"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
Part of being an anti-Alinsky is recognizing legitimate good work, even if by those with whom one is often antagonistic. So here’s a Good Onya to the ACLU, courtesy of Volokh, for pointing out that Free Speech is more important than anyone’s willingness to assume the bully posture over purported insults.
Keep up the good work, ACLU, and consider some of the other distortions of civil liberties loose in the wild these days, e.g. ObamaCare.
by Smitty
So, the Pentagon’s investigation seems to have cleared Gen. McChrystal. Now I get this email saying you want me to subscribe to your sad little excuse for a fishwrapper.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! No, no, no, a thousand times no, and again: may your demise come swiftly, you sorry Commie rag!
by Smitty
In its way, the concern over Apple’s iPhone data collection is laughable. If people understood the half of the data that companies and governments collect, they would. . .do pretty much what they are doing.
Turns out the answer is simpler than you think, and it doesn’t involve a conspiracy theory, the government or David Duchovny. Basically, Apple keeps track of your location data so that it can maintain its own location database. By golly, it also turns out they’ve explained it some time ago–last summer.
Last year, Apple lawyer Bruce Sewell sent a letter to two congressmen explaining and disclosing Apple’s location-data collection techniques and policies. The 13-page letter reports that location data is only tracked and transmitted if a user turns on the Location Services option on in the Settings menu. If the option is turned off, nothing is collected.
According to the letter, the data is stored in what we can only assume is “consolidated.db,” randomly assigned an identification number every 24 hours, and sent off every 12 hours to Apple. The data gets stored in a secure database “accessible only by Apple.”
Apple then collects information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points whenever you utilize a service that requests your current location. It sometimes automatically happens with location-based apps that utilize GPS technology.
It turns out Apple ditched the location databases it was previously using from Google and SkyHook Wireless, and is in fact using their own. Now for that to happen, what Apple needs is location data. What better way than to pull it from the millions of existing iPhone customers already roaming around the globe?
The crux of the matter is that there is precious little middle ground. You either go full-on modern data-driven society, and know that you have to deliberately unplug to be free of the tether, or, alternately, you can opt for something in the Afghanistan to Papua-New Guinea range. It’s almost a binary proposition. High or low tech. Not much middle ground.
One of the translators here in Bagram was decrying the state of Afghanistan in terms of infrastructure. I gathered he’d been a US citizen for a couple of decades. I couldn’t resist making the gentle point that one of the things needed to get Afghanistan going was for people who had been abroad and acquired some education to cease their wandering ways and come home. Fix up the joint.
The response was along the lines of “Screw that noise!”
Sure, I’m quite ready to drop the place like a bad habit. So what are we going to do, distribute 80 million iPhones around Afghanistan? “Domestic peace: there is an app for that!”
As for iPhones, I’ve been a Nokia addict for too long, even though I’m composing this post on a MacBook Pro, and ran 5k while jacked into an iPod, the Genius Mix thingy being a killer feature. When we’re all dead with this technology, Stacy McCain will stand in the ruins, I-told-you-so card cocked at 11 o’clock, saying “Uh huh.”
by Smitty
Managing the definitions is a crucial aspect of information dominance. It comes as little surprise that, a decade on from 9/11, the Altogether Foolish United Nations (A.F.U.N.) stands there, panties wadded, unable to define terrorism:
The main hurdle, then as now, is the insistence by the bloc of Islamic states that any definition of terrorism should leave a loophole for “resistance” against foreign occupation.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which was established in 1969 with “liberating” Jerusalem as its primary focus, is unwilling to give ground on the issue as many of its governments believe that doing so would be tantamount to betraying the Palestinian cause.
The “occupation” exemption is usually cited in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it would also provide cover for the anti-Indian jihad in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both.
India has been a major target of terrorism, both in what some Islamic states call “Indian-occupied Kashmir” and elsewhere. Not coincidentally, New Delhi has spearheaded the push for a international terrorism convention since 1996.
Now, per Wikipedia, the U.S. and allies cough up 2/3 of the funding for the U.N., right?
