of just about every single piece of food and prepared available for purchase.

If you follow the first link, you'll read a quote from a police commander complaining that they're too understaffed to catch all the illegal guns coming into the kingdom.  But the second link says that they'll be even more understaffed as their police force will be called on to round up Big Mac scofflaws.

Err, when they're not blockading hospitals to make sure that desperately ill children don't escape the National Health Service:

[The Archbishop of Liverpool] tells us that everything “humanly possible” has been done to help the child, ignoring that the Police hold him hostage in a hospital that intends to starve him to death.  Police that turned away a German Air Ambulance come to take him for treatment far from the shores of Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle.

But no doubt that one more tweak of the gun laws in Blighty - or on these shores (*cough* ATF Bumpstock Ban *cough*) will solve the problem nicely.

And so the Government can't do basic things that the public expects (provide security) while it busies itself sticking its nose into your business (or killing your kids).  Ah, well.  It's clear that the UK.gov has no legitimacy:

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon. 

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be? 

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

I'm old enough to remember when it was widely thought that the Government was competent, and if it put its mind to it could do amazing things.  That was in the 1960s.  What we've seen since then is a more frequent demonstration that the Government couldn't bring tomorrow in on time.

But hey, some more stupid or useless gun control laws would be awesome, amirite?

The collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK

Peter has a long and well thought out post concerning the jailing of UK activist Tommy Robinson:

At the time, Robinson's supporters tried to claim that his arrest and (suspended) sentence were violations of his right to free speech.  They were not, as the judge made clear.  He violated British laws, he ignored common practice concerning interfering with defendants and/or witnesses in a criminal trial, and he arguably jeopardized the defendants' right to a fair trial by his conduct.  I have no issue with the sentence given him.

Peter is correct and puts together a strong argument for following long established social norms - which is after all, what the legal code is supposed to encapsulate.  You should go RTWT because I am going to pose a number of questions, all pointing to the same meta question: has the UK government lost its claim to legitimacy, and if so, do any of these long held social norms still apply.

Question 1: Is justice being served in the UK?

Technically, it is a "Court of Law", but when we speak in terms of governmental legitimacy the view is broader.  It must be a Court of Justice if society is to keep to the old bargain negotiated 1000 years ago.  Back in the Dark Ages, "justice" was the responsibility of the people - specifically their extended family.  Clan feuds were the norm - and this has echoed faintly down to our own times with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys.  Government was weak then and so justice was rough.  The deal that was negotiated between the states and their subjects over the next 600 years was that the State would administer justice, but do it as fairly as it could, making blood feud unnecessary.

Is justice being meted out in Her Magesty's Scepter'd Isle?  For those who haven't been paying much attention, there have been dozens of arrests (perhaps hundreds) of adult men who have gang raped under age girls.  This has occurred in many locales throughout the land.  It has been doing on not for years, but for decades.  The number of victims is not reported, but is certainly in the tens of thousands.  In each case, the State knew what was happening.

As far as I can tell, none of the State officials - local, county, or national - have lost their jobs over this.

Remember, the deal was that the State would enforce justice fairly so that blood feud would no longer be needed.

Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an "activist" while Peter refers to him as "Alt-Right".  I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like.  But it also cuts to the heart of this question.  If we don't look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment.  The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades.  The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

The alleged perpetrators are described as "asian males", as if some of them were from China or Korea.  This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

Are the "asian males" actually Pakistani immigrants?  Are they all muslim?  Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims?  To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here.  It's actually worse - one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary - the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we're told is an "Alt-Right" fringe.

Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris.  If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off.  Blood feud may be the only option.

Question 4: Is this worse than the Child Abuse done in the Catholic Church?

Peter has written eloquently about the crimes that were committed by many, many priests, and covered up by their bishops.  I myself lived outside Boston when the scandal broke, and saw Cardinal Law recalled to Rome (and promoted) by the Pope himself - a more stark depiction of institutional rot is hard to imagine.

But now consider that membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary.  If you don't like their church, you are free to go to a different one.  But if you don't like your local UK Council (local government), you have to move away from your family and friends.

I guess you could try to vote them out, but what are your chances making this an election issue when there's a chance that some Judge will throw you in jail for talking about it?

