First thing: Many thanks to K. and M. whose PayPal donations made my day. And — I don’t know whom to thank for this because Amazon isn’t yet telling — but I see apricots in my future. 🙂 I’ve had too few apricots in my recent past — and one can never have too many of the little beauties in one’s future. Now on with the ranting, raving, giggling, snorting, news reporting, and other distractions of the day: Did you hear the one about the anti-gun legislator who shot an intruder in his home? (Yes, another one of those hypocritical…
Category: Government
Government evils — but I repeat myself
This hasn’t been verified. Could the FBI really put a backdoor into an open-source operating system — and have it go unnoticed for 10 years? Seems dubious. Isn’t a major point of open-source that thousands of geeks can freely examine the code to find and correct bugs, bad coding — and backdoors? In any case, hats off to Theo de Raadt for immediately taking the accusation public. As the creator of OpenBSD, he has as much to lose as anybody. But he’s obviously got a boatload of integrity, too. “A fresh Gallup Poll released this morning reveals that somehow 13%…
Uh oh. The Fibbies have done it again. And the R-party will, too. Of course. But you’ve gotta admit, the rapidity with which they tap-dance around their own alleged principles is dazzling. Now that’s a headline. “Finding My Spending Identity. Because New Years is coming up and a lot of us are thinking about that sort of thing. More zero-intelligence school policy on guns. This time the victim is an honor-roll girl. But this time the place is … urk! — Montana??? (Tip o’ hat to PT.) No surprise. All the serious thinking about Assange and WikiLeaks (and “CyberWar I”)…
Yesterday, we had news of deeper, more difficult-to-foil privacy attacks on our computers. Well, today those very same attackers bring us more honorable news. Yesterday, I also linked to the WikiLeaks donation page and suggested this might be a good time to send money to those lone warriors battling government secrecy. Alas, WikiLeaks.org is no more. Continuing attacks against the site forced it out of existence. BUT. The site came back to life. It’s now at WikiLeaks.ch in Switzerland. Here’s the IP address in case the domain name is killed once again: http://213.251.145.96/. And here’s that donation page again, which…
Creepy marketers want to fingerprint your computer. But don’t worry; Your Government will protect you. Fifty-one percent of polled voters seem woefully misinformed. Or is it 72 percent? So hard to keep track, these days. This would be a good time to donate to WikiLeaks. There are a number of ways — including ones that would protect your privacy from the ignorami who are shouting “Treason!” “Terrorists!” and “Killers!” The TSA is not only conditioning children to accept molestation. But egads, it’s doing it using the same tactics non-government molesters do. Nine trllion in “emergency loans” by the Fed??? Other…
Tip o’ hat and thanks for the laugh to A.G. (and Winston, I think you’ll appreciate the last one. 🙂 )
Read this shocker in a “Mike Rogers column this morning: We wrapped the packages and took them to the post office to send to the USA this morning. Alas, while at the post office, we were told that the US Department of Homeland Security has stated that there can be no more mailing of packages that weigh over 1 pound unless we can provide the Social Security number of the recipient. Mike was trying to mail gifts from Tokyo to Arizona. Unable to get a simple gift into the U.S., he compared our country to North Korea or Japan in…
Snowed yesterday. And again today. Between snows, it veered around between rain, freezing rain, sleet and whatnot. You folks in Minnesota, Colorado, or even Oklahoma might wonder why that’s news in late November. But this is in the coastal lowlands of the dreary-but-ever-moderate NorthWET. Snow here usually comes in December or later, if at all. And though it may fall heavily at 8:00 a.m., it’s melted by noon. This snow looks set to stay. The forecasters all said we’re headed into a wet, cold winter thanks to a La Nina pattern. Global warming, where are you when we need you?…
Just going through the motions. Even more moronic than we thought. (Tip o’ hat to Joel and Jim B.) But they sure do seem to enjoy their jobs. Man lets house go into foreclosure over $25 fee. Cutting off face to spite nose? Or method to his madness? Me, I think it’s clear he’s not doing it over the fee, but for the principle of the thing: because the bank did him wrong and now won’t even acknowledge him as a human being and a customer. Companion piece: Just when you thought you understood mortgage securitization. A few months ago,…
I didn’t know airports could fire the TSA and hire their own screeners. Did you? Apparently one of the poly-tick-ans who helped create The Sexual Assaulters is now urging airports to do so. Gotta love this, though: “When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees.” Because, you know. Stuff like that never happens. A heartwarming story. But more than that; a tale of complexity. And quiet individual initiative. This one’s just plain heartwarming. Also an example of dubious math. But what the heck.…