United States 22.000%
Japan 12.530%
Germany 8.018%
United Kingdom 6.604%
France 6.123%
Italy 4.999%
Canada 3.207%
Spain 3.177%
The cause of peace is not advanced by these disingenuous professional victims peddling their crap. The Law of War is meant to manage the Evil That Men Do in a way that keeps things proportional and minimizes collateral damage.
Terrorism is to the Law of War as cancer cells are to healthy: unwillingness to face terrorism at the U.N. level is, itself, a watered-down act of terrorism.
It is well past high time that the United Nations either do something useful, or be replaced with something smaller that can. The U.S. alone is picking up over 1/5 of the tab. If we’re paying the band, we should be calling the tunes. Freebird!
by Smitty
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This is precisely what it appears to be, a blatant attempt at blogwhoring. You will likely never see me mention the dude on the right again. I thought the height of his acting career was getting his chops busted by Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary
Brooke Mueller walked into a pawn shop in Inglewood, CA. early Thursday morning, and tried to hock an expensive men’s watch and a stereo . . .
Brooke was desperately trying to get cash for the two items … but the store would not make the purchase because Brooke did not have a valid I.D.
Brooke certainly shouldn’t need the money, because she’s getting $55,000 a month in child support, not to mention the multi-million dollar settlement she scored in her divorce with Charlie Sheen.
Let’s see: $55,000 a month = $660,000 a year.
And yet she’s pawning stuff? She’s required to undergo mandatory drug testing as part of the divorce settlement. If you’re thinking Brooke’s back on the crack, you’re not alone:
“Man, I ain’t never seen some sh*t like that, a cute a** white b**** looking for some candy on these streets,” said a man who identified himself as T-Mac.
I’m trying to picture a reporter, notebook in hand, taking down that quote from “T-Mac.”
by Smitty
This blog was relieved to hear that Girl On The Right’s cleavage is of the ‘First, do no harm’ variety.
In fact, I like to think they improve any environment I happen to be in.
Well, there you have it. Uplifting freshness for all. GOTR is responding to the The Carbon Trust Footprinting Certification Company.
No one, and I mean no one, can convince me that the climate change cabal is anything but a money-making scheme, similar to the pet rock craze of the 70s.
I think the pet rocks themselves may have been more clever. Still no word on what they’re doing with men’s underwear, but something that binds and chafes likely awaits.
by Smitty
I’m totally with Red State on this one.
No, they shouldn’t. I think John Boehner is more conservative than Eric Cantor, who’d most likely replace him, but Boehner’s leadership has been crap lately. This deal that got us $38.5 billion in cuts, turns out to not only have gotten us $14 billion in cuts, but also raised the baseline on spending. That’s a fancy way of saying it will wind up costing us money to get these cuts and put the Democrats in a better position to begin the 2012 budget fight.
Boehner just seems off his game. He is advised by Barry Jackson, an amiable guy from the Bush Administration whose first major policy fight as Boehner’s Chief of Staff following the untimely death of Paula Nowakowski was to make sure support for traditional marriage got stripped from the GOP’s Pledge to Nowhere or whatever they called it.
Listen, ye Tea Parties: you did not give Boehner a veto-override majority in the House. You did not provide a GOP Senate Majority Leader.
You go to political war with the majority you have, not the majority you might want or wish to have at a later time, to paraphrase Rumsfeld. It’s all well and good to have people setting expectations low, and mocking the details as they leak out of the stinky diaper.
However don’t wear yourself out on the 112th Congress. This election was never more than a restraining order.
So yes, let us vent, but keep the blood pressure moderate. This Congressional rear-guard action, while tactically important, is strategically of less value than the 2012 election. We’re not fixing the deficit, much less the national debt, in a single Congress. It’s borderline miraculous to focus the discussion on hahrd things like the deficit, when people want to fret more important things like birth certificates.
So let’s keep up a measured pressure on the GOP, but not wear ourselves out on ground that simply will not be fruitful.