Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

Of course the terrorists used Google Earth. They also used boats, and ate at restaurants. Don’t even get me started about the fact that they breathed air and drank water.


Bruce Schneier
December 8, 2008
Mumbai Terrorists Used Google Earth, Boats, Food
[Apparently some people are making sounds about how bad it is that Google Earth exists. Essentially, because something can be used for evil purposes the “government should do something”. It’s the same mindset that has lead them to restricting knives (for all the good it has done) and banning fire extinguishers in the UK. It’s not guns, knives, or Google Earth that are the problem yet some people continue to push forward with their brain set to “11” on the insanity scale. As near as I can tell there are few explanations:



  1. The people “in charge” are unwilling to use rational thought when addressing the situation.
  2. The people “in charge” are unable to use rational thought when addressing the situation.
  3. The people “in charge” have ulterior motives for increasing government control of society.
  4. Some combination of the above.

Regardless of the pathology these people have no business receiving a government paycheck let alone making decisions that adversely affect the lives of millions of people.-Joe]

Quote of the day–Thomas Paine

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.


Thomas Paine
[Which is why every effort should be made to keep government at the smallest size necessary to accomplish its necessary and authorized functions.–Joe]

Quote of the day–William Earl Dungey

So, since I know how to use machine guns, automatic weapons, submachine guns, rifles, pistols, explosives and other such – like I know how to find the proper place and time to defecate so as not to upset the public nor my friends and family – I don’t need the regulations, laws and infringement on my rights to be armed and dangerous. I also don’t advocate destruction of my community, government nor world to make it my way – but then I do think there are more good people in the world than bad – but the bad ones tell lies, cheat and dishonor their ancestors for personal gain and general stupidity. I remain, armed and dangerous, but then that is all in my mind and not in yours, you never think about me – just the old man in the back of the room.


William Earl Dungey
December 6, 2008
One issue people, arise and think…. it matters

Franken and the “Recount”

This touches close to home for me, since our now WA state gubnuh “found” enough votes after recount after recount, to turn a loss into a victory.  Ann Coulter gives us more detail from the Minnesota senatorial race than you’ll find anywhere in the Old Media;



According to Michael Barone, an examination of King County [Washington State] records showed that nearly 2,000 more mail-in ballots had been “cast” in King County than had been requested.


I was immediately suspicious when WA state went to an all mail-in voting system.  Now I’m not suspicious– I know.



But Gregoire got to be governor — having done unusually well among the imaginary voters of King County.


The head of the Washington State Democratic Party orchestrating this ballot theft was Paul Berendt. Guess who is advising Al Franken on the Minnesota recount right now? That’s right: Paul Berendt.


Surprise, surprise.  We now have evidence of an interstate rent-a-cheat.  Coulter adds;



And, per usual, the Republicans clearly haven’t the vaguest notion what is about to hit them.


Clearly.  The Republicans are too busy trying to appear nice, and can’t be bothered with vague abstractions like the rule of law, or the state and federal Constitutions.  I never could, and can never refer to them as the Grand Old Party.  For now, it’s the Party of the Perpetually Clueless, or PPC.  The trouble with the clueless is that they never know they’re clueless, and cowards always have a perfectly good rationale for doing nothing.

Quote of the day–Richard K. Willard

Just as studies showing the dangers of prejudice and error in jury trials should not undermine a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights, neither should studies purporting to show the dangers of private gun ownership undermine law-abiding individuals’ Second Amendment rights.


Richard K. Willard
D.C. versus Heller–brief Amicus Curiae Of The Heartland Institute in support of respondent.

Unintended consequences of the TSA

Via Bruce Schneier:



They both say there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for.

“This is a laptop here, VCR here and it’s located in this area of the bag. Here’s the color of the bag. They give them all the information they need to know.”

“He was going through the bag like he was searching it? Yeah searching it.”

