Ever wonder if the NSA or some other “men in black” are reading your email? Via Bruce Schneier we have this simple test method from Richard M. Smith. Furthermore this same test can tell you if they break the decryption you are using.
Very clever. I like it a lot. It’s an additional, and extremely useful, twist on something I suggested at GRPC 2000.
I have a five hour drive to work at the beginning of the week and a five hour drive home at the end of the week. Five hours of boredom–except my mind has lots of time to dwell on things. This time I was focused on the bigots at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In addition to the stress of the excess of adrenalin in my system without cruise control I found myself traveling above the speed limit numerous times and ended up cutting about 20 minutes off the usual drive time. I wouldn’t have mentioned this except after trying to sleep for a couple hours I decided to read a few blogs and immediately found Michelle Malkin has posted on something I can relate to.
It’s another example of where the law doesn’t apply to certain people but it does to others. Currently PNNL is in defiance (or has flat out lied about the existence of certain documents) of several Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests. And they still employee the people that committed a felony against me–costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and appears to have destroyed my career. And that doesn’t even consider the adverse impact on national security due to the negative impact of losing my contribution on certain projects.
All the anger generated while driving may not have been entirely wasted–I thought of another way to put some pressure on them. I have some meetings arranged for talk about more traditional methods in the next few weeks but in the mean time I can start preparing a non-conventional surprise for the felons.
What is a communist? One who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his copper and pocket a shilling.
I have some very interesting friends. Barb thinks I attract them some way or another. Of course she doesn’t always describe them as “interesting”. Sometimes when people start talking about things that maybe they shouldn’t be talking about it’s best to just listen and not say anything that might cause them to realize they are talking about something they shouldn’t be talking about. The problem with this strategy is that you can end up with a lot of missing pieces. Some fragments that don’t really make sense or that leave some very interesting questions unanswered. I just got another piece to something that has puzzled me for years. Here’s the additional piece from Antonin Scalia:
I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.
The original “puzzle” was presented to me about eight or ten years ago by a casual friend while sitting in a hot tub at a party. That bit of information will have to remain unpublicized. He really shouldn’t have been talking about that.
A friend in High School had a very unique personality. Very smart and a wacky sense of humor. He was just there for one year when we were sophmores. We sort of kept in touch for a year or two afterwards but nothing after we went away to college. At the High School class reunions another friend of his and I would talk and say to each other, “I wonder whatever happened to Ken…” Around our 30th year reunion Ken made contact and we have exchanged a few emails. Every year he and his family make a Christmas video and I can see his personality from nearly 35 years ago in those videos. Here is his video for this Christmas.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification’s, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood …it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns …Thus it everyday renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent …It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided …such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize; but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy In America 1840
[The Nanny State concept has been around around for a long time.–Joe]
“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.” This single idea has a complete disregard for truth. It doesn’t matter that the world has been proven round, you can still believe it’s flat if you want to. It doesn’t matter if all evidence shows that people have the same genetic code no matter what their skin color is; you can still believe some are inferior if you want to. What this statement means is that you can believe whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be true. There are no right or wrong answers, everyone’s beliefs are equally valid.
Jaime Huffman
Speech for Comm 101
2001
From https://www.joehuffman.org/misc/LifeChange.htm
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
Edmund Way Teale
Circle of the Seasons
[Thanks to James for pointing this one out to me. And just in case you didn’t make the connection this is about people that seek security at the expense of freedom such as those that favor gun control.–Joe]
Previously I announced half price entry for Boomershoot 2006 to Canadian entrants due to the proposed firearms ban in their country and the real reason for Boomershoot. Considering British subjects have already had their firearms taken away and the news from yesterday on how they are taking the next step toward a police state I’m offering all British subjects free entry. Furthermore if their current residence is the U.K. and they give me a month’s notice of their intent to participate I will provide the rifle and ammo. All anonymous of course. Send me an email, encrypted if desired (PGP key below), to reserve the position, show proof of citizenship and/or residency upon arrival and get in for free.
Arrive a couple days early and I’ll show you how to make reactive targets as well.
