This just in
““The same government that has repeatedly violated privacy laws and illegally collects data from all it's citizens, is lecturing the CEO of a company about violating privacy laws and collecting data from all their users.””Read More...
Any unarmed people
““Any unarmed people are slaves or subject to slavery at any given moment.””Read More...
— Huey P. Newton
Share a photograph
“Marine's wife finds way to include deployed husband in touching Christmas card”
Read More...Anything at all
And yes, it influenced me. It's probably my favorite Orwell quote.
“I am an American and a Patriot”
““I am an American and a Patriot. I am my country's keeper. The President and Congress report to me. And so - I will stay informed and involved. Ignorance, apathy, and complacency are my enemy. I will make my voice heard and not just at election time. Silence is the same as consent in the face of oppression. I can make a difference. I matter.I am an American and a Patriot.””
Read More...
☆ Circus of hate
When I first read about Charlottesville, the first thing that flashed in my head was an image of an ex-military type grabbing an antifa and a neo-Nazi by the necks and shaking. There should be an adult right there disciplining the misbehaving children. Except we were told that the antifa were fighting the good fight. We kept hearing about how terrible the neo-Nazis were and how they should be forcibly removed. We didn't hear about how bad the antifa were. And when some of us pointed out that antifa also attacked people, well, that rated an attack right there. “False equivalence!” we heard. Nazi ideas were so very much worse than anything antifa said.
Apparently no one could possibly oppose the neo-Nazi violence and the antifa violence at the same time. If you did criticize the antifa, you were lumped in with the Nazis. Not because of what you said or did, but because you didn't support the struggle against the forces of racism and fascism and marginalization. The antifa were brave despite the institutionalized oppression they dared to fight in the name of victimized people everywhere.
Except the antifa have heavy political support. Some of their funding comes from Soros organizations. Some politicos look the other way when it comes to illegal antifa activities.
Charlottesville specifically looked like a setup. The antifa heavily outnumbered the neo-Nazis. The governor and the mayor didn't seem interested in keeping the peace. Police weren't acting like police. Some officers even said they were ordered to stand down.
It was a Roman circus, a spectacle to distract the crowds. The neo-Nazis looked scary, but the noble antifa would soon dispatch them. Once again the heroic forces of good would triumph over the unenlightened. Blood would flow into the sands.Yep, it was almost as if it were scripted. A myth for the ages.
Grand spectacle.
For your amusement.
With clearly defined winners and losers.
Morality would win, even if it meant breaking the law in the name of the greater good.
Nahh, I thought. You're imagining things. Even you couldn't be that paranoid and cynical. That would require a level of political manipulation unheard of since…
Since the last presidential election. Since the ongoing media campaign against Donald Trump. Since the astroturf effort to convince Congress that campaign finance was a grassroots demand for change. Since the climate change alarmists. Since the introduction of gender fluidity in public school curriculum.
Well, blistering blue blazes.
I had bought into it. While I had focused on saying that violent protest was unacceptable, the media had established the new Utterly Despicable Villains in American myth.
And if you dared hesitate too long before denouncing the Utterly Despicable Villains and all they stood for, well then, you lost your Moral Authority™ to speak at all.
And like a fool, I walked into it with my eyes wide open.
I had been had.
I'm sure there was no central office planning it. Just a bunch of like-minded opportunists who saw a chance to prove that the American Dream was fatally flawed. That the song of freedom draws on an Unpardonable Sin that persisted to this very day! That the American flag was eternally stained with the blood of the oppressed. There could be no hope in liberty. It was all a lie.
Something stinks.
We still have time to fix this. We can't let this deceit become the prevailing myth.
America still does have a Dream. We can make a better World for ourselves and our children. Sure, we'll make mistakes, but we'll fix them. Nothing is carved in stone except the promise of a better tomorrow if we try hard enough. Our sins and our mistakes are our own. Recognizing those mistakes, fixing those mistakes, learning from those mistakes, that's the foundation we need. We're not locked into the sins of our fathers. Blame does not lead to the future.
Hope and liberty do. Take yours, if you dare.