Sky Nguyen knows firsthand. He took this picture of a TSA screener with his camera phone after he saw the agent steal his iPod.

“You saw the Nano in here? Yeah inside here between the glove and palm.”


With 20/20 hindsight it makes perfect sense. With 10’s of thousands of low paid people having access to property you normally have locked you have a huge attack surface (please excuse the geek talk).


As Bruce said:



Someone should investigate the extent to which the TSA’s security measures facilitate crime.


TSA is a crime. It’s government searching without a warrant. It’s also nothing but A Security Theater.

It makes perfect sense

In formerly Great Britain they banned nearly all guns, they have essentially banned self defense, and they are talking about registering and banning knives. With that sort of mindset it follows perfectly well that they have banned fire extinguishers as well.


Via Ry.

The mocking of H-S Precision contest winner

Sebastian had a contest (which I intended to link to but never got around to in time) and the results are in. It is a very deserving entry. Congratulations Tim.

Quote of the day–Thomas W. Malone

The new information tools symbolized by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts.


For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew. In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.


Thomas W. Malone
Director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence
November 29, 2008
You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
[I am concerned that our shrinking privacy are just one component in an increasingly socialist and tyrannical world and the associated lowered standard of living.


Let me explain.


Capitalism was coincident with the greatest advancement in the human standard of living. I have to wonder if privacy is an essential part of capitalism and what the consequences of no privacy of association will be. If your business competition is friends with “big brother” any business deal you try to work on can be torpedoed. It won’t be the market that decides which company is the most successful. It will be who has the best connections to the watchers. And socialism apologists are all for government watching.


And certainly lack of privacy means a lack of freedom. Your ability to escape an abusive relationship or government will be severely impacted.


See also this QOTD.–Joe]

“Papers please” no longer needed

If you have a cell phone and it is turned on your cell phone company knows where it is within a few hundred yards. If the government wants this data from the provider it generally (emergency exemptions apparently exist) has to get a court order.


However, the FBI has the technology to trigger phones into giving up their serial numbers and their phone numbers. This does not require a court order! Currently they use a van to drive around town and try to find their target. But that doesn’t have to be the way they always do it. All they have to do is put this technology on major travel routes and in travel hubs and they can do a pretty good job of tracking a large proportion of the population. If they put up their own devices on most of cell towers around the country they can track every active cell phone in the country.


I write software for mobile phones for Microsoft and it is rare that a day goes by where we don’t talk about and implement privacy protections for the customer and now I find out the Federal Government is actively working to defeat us.

Quote of the day–Mahatma Gandhi

As I proceeded further and further with my inquiry into the atrocities that had been committed on the people, I came across tales of Government’s tyranny and the arbitrary despotism of it’s officers such as I was hardly prepared for, and they filled me with deep pain. What surprised me then, and what still continues to fill me with surprise, was the fact that a province that had furnished the largest number of soldiers to the British Government during the war, should have taken all these brutal excesses lying down.

 

Mathatma Gandhi
An autobiography. The story of my experiments with Truth. There are many versions but I have this one.
[H/T to Ry who has the background on another, more famous quote, from Gandhi. Gandhi is no stranger to my QOTD posts either:

–Joe]

Quote of the day–Timothy Lynch

A new generation of young people who have never heard of Ruby Ridge are now emerging from the public school system and are heading off to college and will thereafter begin their careers in business, education, journalism, government and other fields. This generation will find it hard to fathom that the federal government could have killed a boy and an unarmed woman and then tried to deceive everyone about what had actually occurred and, in some instances, rationalize what did occur. That is why it is important to remember Ruby Ridge. Someone needs to remind the young people (and everyone else) that it really did happen — and that it will happen again if the government is not kept on a short leash. No one will learn about the incident when they tour the FBI facility in Washington. It goes unmentioned for some reason.


Timothy Lynch
August 21, 2002
Remember Ruby Ridge
[Read the whole thing if you don’t understand why we are outraged.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

Ephemeral conversation is dying.


Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn’t just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.


We can’t turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay and even our voice conversations are threatened. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. Laws requiring ISPs to store e-mails and other personal communications are exactly what we don’t need.


Rules pertaining to government need to be different, because of the power differential. Subjecting the president’s communications to eventual public review increases liberty because it reduces the government’s power with respect to the people. Subjecting our communications to government review decreases liberty because it reduces our power with respect to the government. The president, as well as other members of government, need some ability to converse ephemerally — just as they’re allowed to have unrecorded meetings and phone calls — but more of their actions need to be subject to public scrutiny. But laws can only go so far. Law or no law, when something is made public it’s too late. And many of us like having complete records of all our e-mail at our fingertips; it’s like our offline brains.


In the end, this is cultural.


The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.


When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he’s operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society’s tolerance for digital ephemera changes.


Bruce Schneier
November 24, 2008
The Future of Ephemeral Conversation
[What I fear will happen is that people, and politicians in particular, will fail to realize is that the society needs to compensate for the power differential and open up government while securing the individual and private organizations. They will think government “needs” to be private and that in order for the government to “protect” us they need to monitor our every word and move.


You can see this mindset in that so many people fear “large corporations” more than governments. They want the government to protect them from the corporations. They want more power for the government so it can further regulate businesses and individuals. They apparently are totally oblivious to the fact that an abusive corporation can be taken down in a few months by a massive boycott. Corporations don’t have the means to force you to buy their goods. On the other hand a government uses guns to take your money, your property, your freedom, and/or your life. Giving governments a monopoly on force and privacy is extremely poor social hygiene.–Joe]

Quote of the day–William Clayton

The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they’re going to be when you kill them.

William Clayton
[There are more than one William Clayton I found on the net and none are particularly good candidates for this quote. But he is the only one I found this quote attributed to.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Milton Friedman

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.


Milton Friedman
[It’s really sad that people are:



  1. Unaware of this
  2. Unwilling to accept this
  3. Or, most likely and saddest of all, don’t want political freedom

For those interested in political freedom I would like to suggest the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and 13th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution would be good additions to capitalism toward achieving political freedom. Although if the Second is uninfringed then the 13th pretty much should be taken care. Isn’t it ironic that our first president with a skin color strongly correlated with slavery in our country wants to continue the infringements that kept those people in slavery? And furthermore the first infringements upon that right in this country were enacted to keep people of that skin color from obtaining and using firearms? Condi Rice gets it. Barack Obama doesn’t. What makes the difference?–Joe]

What people really care about

The new machines being proposed for airplane security give results like this:



Never mind What TSA Really Stands For, that almost for certain it can never be effective security, and it costs billions each year that could be spent on something more effective, the response is:



After the machines were introduced at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport last year, officials there said they had few complaints from passengers, saying most approved because lines moved faster.


Sheep.

Israel continues to commit suicide

Death by a thousand, self-inflicted cuts.  This from our friend Howard;



Friends:

 

Today we really have a poporie of news. 

 

I’m on duty patrolling downtown this evening.  20:30 I get the patrol officers briefing.  21:00 we get our volunteers briefing.  Hope the rain holds-off.  Then again if it starts raining for real I guess we just go home.

 

Soon we may be all the protection the public gets.

 

The public transportation unit is gone.  More cops are leaving than replacements can be found.  The Ministry of Interior is disarming the public who have licensed guns…after passing [a] process determining need for a gun and background, physical and mental record checks.

Who ever said registration and licensing were the path to confiscation?  Once again we see Jews being disarmed, only this time Jews are doing it to each other.



Now the Finance Ministry is not going to fund the minimum wage school guards receive.  So the schools will be totally unprotected.

This is what is known as the “Peace” process– The lack of meaningful opposition to socialist, Marxist, Fascist, communist or jihadist military expansionism.

