Anonymous 2012

Look at how quickly young people are learning to recognize and confront organized evil. First it was Scientology that got assaulted, and now this:

Anonymous for President:

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Anon 2012.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Intertubes; I bring forth a message for the masses, a revelation that many of you are already beginning to suspect, to understand.

Your government has failed you.

Politicians, regardless of their claimed affiliations, sit atop Capitol Hill, making false promises and ignoring public outcries. They have made a business out of striping away your rights for their own profit. They wage wars,they manipulate, they lie, they cheat, they steal. The history of your nation and the fate of your lives are decided in dark backroom dealings that you will never hear of in places that you will never see. Men in dark suits and dark sunglasses listen to every word you utter, read every word you type, examine every document you send without fear of reprisal or punishment.

Your rights have been destroyed, and your privacy lies in shattered pieces at your very feet.

It is time for you - for all of us - to act.

A Vote for Anonymous is a Vote for the People.

At first I thought the call to vote for Anonymous was a bad thing, but then I realized that "A Vote for Anonymous" literally means to simultaneously vote for everybody and nobody. It's almost as good as not voting at all.

Will this have any impact? Probably not in and of itself. But to me it is a proverbial crack in the dam of the state, growing ever quicker thanks to the internet's ability to make information free, open, and ridiculously easy to find. Eventually the dam will burst, and I hope I'm still around when it happens.

Cops and Robbers, or, Gangsters and Robbers

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Residents in Central Florida are sick of the lack of police services in their community and are finally turning to their own measures to protect their lives and property.

These poor people are being doubly victimized: once by the gangsters police, and once by the burglars. You see, the police force the residents to pay for their protection services (think: protection racket) and yet, when these residents actually need the services, the police don't provide it!

In this case, despite all their desire to do so, the police are unable to provide the service due to inefficiency (they call it budget constraints). But whether the police do not provide the services they are supposed to through negligence, inability, or outright refusal is irrelevant.

The police department should be disbanded, or at least privatized. The residents should not be taxed; not be forced to pay for the services that they clearly aren't getting anyway. They should be free to protect themselves through any service they want and not be forced to pay for the police, who through brutal gangsterism, make themselves the only protection service provider in town.

The police should be ashamed of themselves. But of course, idiots, incompetents, and assholes never see the irony in their own actions. The residents have taken up arms, and the cops have now been de-facto relegated to a sort of coercion clean-up crew, yet they continue to fancy themselves as being the ones providing the protection. Ha!

These poor residents, despite paying for it, have clearly not had any actual security service in a long time. And since they aren't allowed to redirect their money to an agency that would or could actually provide the needed services, the residents are taking it into their own hands. I wouldn't be surprised if these residents end up having to physically defend themselves not only from the burglars, but also from the parasitic protection racket police that profess to protect them!

Prohibition Doesn't Work

Sorry for pointing out the obvious yet again, but it bears repeating. We already knew that the US has the highest prison population in the world, but now we find out that US citizens are more likely to use (illegal) drugs than anywhere else in the world!

So much for prohibition:

Americans are the world's top consumers of cannabis and cocaine despite punitive US drug laws, according to an international study published in the online scientific magazine PLoS Medicine.

The study, released Monday, revealed that 16.2 percent of Americans had tried cocaine at least once, and 42.4 percent had used marijuana.

In second-place New Zealand, just 4.3 percent of study participants had used cocaine, and 41.9 percent marijuana.

The research was conducted at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, based on World Health Organization data from 54,068 people in 17 countries.

Rates of participation differed from country to country, and researchers noted uncertainty over how honestly people report their own drug use.

"Nevertheless, the findings present comprehensive data on the patterns of drug use from national samples representing all regions of the world," a PLoS statement said.

A vast majority of survey participants from the United States, Europe, Japan and New Zealand had consumed alcohol, compared to smaller percentages from the Middle East, Africa and China.

The data also revealed socioeconomic patterns in drug use. Single young adult men with high income had the greatest tendency to regularly use drugs.

Funny then, isn't it, how those most likely to be in prison for drugs come from the poor sectors of society?

Drug use "does not appear to be simply related to drug policy," the researchers wrote, "since countries with more stringent policies toward illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies."

In the Netherlands, where drug policy is more liberal than the United States, 1.9 percent of survey participants said they had used cocaine and 19.8 percent marijuana.

Twelve US 12 states including California permit medical use of marijuana, but possession and use remains prohibited under federal law.

And despite the US government's massive anti-drug efforts, the United States remains the world's top drug market, one amply supplied by South American cartels.

In other words, drugs are winning the War on Drugs.

Police? What Police?

Here is a video (with Spanish Italian narration) of some group of criminal thugs beating the living shit out of a very unfortunate individual. It's easy to spot the criminal thugs as they are all wearing the same gang colors and outfits: shorts with purple/blue shirts.


