Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
I’m reading — rereading, actually — the excellent book Isaac’s Storm, about the Galveston hurricane of 1900.
One hundred and fifteen years later this remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. By a long margin. The San Francisco earthquake? The Chicago fire? The Great Peshtigo fire?* The Johnstown flood? The eruption of Mt. St. Helens? Hurricane Katrina? Forget them. All small potatoes when compared with what befell the people of Galveston.
Cop shoots murder victim’s mother in the leg; misses dog. EU Parliament votes to protect Snowden against U.S. extradition. Reforming school policing. While The Atlantic fails to ask some basic questions, its heart is definitely in the right place. It’s all part of the school-to-prison pipeline. And good old “zero tolerance.” 🙂 Everything you need for household repairs. Cannabis fights liver cancer. I’m not sure why even some good, aware people continue to be surprised that there is no justice from the Department of Justice.
Amish man sues to buy firearms without photo ID. Those secretive, usually warrantless stingray units? Turns out they can record the content of phone calls; not just act as a locator. (H/T MJR) Liberalthink: We MUST have the $15/hour minimum wage even if it puts people out of work. The news just gets more dire for Obamacare’s race to the bottom. Kevin Wilmeth asks, “How cool is Marilyn Williams?”, who defended her home with a precision air rifle (aka “sniper rifle” to the media). I’m not sure how the term “social justice warriors” (SJW) came into such popular use. But…
Just now. 74 to 21. I posted about Orwell, Rand, and CISA last week. The data in question would come from private industry, which mines everything from credit card statements to prescription drug purchase records to target advertising and tweak product lines. Indeed, much of it is detailed financial and health information the government has never had access to in any form. The bill’s proponents said the data would be “anonymized”. Cisa would create a program at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through which corporations could share user data in bulk with several US government agencies. In exchange for…
It’s just talk so far. And European talk, at that. So take it FWIW. But if banks impose negative interest on customers, controls on withdrawals won’t be far behind. NSA-proof wallpaper? Faraday cages for all! (H/T Laird in comments) We must have common-sense sword control NOW! Fedjudge says DEA raids on legal dispensaries in California are against the law. The more news and studies that emerge about Obamacare, the more horrible that horrible program looks. (When companies can manage to get around federal regulations, this is the way humane and profitable health care gets done.) Peter Schiff writes an eloquent…
I really do. But sometimes the combination of Orwell and Rand becomes too obtrusive to bear. To wit: the CISA blowup. The gloriously bipartisan Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, sponsored by freedom-loving Republican Richard Burr (NC) and — guess who? — our old friend Dianne Feinstein (D-Control Freak) would “allow” tech companies to “voluntarily” share information about their customers with the federal “security” apparatus “so it can be analyzed for signs of lawbreaking – be it computer related or not.” Companies that “volunteer” would be given legal immunity against angry customers. But as the linked article in The Register…
“Mommy, am I going to die?” Cop shoots four-year-old after he showed up to “help” her injured mother. Clearly all in a day’s work for this callous dude. Missed the family dog, though. Drone defense on a budget. “I want one,” says MJR, who sent the link. White House aide shoots at her cop boyfriend. Much has been made of the fact that this babe is a “special” assistant to Obama, but apparently in WH parlance, “special” is as in “rides the short bus.” Barfetta Barvetta Singletary. Don’t ever ask that woman out on a date. Per Shel in comments,…
Still working on that blogosaurus. So close to done. But I’m helping to put up siding today and I’m not sure how long or steadily I’ll be required as a construction minion. So here are some links for ya. Oregon legalizes pot and nobody cares. Good one from Kevin Wilmeth. “Outsourcing Empathy: What Could Go Wrong?” (Was saving this to link from my blogosaurus, but what the heck.) Courtroom DNA evidence: it goes the way of so much other prosecutorial “science.” (H/T S.) “Why we should just nationalize Facebook.” Um … no, “we” shouldn’t. Even if “we” had the authority…
Even a gun controller calls Obama’s response to the UCC campus killings a tantrum and correctly states that nothing Our Glorious Leader wants will end violence. Here’s a pretty good fisk of Hillary Clinton’s latest opportunistic anti-gun knee-jerking, too. Again, it’s by somebody who’s hardly a pro-gun purist. Here’s another good one. I’d expect this sort of thing in over-regulated, over-zoned cities, but when rural Colorado tries to keep people from living off-grid on their own land, we’re truly in a pickle. (Via jed in comments) Have you ever complained about how some arbitrary credit score governs too much of…
Before I get to the linkage — good luck to all you on the east coast, especially from the Carolinas to New Jersey. Keep to high ground and away from the surf and flooded roads, please. We need to keep you guys around! The Freeholder was caught in some of the early storm action and has some thoughts on bugging out when you’re … already out. Four of the best comments on the Oregon campus shooting. Google has apparently realized that “don’t be evil” long ago quit applying to them anyhow. The human quest to find our place in the…
