State Department attacks First and Second Amendments

Defense Distributed was instructed to take down the CAD files for the Liberator, a single-shot 3D printed plastic gun, by the US State Department:

Defense Distributed, the Texas-based nonprofit that wants to empower people to 3D print their own guns, has hit a bit of a legal snag. According to founder Cody Wilson, DEFCAD, the open source weapon-printing project powered by Defense Distributed, received a letter (embedded below) from the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance, telling him to remove the blueprints of the Liberator, his 3D printed gun, from the web so that they may be reviewed by the department.

The group’s website currently has a red banner appended to the top that reads, “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls.  Until further notice, the United States government claims control of the information.”

“We got an official letter from the Secretary of State, telling me who they were, what their authority was under U.S. law and telling me they want to review these files to see if they’re class one munitions,” Mr. Wilson told Betabeat by phone. “That includes blueprints.”

In the letter, embedded below, the State Department says that Defense Distributed may have released data that is controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation without getting prior authorization. This would put the company’s actions in conflict with–oh boy–the Arms Export Control Act.

“Please note that disclosing (including oral or visual disclosure) or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad, is considered an export,” reads the letter. It also says that until Defense Distributed has received the legal all-clear, the company “should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled. This means that all such data should be removed from public access immediately.”

Keep in mind, this is the very same State Department that sends tanks, jet fighters, and missiles to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.  But the freely distributed plans for a single-shot plastic pistol is somehow considered sufficient cause to justify violating the First and Second Amendments.

Forget Pirate Bay and the thousands of torrents that are already distributing the files, given that the zipfile is only 2 megs, it seems to me that a few patriotic virus programmers should be able to see that they are rapidly distributed to millions of computers around the world regardless of what the State Department has to say about it.

And if they think they’ve got problems now, just wait until home genetics become as accessible as 3D-printed firearms.  It will bring back the old fears of witchcraft; I can imagine that the unauthorized possession of another individual’s hair and nail clippings, or at least a government employee’s, will becomes a crime.

Diversity is good for you

Except when it results in a lethal post-op infection.  But it’s not as if surgeons and nurses really need to wash their hands or anything before poking around in your body, right?  More lunacy out of Ukistan:

The UK Department of Health recently announced that it would loosen hygiene rules for Muslim doctors and nurses. From now on, Muslim female staff will not need to wash their hands before procedures as it compromises their modesty. Instead, they will have the admittedly less sanitary option of wearing disposable plastic over-sleeves.

Acknowledging the danger of microbes and death, a Department of Health spokesman said, “The guidance is intended to . . . balance infection control measures with cultural beliefs.” But, believe it or not, from a culturist perspective, the death of some patients is not the main cause for concern that this policy elicits.

The most dangerous problem is that this policy encodes multiculturalism not culturism. Whereas culturism acknowledges that England has a majority culture to protect and promote, this multiculturalist policy implicitly says that England has no core culture. It says that the nation can be whatever pressure groups decide it is. It, therefore, officially ends the dominance of English culture in England.

I suppose we can be grateful that the devotees of the Diversity Gospel are not arguing for the embrace of a culture that is morally opposed to showers, toilet paper, and indoor plumbing.  Yet.

At this rate, John Piper’s killer god won’t even need to send out his tornadoes of doom anymore.

Adios ProFootballTalk

I used to like ProFootballTalk when it was actually about what happened around the NFL.  But I found myself reading it less and less often last season even though I was still actively following the NFL.  Now that it’s an advocacy site primarily concerned with what Tim Tebow SHOULD do, and what the NFL SHOULD do, and what team owners SHOULD do I can’t even stand reading it anymore.  It’s just one stupid left-liberal crusade after another; the final straw for me was the campaign to save Chris Kluwe’s job because he supports homogamy.  Followed, a few days later, by the continued campaign to change the Redskins name; a name that troubles no one, including the overwhelming number of American Indians, outside the media.

Now, I actually liked Kluwe.  But he was bad last year.  Very bad.  When the Vikings needed a big kick, he shanked it.  When they needed him to drop it inside the five, he booted it out of the end zone.  And the hypocrisy PFT showed in distinguishing how they covered Kluwe’s comments about homosexuals (isn’t it wonderful that he speaks out on such an important issue) compared to the way they covered Chris Culliver’s (the NFL should discipline him and the 49ers should consider cutting him), was simply outrageous.

So, besides Football Outsiders, what is the best NFL site to replace it on the sidebar?

He ain’t gonna play Quds City

I suspect there are more than a few secular Jewish science fetishists who are going to feel more than a little conflicted about this announcement by Cambridge University:

Stephen Hawking has pulled out of a high-profile conference to be held in Jerusalem in June to support an academic boycott of Israel, conference organisers and the university said on Wednesday.

