Trump's Totalitarian Trifecta - TLF084

Published: March 13, 2018, 11 p.m.

Trump has gone full-on authoritarian in a trifecta of comments and actions. Are you surprised? What's in the News with stories on square root guns, banks scared of crypto, coward cops update, lost money, and US arming ISIS. Also, an Ancap Apps update on why I no longer recommend Tor Browser. Finally, a #NHItsLikeThisToo with some news on liberty in the state! This episode is brought to you by ZenCash, a cryptocurrency that infuses privacy, anonymity, and security done right. Also brought to you by NordVPN, the fastest, easiest to use service to protect your online presence that I've ever seen.

WHAT’S RUSTLING MY JIMMIES

Holy shit, guys. I pay so little attention to national politics these days because it has so little effect on me here in New Hampshire, but I could not miss Trumps latest ridiculous totalitarian comments. And, this is the fucking guy that some libertarians, including one of my favorite libertarians, Walter Block, actually supported!

WHAT'S IN THE NEWS

In no tolerance, no brains news, a discussion among students at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, La., about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the student’s homes.

In no shit Sherlock news, Bank of America, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, admitted in an annual report that cryptocurrencies are a threat to its business model.

In Coward Cops update news, shortly after I wrote the Jimmies segment in last week's episode about the coward resource officer who hid like a little baby during the school shooting in Florida, it was released that three other Broward County Sheriff's deputies were also outside the school and had not entered.

And, what's worse is that the Miramar Police Department has suspended two officers from their SWAT team for responding to the school shooting without having orders to do so.

In it's only stolen money news, an annual financial report released by the US Treasury this month showed the government lost over a trillion dollars in 2017. That is more than Australia’s entire Gross Domestic Product.

In old news news, an extensive field investigation into the origins of Isis’ weaponry in Syria and Iraq has found that weapons supplied by the US and Saudi Arabia to the Syrian opposition often ended up in the jihadis’ hands, enhancing the “quantity and quality” of their armaments.

ANCAP APPS

In an Ancap App update, a piece of software I've recommended in the past has now been moved off of my recommended list. The Tor Project hailed as a bulwark against the encroaching surveillance state, has received funding from a US government agency and cooperates with intelligence agencies.

Tor, the free software which enables anonymous communication over the internet, is a “privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting,” claims journalist Yasha Levine, who obtained 2,500 pages of correspondence about the project via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

NEW HAMPSHIRE, IT'S LIKE THIS TOO

There have been some interesting updates in New Hampshire that give us even more freedoms in the state.

First of all, the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed a bill banning the use of “sobriety checkpoints” by state and local police departments, following long-running criticism that the practice is unconstitutional and ineffective.

Secondly, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to kill a bill that would have increased oversight for homeschool students. House bill 1263 would have required that homeschool students have their annual assessments reviewed by either state officials or nonpublic school principals.