Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Category: News

  • This won’t end well

    Texas Bullion Depository Begins Construction. In June 2015, Gov. Greg Abbot signed legislation creating the state gold bullion and precious metal depository. The facility will not only provide a secure place for individuals, business, cities, counties, government agencies and even other countries to store gold and other precious metals, the law also creates a mechanism to facilitate the everyday use of gold and silver in transactions. In short, a person will eventually be able to deposit gold or silver – and pay other people through electronic means or checks – in sound money.

    […]

    According to an article in the Star-Telegram, state officials want a facility “with an e-commerce component that also provides for secure physical storage for Bullion.” While in the development phase, officials said plans for a depository will include online services that would let customers accept, transfer and withdraw bullion deposits and related fees.

    Ultimately, depositors will be able to use a bullion-funded debit card that seamlessly converts gold and silver to fiat currency in the background. This will enable them to make instant purchases wherever credit and debit cards are accepted. [Tenth Amendment Center]

    In other words, they’re trying to recreate E-gold as a state-run entity. This effort is doomed from the start. The Evil Empire destroyed E-gold because it can’t afford to permit a threat to the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money–they’ll destroy any state-run equivalent for the same reason. This is why Bitcoin came along–it removed the ability of a government to destroy a threat to their fiat currencies.

  • I’ll believe it when I see it

    This Could Get Interesting: @RealDonaldTrump v. the Perpetual War Lobby. Trump has announced a pullout of US ground troops from Syria.

    Apparently a drawdown of the US presence in Afghanistan, by about one third, is in play as well. [KN@PPSTER]

    This isn’t the first time Trump has talked about withdrawing from Syria. Both times he did so as President, the “Syrian government” promptly launched “chemical weapon attacks” on their own territory. I won’t be at all surprised if this happens again and forces Trump to end the withdrawal.

    On the other hand, the ruling class has been making a big deal about how abrupt and hasty the withdrawal order is. It’s entirely possible that Trump has noted what happened in the past when he talked about withdrawing, and gave the order so abruptly specifically to ensure that the “Syrian government” didn’t have a chance to arrange a “chemical weapon attack” to prevent it.

  • The training excuse again

    Cops Kill Lots of Dogs. This Simulator Trains Them Not To. “We identified that this was a problem and created this training so we could keep officers safe, pets safe, agencies from paying out multi-million dollar lawsuits, and honestly, so we can keep the relationship between police and community a whole lot better, because it’s just rampant,” [National Sheriffs’ Association deputy executive director] Thompson continues. “Every day you hear of an officer shooting a dog. It’s not because they’re crazy, warmongering people who want to shoot a dog, it’s just they’ve never been trained or told different.” [Hit & Run]

    The “we need more training” is a standard cop excuse for various vile acts. It’s particularly ridiculous when they use it for their dog-killing habits, because there are millions of ordinary Americans (myself included) who carry guns around strangers’ dogs every day and never have the slightest inclination to shoot any of them. We didn’t get any special training in not shooting dogs, all we do is not be a bunch of vicious psychopaths.

  • Purging unapproved opinions

    Major Internet Platforms Ban Alex Jones. Jones is a noted conspiracy theorist and the founder of the InfoWars website and podcast. In a Monday tweet, he confirmed that Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple had completely unpublished and/or removed his professional pages and podcasts. [Reason.com]

    It’s been well known for a while that those organizations hate anyone who’s not a liberal, and have a long history of censoring opposing viewpoints. It’s unusual for a bunch of them to get together for a coordinated purge like this, though. The most likely reason I’ve seen for it is that there’s a midterm election coming up, and the liberals are afraid of the very large Infowars audience being exposed to unapproved thoughts. For those who want to see what the Thought Police don’t want you to know, see the Infowars channel on BitChute.

  • You can’t stop the signal

    Cody Wilson Takes Gun Plans Offline After Judge Issues Restraining Order. The internet is defying a federal judge’s attempt to block Defense Distributed from publishing instructions showing how to create 3D-printable firearms.