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This started out to be a comment to Steve’s post and his question, “What on earth is going on back home?” It grew in size and scope to the point it needed to be its own post which I now offer to you. It’s not the first time (here is a collection) I have touched on the subject and for certain it will not the last.
The number of days I have spent in the U.K. can be counted on one hand so I recognize my limitations on being an authority on the politics and mindset there. However, it is my opinion that the rush toward a police state in the U.K. is because of a mindset that developed slowly over the last 70 to 80 years. Read F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom for my best guess at to what is going on. Hayek published the book in 1944 and he was specifically warning the U.K. about the dangers of where they were headed. The basic problem as outlined by Hayek is that the people decided it was the job of government to take care of them. From socialized medicine to giving up their right to self defense it’s always the government who is responsible. Once that mindset is cemented into place and the government fails on any given task the “answer” is always more power to the government.
The really scary part is what comes next. As Hayek points out extreme power, however benign the original people to whom it is given, attracts “the wrong sort of people” and is repulsive to those who would be most responsible with it. Hence the more power the government is given the more you will find people in government that should not be given that power. The examples abound–Soviet Union, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. In the 20th century there were at least 60 million people killed by their own governments because of this sort of error in political philosophy. I hope the U.K. will not be a prime example of the 21 century.
One would think that after 60 million dead the lesson would have been learned but the evidence from the U.K. is that some people may still have to learn it for themselves.
Now, it is somewhat difficult to think of Germany and Italy, or of Russia, not as different worlds but as products of a development of thought in which we have shared; it is, at least so far as our enemies are concerned, easier and more comforting to think that they are entirely different from us and that what happened there cannot happen here. Yet the history of those countries in the years before the rise of the totalitarian system showed few features with which we are not familiar.
F.A. Hayek
The Road to Serfdom, Page 14
Published 1944
[This relates both to my previous post and next.–Joe]
1984 versus 2014, what’s 30 years when you are writing about society nearly 40 years in the future?
From Bruce Schneier we get this news:
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
And that’s just the beginning. Here’s the future:
The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and stored by machines.
It’s a slippery slope. The government takes the guns away “to reduce crime” and when that doesn’t work, they conclude more government power over the people is needed and when that doesn’t work, they need still more power. They never give consideration that giving power back to the people could be a good idea. As Lyle points out, only when government involved do people conclude that their failures mean we should give them more money. It’s a classic When Prophecy Fails case. It’s also an extreme failure of the Jews in the Attic Test.
This is extremely scary stuff. I gives me shivers and just drains the energy from me.
Massachusetts has some of the strictest gun control in the nation. The Brady Bunch should be proud that the scumbag didn’t have a gun when he did this:
PLYMOUTH (AP) — A Framingham man is being held without bail on charges he kidnapped a woman and her two-year-old son and raped the mother repeatedly over a two-day period.
Police arrested Evandro Doirado Monday night after the woman silently mouthed “help me” to a liquor store clerk.
Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz says the victim was carjacked at knifepoint Saturday night in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Framingham. Cruz says the woman was raped twice in the car before being taken to the Plymouth Sands motel, where she was attacked again as the toddler cowered by the bed.
It was when Doirado took the victim to a liquor store on Monday night that she was able to mouth the words “help me” and the name of the motel to the clerk.
Cruz says Doirado did not know the woman and the attack appears to be random.
Yeah. Real proud. If the woman had been carrying a gun she probably wouldn’t have gotten carjacked to begin with. The Brady Bunch and the politicians that listen to them should be on trial with the scumbag.
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Mr. Hamilton has an amazing way with words. They can be like the Zen master smacking you upside the head, knocking you free of your ‘self’ for a moment of clarity.
…
I don’t think Greg is really being flippant. Talking with him outside of class impressed me with not only how much he thinks about what he teaches, but that he thinks a lot about communication, about how he teaches. He’s very deliberate.