More about Jim Jones and those who supported him

I’ve referred to Jim Jones and the “People’s Temple” several times.  They represent my ideal of the ultimate fate of a socialist organization.  I visited San Francisco twice in the mid to late ’70s.  My older siblings had spent time in West Coast quasi-religious, socialist communes (all very, very “hip” you understand) and I’d visited them, spending several nights at one of them in Oregon.  I was even “touched by the spirit” at one of their rallies, and I’m here to tell you; that s#^t is real and it is powerful (something about human evolution having selected in us a tendency to bond tightly with our group, with extremely powerful emotions, in times of stress, but I’ll leave that to the sociologists, anthropologists and biologists).  I learned all I wanted to know about these groups.  Specifically, that I never wanted anything to do with them ever again.


These groups had sprung up in a lot of places back then, accepting the assertion that “All You Need is Love” or other similar nonsense.  They were very socialist, as any description with the word “free” in it was super cool: Free love, free food, free store, free drugs, etc..  Everything belonged to everyone and all was love, love, love…  Only trouble was, as you would expect, the takers always seemed to outnumber the givers, and so the givers (most anyone with options in life) would become disgusted at some stage and leave the group.  You had to use extreme measures to coerce members into staying on, much as the Russians had to build the Berlin Wall and Jim Jones had to imprison his followers in a remote jungle.


I’d seen the History Channel’s documentary on Jim Jones, but there is a ton of stuff in Dan Flynn’s account that was never mentioned.  I mean, Wow!  Take some time to read the article (hat tip to Micheal Savage).



By virtue of producing rent-free rent-a-rallies for liberal politicians and causes, Jim Jones engendered enormous amounts of good will from Democratic politicians and activists. They allowed their political ambitions to derail their governing responsibilities. Frisco pols like Harvey Milk never seemed to care how Jones could, at the snap of his fingers, direct hundreds of people to stack a public meeting or volunteer for a campaign. City Councilman Milk just knew that he benefitted from that control, and therefore never bothered to do anything to inhibit the dangerous cult operating in his city. Instead, he actively aided and abetted a homicidal maniac. It wasn’t just local hacks Jones commanded respect from. He held court with future First Lady Rosalyn Carter, vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale, and California Governor Jerry Brown.

Quote of the day–Herbert Marcuse

Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.


Herbert Marcuse
An Essay on Liberation, ch. 1 (1969)
[Some people don’t want to be liberated. And a great many more don’t want others to be liberated either.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Sick in the U. P.

I won’t apologize for concluding that anyone who supports the free and unfettered possession of deadly weapons is sick in their head. Why in God’s name should the Democratic party, or any organization dedicated to improving the lives and future of Americans, give up on the idea of gun control? Has mental illness spread so far in our country that the concept of curbing violent death by gun is no longer viable?


Here’s my take: all gun owners should immediately submit themselves for psychiatric examination, to determine the extent of their illness and begin treatment before they do harm to someone.


Rifled, single-shot hunting weapons aside, this country should immediately consider laws making the possession of any handgun or assault weapon evidence of serious and dangerous mental illness, and anyone having such a weapon on their possession should be subject to immediate immobilization, hospitalization and confinement for treatment. The sale of — or display with intent to sell — any handgun or assault weapon to a private citizen should result in that person’s inventory being seized and immediately destroyed, and the seller hospitalized immediately for treatment. Any factory producing handguns or assault weapons caught selling their product to private citizens should be closed, their corporate officers hospitalized, and the inventory destroyed.


Sick in the U. P.
Oct 27, 2008 06:07 PM
In a comment to this article: Why we all need the Democrats to abandon gun control
[Sounds like some people are in full support of sending us for an extended stay in the reeducation camps. I wonder if he realizes what it would entail to get 80 million (or even a significant fraction) armed people to the camps. I would like to suggest it is they that need to seek psychiatric help.–Joe]