The academic and cultural boycott, organised by international activists to protest against Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, is a heated and contentious issue; having the renowned physicist and cosmologist join it is likely to help the anti-Israel campaigners significantly.

“Never has a scientist of this stature boycotted Israel,” said Yigal Palmor, the spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

It’s always entertaining to watch the Left devour itself, as it always does in the end.  It should be interesting to see how some of those who celebrated the boycott of Sun City due to South African apartheid attempt to decry the boycott of al-Quds due to the Israeli version.  And it should be informative to see if this affects the subsequent media coverage of Hawking, which hitherto can only be described as “uniformly fawning”.

Now, unlike the boycotters, I support Israel as a Jewish state.  Of course, I also support Germany as a German state, Nigeria as a Fulani/Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo state, and England as an English state. Which raises an interesting line of questions to direct towards those who proclaim the Diversity Gospel, beginning with this: do you support or oppose Israeli apartheid in the interest of maintaining its existence as a Jewish state?

And it raises another question. Can Stephen Hawking sing?

The Diversity Gospel

WATYF pointed out one of the many problems with John Piper’s claim of a Biblical mandate for diversity:

I think the most logical argument against “diversity” is found in Paul’s admonishment in Romans 12 where he says, “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men”. He tells us that we should act in such a way that would promote peace. Well, we know from several studies that “diversity” leads to a LACK of peace amongst men. We know that it leads to less trust, more animosity, and in many cases of very high levels of diversity, outright violence. If we truly want to live at peace “as far as it concerns us”, we would seek to promote peace between us and others, and that would be by preferring a homogenous society.

The real question is, “Why should we promote diversity?” According to what Biblical standard should it be pursued? If we can’t come up with one (which, as far as I know, there isn’t one in scripture), then we should consider just accepting the simple facts of the matter and doing what’s prudent.

There is another, related argument, which is Matthew 7:15-16.  “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?”

Consider the present fruits of diversity in Nigeria:

A fresh load of battered corpses arrived, 29 of them in a routine
delivery by the Nigerian military to the hospital morgue here. 
Unexpectedly, three bodies started moving.
“They were not properly shot,” recalled a security official here. “I had
to call the J.T.F.” — the military’s joint task force — “and they
gunned them down.” 
It was a rare oversight. Large numbers of bodies, sometimes more than 60
in a day, are being brought by the Nigerian military to the state
hospital, according to government, health and security officials,
hospital workers and human rights groups — the product of the military’s
brutal war against radical Islamists rooted in this northern city. 
The corpses were those of young men arrested in neighborhood sweeps by
the military and taken to a barracks nearby. Accused, often on flimsy or
no evidence, of being members or supporters of Boko Haram — the
Islamist militant group waging a bloody insurgency against the Nigerian
state — the detainees are beaten, starved, shot and even suffocated to
death, say the officials, employees and witnesses. 
Then, soldiers bring the bodies to the hospital and dump them at the
morgue, officials and workers say. The flood is so consistent that the
small morgue at the edge of the hospital grounds often has no room, with
corpses flung by the military in the sand around it. Residents say they
sometimes have to flee the neighborhood because of the fierce smell of
rotting flesh. 
From the outset of the battle between Boko Haram and the military, a dirty war on both sides that has cost nearly 4,000 lives since erupting in this city in 2009, security forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings and broad, often indiscriminate roundups of suspects and sympathizers in residential areas. 

That’s precisely what history teaches us diversity brings.  Social science, too, has very reluctantly concluded that diversity is a powerful societal negative:

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as “hunkering down,” avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.

Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:

  •     Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
  •     Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
  •     Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
  •     Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
  •     Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
  •     Less likelihood of working on a community project.
  •     Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
  •     Fewer close friends and confidants.
  •     Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life. 

So, there is no Biblical justification for Piper’s invented mandate and a clear connection to massive, wide-scale violence as well as a whole host of observable evils.  Moreover, Piper’s teachings on the matter are contrary to that of his father and consistent with the beliefs of a broad spectrum of evil individuals from the African slave traders to the secular globalists.  It should be readily apparent at this point that “Christian Diversity” is a false and ascriptural teaching.

Moreover, in the discussion it was easy to see how The Responsible Puppet immediately resorted to evasive dishonesty in defense of his “Christian” position.  His claims to ignorance were remarkable given his insistence that diversity must be intrinsically good; a nonsensical position given his claims to know nothing about racial differences.  It took repeated questions before he would even admit to the utterly obvious fact that European civilization is superior to other civilizations, so great is his worldly fear of admitting that there are substantive differences between different human sub-species.  He openly declared that he had to be very careful about saying anything about the subject.  “What I’m doing is answering the question very carefully, which I think
is warranted in this situation. And I’ll continue being careful….”