Police Beating - Click here for more amazing videos

The poor victim is in desperate need of security services or other physical defense, but none is available to him. No, instead he is left at the mercy of the gang. The strange thing is that this man is in an area where the "government" has a monopoly on security services, and the "government" professes to deploy security services to protect and serve the populace, and prevent gangs like this one from brutalizing innocent people.

But the security services are nowhere to be found! When color-wearing gangs terrorize the streets, and the "government" cannot deploy its police adequately to stop these kinds of crimes, is it not evidence that perhaps the "government" should release its monopolistic grip on the security services market? Shouldn't the "government" allow its citizens to contract private, and more effective, security as they see fit?

No, for that would require the "government" to care about its people. Clearly, the government would rather finance terrorist groups that use violence on innocents in order to further their radical and twisted ideology.

"Government" police forces are not police forces at all. They are terrorists, thugs, and territorial color-wearing gangs. They are the very thing they profess to protect us from. A "protection" racket through and through.

Edit: Mike from NoState.com informed me that the video is in Italian, not Spanish. Whoops!

US Field Manual on How to Install Puppet Regimes

Wikileaks has struck gold! Somebody has leaked the US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3 to the Wikileaks site.

I won't paste any of it here, instead you should just go check it out yourself. It does not disappoint.

City of Champions

Reads the AP headline: "Voter Turnout for Tiny North Dakota Town: Zero."

I call it the City of Champions.

Kill 'em with Kodak

BT's chief security technology officer, Bruce Schneier, has an excellent piece at The Guardian about photographer's rights in this topsy turvy world of the "Global War on Terror":

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

Go read the rest. And after that, go take some photographs of some statues and monuments. And if you live in the US, you might want to keep this document handy.

An Open Letter to All Libertarians

Written by Francois Tremblay, and reprinted at The Radical Libertarian.

Original can be found here.

Dear Libertarians,

Most of you have staked all of your hopes on Ron Paul. He has been defeated, during the course of the popularity pageant we call the democratic process.

The Libertarian Party has existed for more than thirty years, with no concrete results under its belt except a few local, irrelevant posts. Perhaps you believe it is the only solution. Perhaps you believe that the sole alternative to political evils is a violent revolution, and thus prefer the evils to violence, and call it “necessary” (as if anything evil could be necessary).

Suffrage is… powerless and unreliable. It can be exercised only periodically; and the tyranny must at least be borne until the time for suffrage comes. Besides, when the suffrage is exercised, it gives no guaranty for the repeal of existing laws that are oppressive, and no security against the enactment of new ones that are equally so.

Lysander Spooner

Or perhaps you may now be coming to the same realization that Anarchist writers have written about for centuries:

No political means have ever produced lasting freedom. Political means can engender nothing but the sustenance of political means. Only disengagement and principled resistance can produce lasting freedom.

With very few and very temporary exceptions, no government has ever been made smaller by political means. No successful movement for freedom in history has ever been guided by any other principle but disengagement and principled resistance.

From Étienne de la Boétie, 16th century precursor of the modern Anarchist movements, to Murray Rothbard, founder of the modern Market Anarchist movement, all are in agreement: disengagement is the best way to oppose the ever-growing State.

The surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Libertarians, is what you’ve been doing working, and if not, why do you keep doing it? Has the constant compromise of your principles (culminating in the nomination of Bob Barr for candidate, who is about as libertarian as George Bush) resulted in any success?

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

William Lloyd Garrison, on the emancipation movement

You believe in smaller government. We are on your side. But libertarianism cannot be fulfilled by political means, and it cannot be fulfilled by violent revolution. The only way through which libertarianism can be fulfilled is disengagement. This is the method that Market Anarchists have always preached and followed.

How can disengagement succeed where political means and violent revolutions fail? Because the State can only survive when we, the people, believe in its legitimacy and treat State law, State “justice,” war, taxation and democracy as “necessary evils.” If a mere 10% of the people in any society refuse to vote, refuse to pay their taxes, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of State courts and the State police, establish their own voluntary courts and security, and promote a peaceful, voluntary way of life to the majority, then the State will be exposed as the criminal gang that it is.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, ‘But what shall I do?’ my answer is, ‘If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.’ When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

Henry David Thoreau

But most of you do not want Anarchy. This is well understood. However, some Market Anarchies in the past have had a legislative or law enforcement structure (e.g. the well-documented example of Iceland). I would like to submit to you that the establishment of such a structure is far more likely than any Libertarian political victory. Once the State is dissolved, I believe that most people will readily join the principles of freedom that you espouse: “as long as you don’t harm me, I won’t harm you.”

Ron Paul had a lot of good ideas, but he was wrong about one thing. He believed that the “role of government” was to protect and serve us. No government in history has ever done this. The role of government is to cheat, steal, and kill, for the profit of its members. We constantly observe this to be a fact in all its actions.

Hitch your wagon to ours. We have the ideals, the arguments, and the methods to change society forever. With your help, we cannot fail.

Francois Tremblay, in the name of all Market Anarchists