Question 5: Is Justice being served in the UK?

Yes, I already posed this question, but want to bring it back into focus after the discussion above.  Certainly some people think that the answer is no:

Even if everything done by the police or the court was perfectly legitimate and reasonable, the problem is that many people in England believe that Tommy Robinson is being unjustly persecuted by his government. The fact that he was arrested so shortly after his successful Day for Freedom event, where he gathered thousands of people in support of free speech, strikes many as a little bit more than a coincidence.

Discussion

This is what a collapse of legitimacy looks like.  The answers to the questions are more or less irrelevant; the fact that they can be posed without being dismissed out of hand is the point.  Societies are remarkably resilient: Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country, and Roman political and social institutions outlived the fall of the Western Empire by a century or more.  But that was because everyone more or less agreed that those institutions still deserved support even though the Emperor had been replaced by the Rex of the Goths.

That's not we're looking at here.

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon.

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be?

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

UPDATE 1 June 2018 12:42: Via Brock Townsend, I see that I'm not the only one who sees things this way.

Admittedly I'm not a fan of Mr. Lincoln, but this is going too far

Lincoln Memorial vandalized by anarchists:

Authorities in the nation's capital are searching for a vandal after the Lincoln Memorial was spray painted with explicit graffiti early Tuesday. 

The National Park Service said it was working to remove the graffiti after it was discovered at about 4:30 a.m., FOX 5 DC reported.

The graffiti, which was done in red spray paint on a column, appears to say “F*** law."

Actually my take on Mr. Lincoln is that he pretty much lived the advice from the graffiti, but this is getting out of hand.



Hat tip: Chicago Boyz.

A reminder of the unsavoriness of both Clintons

First, Hillary:



This is clearly anti-Hillary agitprop, but in the same way that this was anti-McCain agitprop in 2008:

Note the camera angle selected to cast unflattering shadows.  The video does this too; in my mind that detracts from the video's argument.  However, notice that the video has clear sourcing on just about everything.  As Mythbusters would say, "Plausible".

And some of the weaker points brought up here are discussed by the late, great Christopher Hitchens (whose journalistic credentials are disputed by nobody).  In particular, he goes over Dick Morris and Sid Blumenthal at some length.



I'm sure that my readers will recognize the Blumenthal name as the same one that the Trump campaign says (via a former McClatchy bureau chief) started the whole Obama "Birther" business back in 2008.  Sidney was seemingly useful to the Clintons over the course of two decades.

I can understand how someone would want to vote for her because they self-identify as a Democrat.  Tribal instincts run deep in the human psyche.  I may not agree with their choice, but we are not rational beings - rather, we are rationalizing beings.

But this is who the Clintons are.  This is who Hillary is.  The only excuse to vote for her is because of a tribal instinct.  Remember that.

So would Donald Trump be a good President?  I certainly can't say.  What I can say is that the single biggest political problem facing this Republic today is a crisis in governmental legitimacy.  Hillary is astonishingly unequipped to deal with this.  Trump, as an outsider in the political arena at least has the possibility.

The World's cutest terror suspect

So who would be prohibited from buying guns because they're suspicious - if the Democrats get their way?  I covered this seven years ago.

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The world's cutest terror suspect

Todd Brown is the proud dad of an adorable little girl. A little girl that he found out, is on the TSA's list of potential terrorists.

It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.

Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.

Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.

This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.

An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:

They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.

Bingo.

A long time ago, I posted about false positives and why the TSA doesn't go after everyone on one of its lists:

If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.

There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billionbucks. So they turn the system off.

And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really.  5 year olds, too.

Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.

From the TSA's perspective, this makes sense. From our perspective, it's annoying. It's double-plus annoying when there's nothing that tells you that you're likely a false positive in their system. There is, of course, a sure-fire way to reduce your chance of triggering a false positive in the TSA's system to zero. Guaranteed to work every time.

Drive.

The futility of using the "No Fly" list to restrict firearms purchases

Politics aside, it cannot possibly work - technically speaking.  At least not "work" to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists.  This post from nearly eight (!) years ago explains why.