This, too, is another relevant argument.  Why is such care warranted?  Why must he be so careful?  Why is he afraid? Something gave him that spirit of fear.  And yet, Timothy 1:7 says: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

The Diversity Gospel asserted by Piper and exhibited by the Puppet is fearful, weak, and weak-minded.  And therefore we know it does not come from God.

The conspiracy theorists were right

As I have repeatedly written, the Conspiracy Theory of History is the only one that stands up to critical analysis.  Not only that, but the closer you look, the more readily apparent the various conspiracies become.  Matt Taibbi, who has been doggedly investigating the world of high finance since the 2008 crisis began, finally throws up his hands and admits what was always readily apparent to the sufficiently logical:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of
the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you
an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but
your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this
out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest
banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three –
and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”)
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this
scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks –
including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal
Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global
interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive
manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were
caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year,
to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial
acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix
suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and
price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall
Street culture.

Nor should it come as any surprise that the chief role of government in all of this has been to enable and defend the conspirators.

“But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of
March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been
so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against
the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’
incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money
because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever
thinking the banks were competing in the first place.”

The reason all of this information is finally coming out is because the system is breaking down.  The scale of the efforts required to attempt salvaging the players precludes any ability to keep everything behind the veil of genteel respectability while the straightforward demands for access to taxpayer funds and bank deposits prevents any attempt to confuse matters by appealing to their complexity. 

Why big corporations welcome regulation

Karl Denninger explains the rationale underlying the unholy alliance between big business and big government in explaining why Amazon is welcoming online sales taxes:

Amazon, for its part, has engaged in this sort of screwball deal with its distribution centers in various states, arguing that this doesn’t give them nexus and thus they don’t need to collect tax.  When threatened they reply with the threat to close the center and fire the employees (who are residents of the subject state) or sue, which effectively stalls the clock.  This set of tactics has “worked”, because Amazon (and similar firms) are huge corporations with internal legal staffing that can fight these things and, at worst, delay the outcome driving up the costs for the states and there is virtually no chance that the company or its officers will be indicted by the states in question for tax evasion, as is the case for a small business.  The problem is that as these cases have gone on over the years it has become increasingly apparent that Amazon and these other retailers will eventually lose and be forced to both pay and collect the taxes and might be exposed to penalties, interest and retroactive tax billing for willful evasive activity.

So what Amazon appears to have decided to do is play screw the other guy by forcing them into having a “virtual” nexus that otherwise would not exist!  This is then sold to people as “fairness.”

It is nothing of the sort.

Amazon could choose to have distribution centers only in no-sales-tax states.  It could then tell the rest of the states to “pound sand.”  There is a long-standing US Supreme Court decision (“Quill”) that they can stand behind if they take this approach and are without question in the clear in doing so.  But by doing so Amazon would have a serious problem because transit time and cost become a big problem, and since everyone wants everything right now, shipping cost is a huge expense and getting larger, and Amazon sees both cutting that cost and increasing speed of delivery as a competitive advantage (it is) they want to open distribution centers close to the people who shop.

But that leaves them with a problem because to do that they create nexus, and with nexus comes compliance costs.  Since they’ve become increasingly unable to avoid this and meet their business goals they now seek to use the jackboot of government to shove it down their competitors’ throats!

Obviously, Amazon would prefer no sales taxes.  But if they’re going to have to pay them anyhow, then it is much better for Amazon if everyone, including their competitors, is forced to deal with the compliance costs that Amazon is much better suited to pay given its size.  Large corporations can more easily afford to comply with regulations, as the employees required to do so make up a much smaller percentage of their total workforce.

This is a relatively harmless example, but it should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of pretending that big business is the enemy of big government.

Mailvox: the shortest genre

Phony is convinced he has evidence lending support to the myth of the Woman Warrior:

“The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous. “

Nusaybah bint Ka’ab.

Dipshit.

Very well, let’s examine the military career of this famous female warrior, which is recounted on Wikipedia:

“Initially, Nusaybah was attending the Battle of Uhud like other women, and her intention was to bring water to the soldiers, while her husband and two sons fought. But after the Muslim archers disobeyed their orders and began deserting their high ground believing victory was at hand, the tide of the battle changed, and it appeared that defeat was imminent. When this occurred, Nusaybah entered the battle, carrying a sword and shield.

“She shielded Muhammad from the arrows of the enemy, and received several wounds while fighting.

“When a horse-mounted Quraish attacked her, she pulled on the horse’s bridle and plunged her sword into its neck, toppling the horse on top of its rider. Witnessing this, Muhammad then yelled for Abdullah to help his mother and the pair dispatched the struggling rider. The pair then circled around Muhammad, throwing stones at the advancing Quraish troops, until Muhammad noticed Nusaybah’s wounds and ordered her son to bandage them, and praised their heroism. Abdullah was wounded himself, as a Quraish cut across his left arm, and Nusaybah treated him and told him not to lose courage. Picking her sword back up, she was complimented by Muhammad on her own courage and he pointed out the man who had wounded her son. Advancing to him, she cut his leg off with a blow of her sword, and he fell to the ground where he was killed by other fighters.