Fake news from the Washington Post
”Deep State Leaks Highly Classified Info to Washington Post to Smear President Trump”
“Trump: I had ‘absolute right’ to share ‘facts’ with Russia”
Read More...Government shutdown
I know what CNN is saying.
But realistically, why would a government shutdown be bad?
We know what Milton Friedman said.
If your local grocery store closed because they forgot to order, you'd go somewhere else. If the plumber you called couldn't come because his truck got repossessed, you'd call another. If your favorite coffee place had no one to work and was closed, well, there are other options.
But with government services, there aren't options.
Government doesn't like competition.
Every year, statists tell you How Important Government Is and how the "other party" is about to screw up your life.
It's political theater.
There isn't even a budget.
The last time there was officially a budget was 2009. But it was pretty much a budget in name only. Even if there was a budget, it would be several thousand pages long, incredibly detailed on some things and disturbingly vague on others. It's meant to be abused. I don't want to examine the Federal budget process here but I will tell you that even if Congress makes no changes, each agency gets the same amount it had the previous year plus an automatic increase. This is the so-called discretionary spending.
That's right. It takes an act of Congress to keep spending at the same level it was in the previous year.
The default setting is more government and more spending.
Then there is the mandatory spending which isn't part of the budget process. Congress may revisit the rules every few years on mandatory spending qualifications, but it usually rolls along on it's own. Mandatory spending is about two-thirds of the budget, Social Security alone is about one-third.
And I haven't even gotten to earmarks.
Government doesn't like competition so it locks private interests out of the services it provides. It manipulates you into blaming the other party so it can tax and spend more of your money. And it expects thanks for it's hard work.
Government shutdown.
This would be a bad thing how?
Still think libertarians are paranoid?
The question isn't if the NSA watches everything. We now know that they do.
Libertarians have been watching this for a very long time. Ever since the Inslaw affair we've known. Rumors have been flying since the days of minicomputers that certain machines were modified to report to the various spy agencies.
So let's talk about the story headlines from yesterday.
Donald Trump and his associates were under surveillance, but not directly. They were incidentally surveilled because of active surveillance on other parties. This may have been taking place for up to a year before the 2016 election. At least one source dates the surveillance to 2011.
This is where we start getting into legalisms. Because Trump and associates were not the direct targets of surveillance, intelligence officials say that Trump was not under surveillance. Technically true and absolutely false.
By American law, the names of American citizens are "masked" in surveillance reports unless they too are under investigation. Or unless an authorized government official orders the names unmasked.
So the NSA spies on everyone but Americans are supposedly shielded and protected by a legal process. Even there the names would have only have been unmasked for that one official. Except President Obama had recently changed the regulations, some intelligence would be shared among 16 different agencies.
Washington is a political town, gossip rivals actual intelligence as trade goods. While it was illegal to share those unmasked names with those who did not have clearence, that's also business as usual.
And so far no one is asking what Hillary Clinton and her associates were doing for the same time period.
So the NSA spies on everyone on the planet.
One government official can unmask the American names in intelligence reports, even if those Americans had done nothing wrong.
And it all could be denied because the denial is technically true while absolutely false.
Your government. Working to protect you.
I'm going to tell you some secrets now.
The NSA can't monitor everything on the internet. They may record it to batch examine later, but there's no computing power that can watch everything in real time.
Despite all the enhanced algorithms, despite the focus on encrypted data streams, and despite the probability matrices, the system is half blind.
I don't remember which one, but when I was a teenager I read a novel about WWII spies. There was a bookstore in the novel, and every couple of hours a certain book was moved. From the noon position to the two o'clock, from the two to the four o'clock, and so on. The first thing that the spy ring did was check the window, if the book wasn't in the right spot they knew their cover had been blown.
So imagine a Facebook page and the picture on the top is a border collie. One day the picture changes to a pinto mare. Two hours later something blows up.
Imagine a reddit about French cooking. One day a newbie signs in and asks about substitutes for heavy cream. The next day a newspaper gets a tip about the L.A. water supply being contaminated.
Do you see?
All this spying can't reliably predict what might happen except by blind chance. It's amazingly good about putting all the pieces together after.
All these intelligence agencies are subject to political corruption.
So, does all this spying really protect you?