And an added note: the Democrats aren't pushing the No-Fly list for gun bans.  There are around 70,000 people on that list (including, at one time, the late Senator Edward Kennedy).  Instead, they're pushing the Terrorism Watch List, which has on the order of a million people on the list.  The number of people on there for no good reason (or for no reason at all) is certainly astronomical.

And so, to the motivations in play.  Eric Raymond explained what was up a couple years back: Destroying the Middle Ground.  The system and politics are corrupt, and the Agencies tasked with implementing the law will do so corruptly.

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Anti-terrorist data mining doesn't work

One of the biggest problems in Internet Security is getting the "False Positive" rate down to a manageable level. A False Positive is an event where your security device reports an attack, where there's no actual attack happening. It's the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem, and if it's too high, people turn the security off.

Apple had a hilarious ad that spoofed Vista's UAC security a while back. The security is so good that the whole system is unusable:


Surprise! Seems that identifying terrorists by mining a bunch of databases isn't any better:

A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

The problem is not so much one of technology, as it is of cost. Suppose you could create system where the data mining results gave you only one chance in a million at false positive. In other words, for every person identified as a potential terrorist, you were 99.9999% likely to be correct. This is almost certainly 3 or 4 orders of magnitude overly optimistic (the actual chances are likely no better than 1 in a thousand, and may well be much less), but let's ignore that.

There are roughly 700 Million air passengers in the US each year. One chance in a million means the system would report 700 likely terrorists (remember, this thought experiment assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate). The question, now, is what do you do with these 700 people?

Right now, we don't do anything, other than not let them fly. If they're Senator Kennedy, they make a fuss at budget time, and someone takes them off the list; otherwise, we don't do anything. So all this fuss, and nothing really happens? How come?

Cost. If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.

There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billion bucks. So they turn the system off.

And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really.  5 year olds, too.

So the Fed.Gov sweeps it under the rug, thanks everyone involved for all their hard work, and pushes the "off" button.

As expected, the Slashdot comments are all over this:

I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
The mere concept of a list of names of people who are too "dangerous" to let fly ... but not dangerous enough to track ... that just [censored - ed] stupid.

At least everyone's looking busy. The analogies to gun control pretty much write themselves.

America's transition to the Soviet Union is complete

Hidden microphones record conversations in public places:

Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing.  It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn’t even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, “They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!”

I remember when this sort of thing was what totalitarian states did.  Oh, wait ...

Sure, you can trust the government

Trustworthy, trustworthy, trustworthy:

An SUV tucked away in the shadows of the Philadelphia Convention Center’s tunnel bears the ubiquitous logo for Google Maps, and mounted on top of the vehicle are two high-powered license plate reader cameras. To the average passerby, it might appear to be a Google street view vehicle. 

Others, such as Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer and information science professor, saw it for what it truly was: a crudely disguised tool for surveillance. Blaze tweeted a photo of the vehicle with the appropriate opening: “WTF?” 

... 

So why this subterfuge? Two spokespersons with the Philadelphia Police Department were not immediately available for comment. 

“We can confirm that this is not a Google Maps car, and that we are currently looking into the matter,” Google spokesperson Susan Cadrecha wrote. When pressed, Cadrecha would not elaborate as to whether the company was concerned or angered that a local agency would be using a vehicle with powerful—and controversial—surveillance technology while masquerading as a street mapping car.

Remember, Citizen: if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. All is for the best, in the best of the Brave New Worlds.

In other news, New York City's police have been ticketing legally parked cars:

I then selected 30 random spots that had received 5 or more tickets over the time period, and based on Google Maps found that all of them appeared to be legal parking spots!  (Randomly selecting spots with a single ticket in the database showed some illegal spots as well, so I chose 5 as a conservative cutoff.) 

How many spots received 5 or more of these pedestrian ramp tickets in the last 2.5 years?  We are talking 1,966 spots that are generating about 1.7 million dollars a year in tickets at parking spots that are mostly legal.

Err, relax Citizen: if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. Unless we want money from you, in which case it's know your place, Peasant. Because Shut Up.  And respect my authoritah.

Tagged "police state" because, well, you know.

Dilbert on voting machines

It doesn't matter who casts the votes.  It matters a lot who counts them.