“Nusaybah’s twelfth wound, cut across her shoulder by a Quraish named Ibn Qumiah, left her unconscious on the battlefield. When she awoke after the battle, her first inquiry was whether Muhammad had survived.”

So, this most exemplary of all women warriors managed to unhorse one rider and cripple one man in a tribal skirmish while trying to defend her family in a desperate situation.  If we are to take Nusaybah as sufficient justification for the plethora of female Conans that presently litter bad fantasy, we should also believe that it is perfectly realistic to have your average suburban mother throwing around Chevrolets.  This is akin to asserting that because a middle-aged woman shot a home intruder once, it’s perfectly realistic to write about female SEALs.

And note that this fearsome woman warrior took no less than twelve wounds, very nearly got herself killed, and never took arms again.  Courageous? Indubitably. A warrior? No. Not in the slightest. If this is the historical basis for women warriors, the genre is going to consist of a series of very slim volumes indeed.

Has Phony ever hit a woman?  Has he ever seen a woman’s head snap back, seen her knees buckle, and stood over her as she lays crumpled on the floor?  Has he ever bloodied a woman’s nose or blackened a woman’s eyes?  Has he ever toyed with a woman desperately trying to lay a hand on him before stepping forward and flattening her with a single jab?

I have. It wasn’t even amusing because it was so easy.  I had a harder time fighting a well-trained eleven year old boy.  I wasn’t even throwing any combinations or throwing my strikes at more than half-force, and that was still enough to lay them out. If you are a man who hasn’t ever hit a woman in the face, or if you are a woman who hasn’t ever been beaten up by a man, your opinion on the subject is guaranteed to be irrelevant. The cumulative difference in speed, strength, and mass simply has to be experienced to be believed.

I sincerely encourage anyone who wishes to write about women warriors to visit a full-contact dojo and ask to spar a few rounds with the opposite sex.  They will accommodate you and it will be an eye-opening experience.

Halfway to reality

Emily Asher-Perrin fails to think the matter all the way through:

Never mind the chainmail bikinis—what about those awkward breast plates
in armor that we see frequently in fantasy artwork and at the Ren Faire?
Whenever women complain about this convention, they are usually shot
down for trying to erase women’s true bodies, for insisting that women
make themselves more “male” in order to appear strong and capable…. Let’s begin by stating the simple purpose of plate armor—to deflect
blows from weaponry. Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword,
your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body,
away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact
increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward
the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious
armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing
you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough
blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying
your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death
trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at
some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

 That’s not to say that female armor cannot be shaped differently—in fact, it should be to account for differences in shoulder-to-waist ratios and more, as the military recently discovered. Some films decide to provide women with a shelf of sorts in the chest region and that choice, if well-designed, can be flattering as well as functional. But it still isn’t logical or necessary by a longshot.

So if you want to wear some sculpted armor to the Ren Faire because you feel fabulous-looking in it, go forth and have fun! But if you’re drawing lady soldiers, or creating female characters who are depicted as actual warriors, please err on the side of reality when designing their armor. Science says your boob plates are killing the women you hoped they would protect.

Of course, if we’re going to start bringing reality into swords and sorcery, we should probably also take into consideration the fact that even a large, well-trained woman couldn’t last thirty seconds against the average warrior.  The correct and realistic portrayal of an armor-era woman is either one who is dead and buried after her brief foray into warrior womanhood or at home, caring for the children that she started bearing in her teens.

Awkward and combat-inefficient breast plates are the least of the problem. What it is time to retire is the absurd and ahistorical “warrior woman”.

The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous.  If you doubt me, just hand a sword to the closest woman the next time you’re in a medieval museum.

The threeway from Hell

What are the chances of any quality games actually coming out of a Lucas-Disney-EA alliance?  One in fifty quadrillion against?  One in an Oom Quatbog shreksillion against?

Electronic Arts announced today it has landed an exclusive multi-year agreement to develop and publish games based on Lucasfilms’ Star Wars universe. EA said the it will create and publish Star Wars games for a ‘core gaming audience’ across ‘all popular platforms’ and genres. The EA studios creating those ‘core’ Star Wars games are Battlefield developer DICE, Dead Space developer Visceral Games and Mass Effect house BioWare.

The developers sound all right, more than all right, actually, but that doesn’t mean these EA games are going to be seeing the A-teams from those developers.  In fact, given the way that the top dogs often move onto new projects after designing and/or developing their big hit, I would be surprised if the projects were even seeing B-teams assigned to them.