    A few hours after U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik, a Clinton appointee, muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order Tuesday evening, the CodeIsFreeSpeech.com mirror site appeared. It’s a project of the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups, and includes freely downloadable computer-aided design (CAD) files for the AR-15, AR-10, Ruger 10-22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms. [Reason.com]

    I have a copy of all the files here, in case something happens to that mirror: Defense Distributed files (335.5 MB).

  • Google doesn’t understand bail reform

    Google to Purge Ads for Bail Bond Services.
    Google has thrown its support behind the growing movement to eliminate cash bail by purging bail bond advertisements from its platform.

    […]

    Beginning in July, Google will no longer accept advertisements from private bail bond services. David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, explained the decision Monday: “We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products…”

    […]

    Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put out a statement Monday afternoon supporting Google’s decision: “No one should be incarcerated—before they’ve even been tried or convicted of a crime—simply because they can’t afford not to be.” [Hit & Run]

    So in order to help poor people who have trouble affording bail, they’re trying to make it harder for poor people to afford bail. It’s amazing how consistently rich liberals respond to problems affecting poor people by doing things that make those problems worse.

  • Another reason to like Uber

    What Do You Call a Tool to Help Uber Avoid Gov’t Stings? A Good Start. Uber uses a tool called “Greyball” to circumvent officials. It’s a tool that Uber says is designed to help it deny ride requests to people who violate their terms of service, disrupt the system, or threaten their drivers. They also have been using it to operate in places where government officials have been trying to shut them down.

    […]

    Uber used this tool to operate in Portland, Oregon, as regulators attempted to use sting operations to catch them and shut them down. As the story explains, this all bothered authorities because Uber was employing people and putting them to work outside of their purview… [Hit & Run]

    This is pretty old news now, but it’s another reason to prefer Uber over other ride sharing services: they were willing to do something to protect their drivers from corrupt and oppressive local governments who were paid off by the taxi cartels to attack them.

  • Questionable marketing decision

    Lyft Announces It Will Make All Rides Carbon Neutral. Lyft announced it will spend millions of dollars to make all its rides carbon neutral.

    […]

    The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it will pay for a range of environmentally beneficial projects to compensate for the emissions from the millions of car journeys it provides every week. The tactic, known as carbon offsets, is a way for Lyft to do something about climate change without changing its business model. [Slashdot]

    So Lyft is gambling that there are more prospective customers among religious fanatics who actually care that the company they get a ride from is buying indulgences than there are among sane people who don’t want to pay extra for a ride to pay for someone else’s religious beliefs. I’ll bet this makes Uber executives very happy.

  • Twitter’s new rules supposedly going into effect

    The Twitter Rules. You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. We will begin enforcing this rule around affiliation with such organizations on December 18, 2017. [Twitter.com]

    Supposedly this new Twitter rule will be going into effect today, with people who violate it having their accounts banned. However, this is obviously not going to happen. If it did, every account associated with any government would be banned, as would anyone affiliated with any government (including employees and businesses that do business with governments). Since this covers not just activity but statements, mainstream media sources such as the New York Times and CNN would also be banned.

    But of course this is Twitter, so they’ll actually just be banning people who aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic Social Justice Warriors, because anything that makes a pinko sad is literally violence.

  • Cops get away with murder yet again

    Arizona Cop Acquitted for Killing Man Crawling Down Hotel Hallway While Begging for His Life. Arizona jurors watched the video below, which shows former Mesa, Arizona, police officer Philip Mitchell Brailsford shooting and killing a man who was begging for his life and attempting to follow the officer’s orders to crawl down a hotel hallway.

    Yesterday, the jurors found Brailsford not guilty of second-degree murder and reckless manslaughter.

    The incident occurred in January 2016. Daniel Shaver apparently was showing off a pellet gun, and it was visible through the hotel room window. This prompted somebody to call to the hotel front desk, which prompted a call to the police. [Hit & Run]

    It’s perfectly legal to carry real guns either openly or concealed in Arizona, to say nothing of a pellet gun in a temporary residence. Of course, cops don’t care about the law.