I’m not privy to his internal reasoning, but I can make some observations. “Make the most of it” carries the same vital information of a more somber “scan and assess”. Its tone matches the adrenaline-charged situation that it is describing. It suggests an active, optimistic defensive mind-set. The first time you hear it, it’s so provocative that you think about it more. It’s also sufficiently cool that you want to remember it. Remembering it takes you to other things you learned in that class. It’s a rhetorical and cognitive hook in addition to its primary payload.
That said, like you, I try to watch what I say. A line I spring on friends with irritating frequency is, “That will come up at your trial.”
Sean Flynn
December 20, 2005
[On the general issue of this quote by Greg Hamilton.–Joe]
I did a little follow up and found the end of the story I had reported on before (here and here):
I’m glad to announce that my attorney,
Walter Maksym, was able to convince the State’s Attorney to dismiss my
case on December 8th. So, it looks like it’s all over for now! It truly
is a wonderful relief to be done with the criminal charges.
He shouldn’t have been arrested for wearing a coat to begin with but having the case dismissed is the next best thing.
It’s not well known and I really hadn’t ever planned to tell anyone
but Xenia spilled the beans on her Live Journal so there’s no point in
continuing to hide it. For the last 17 years we have told people
we have three children, James, Kim, and Xenia. This photo is of
Xenia:
Yeah. Identical quadruplets. This will explain certain
other things people have long wondered about. Xenia maintains two
Live Journals and her own website,
gets nearly straight A’s in school, has a boyfriend, and almost never
gets in trouble (she always has at least a couple alibis). In
addition to it being rare to have identical quadruplets this set is
even more rare in that they have identical fingerprints. I
figured this might come in handy someday but now that Xenia has spilled
the beans that game is pretty much over. Oh, well… Merry
Christmas everyone.
Three days ago I told you the Canadian Supreme Court was about to rule on the legality of swingers clubs. The ruling is out now:
OTTAWA (Reuters) – Group sex between consenting adults is neither
prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled
on Wednesday, dismissing arguments that the sometimes raucous
activities of so-called “swingers” clubs were dangerous.In a ruling that radically changes the way Canadian courts determine
what poses a threat to the population, the court threw out the
conviction of a Montreal man who ran a club where members could have
group sex in a private room behind locked doors.“Consensual conduct behind code-locked doors can hardly be supposed
to jeopardize a society as vigorous and tolerant as Canadian society,”
said the opinion of the seven-to-two majority, written by Chief Justice
Beverley McLachlin.…
“Criminal indecency or obscenity must rest on actual harm or a
significant risk of harm to individuals or society. The Crown failed to
establish this essential element of the offence. The Crown’s case must
therefore fail,” wrote McLachlin.In indecency cases, Canadian courts have traditionally probed
whether the acts in question “breached the rules of conduct necessary
for the proper functioning of society”. The Supreme Court ruled that
from now on, judges should pay more attention to whether society would
be harmed.The judges said that just because most Canadians might disapprove of
swingers’ clubs, this did not necessarily mean the establishments were
socially dangerous.“Attitudes in themselves are not crimes, however deviant they may be
or disgusting they may appear,” the judges said, noting that no one had
been pressured to have sex or had paid for sex in either of the cases.“The autonomy and liberty of members of the public was not affected
by unwanted confrontation with the sexual activity in question only
those already disposed to this sort of sexual activity were allowed to
participate and watch,” they said.
I won’t be going to Canada anytime soon even if Barb said I could
do some “field research”. They may have figured out sex between
consenting adults isn’t a threat to society at large but they haven’t
figured out that someone that carries a handgun for person protection
and hasn’t ever committed any crime worse that going 10 or 15 MPH over
the speed limit isn’t a threat either. But this is a step away
from the Nanny State. I wish the fiscal conservatives in this
country would realize that being a Nanny State isn’t just about
refusing to let people spend their own money however they think is
best. It’s also a Nanny State that tells individuals they can’t
fry their brains with recreational drugs, marry the person of their
choice, or play a group game of belly bump.
From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson:
Steely eyed dealers of death.
Translation: Microsoft Gun Club Members.
[For my friends at Microsoft. They know who they are and why I chose this one for today.–Joe]