The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

NSA and the Ethos of the Geek Elite

Posted on | June 16, 2013 | 59 Comments

Edward Snowden as a 22-year-old übergeek

“I woke this morning with a new name. I had had a vision. A dream vision. A vision righteous and true. . . .
“You’ve felt it, known it, recognized it.
“Now realize it.
“I woke this morning with a new name. That name is Wolfking.
“Wolfking Awesomefox.”
— Edward Snowden (“The TrueHOOHA”), June 12. 2008

Can we trust Edward Snowden? If the National Security Agency could not trust him to keep the secrets he was paid so handsomely to keep, why should we trust his description of what the NSA does? This is a question that troubles Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

I want to know how far I can trust Edward Snowden. He’s supposed to be a technical guru of some sort, but apparently he didn’t understand this. Or, if he did, he didn’t bother clearing it up for either Glenn Greenwald or Bart Gellman, who both went with the “direct access” phrase in their initial stories. If it’s the former, I wonder just how much he actually knows about NSA’s capabilities. If it’s the latter, I wonder about his motivations. …
Snowden has made several other dubious statements, including the suggestion that he could order a wiretap on anyone he wanted, and that he had access to any CIA station. Put this all together, and I think it’s reasonable to ask just how much we can trust what Snowden is saying.

Understand that Kevin Drum is a lefty who very much wants to believe the worst of the American Military-Industrial Complex, and yet he’s honest enough with his readers to admit that key details of Snowden’s story don’t seem to check out as verifiable facts.

My early doubts about Snowden’s reliability have only been exacerbated by revelations over the past few days that expose Snowden as a certain type of punk: He feels no loyalty to anyone or anything, except himself, and yet imagines his narrow selfishness as a heroic quality: “Behold, my courageous commitment to an ideological abstraction that is incomprehensible to inferior mortals!”

Snowden’s capacity for self-dramatizing heroism is evident to anyone who carefully reads the lengthy profiles in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I continue to insist that the real scandal here is that a clown like this could get security clearance. If I understand the timeline of Snowden’s career correctly, he wrote his bizarre “Wolfking Awesomefox” rant while he was posted in Geneva, Switzerland, as a CIA technician under diplomatic cover.

Great Caesar’s Ghost! We’ve entrusted our national security to creepy little weirdos who have nothing better to do in their spare time than hang out in online forums talking about videogames?

The resemblance between Edward Snowden and any number of misfit psychopaths who come to mind — from Lee Harvey Oswald to Dylan Klebold to Jared Loughner — ought to be obvious enough. Yet our security agencies were so hungry for computer talent that nobody thought, “Hey, maybe we ought to keep an eye out for kooks”? And nobody bothered to make sure these geeks weren’t sneaking out the door with top-secret data on their thumb drives?

He was a teenage aficionado of role-playing video games and Japanese anime cartoons who dropped out of high school and turned his avid interest in computer technology into a career that paid him more than $100,000 a year before he turned 30, living every nerd’s dream with a beautiful girlfriend and a job in the tropical paradise of Hawaii.
For all his success, however, Edward Snowden harbored profound doubts about the world into which his skills had brought him. Snowden worked as a contractor on powerful top-secret information systems that sorted through data for the U.S. government, in what officials describe as a vital program to prevent terrorist attacks, but which Snowden and others say was an unconstitutional intrusion on the privacy of American citizens. . . .

Read the whole thing at Viral Read. Say what you want about surveillance and the Fourth Amendment, but I just don’t trust this guy.

 

Category: Crime, Culture

Imaginary ‘Rights’ You Don’t Have, You Sad and Disgusting Troll, Bill Schmalfeldt

Posted on | June 16, 2013 | 58 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt: Somewhere, a carnival is missing its sideshow freak

“Schmalfeldt is forever burning bridges behind him as he careens from disaster to disaster caused by his antisocial personality. He never accepts responsibility for his failures, always externalizing blame onto his scapegoated enemies.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Feb. 20

“The State of Maryland has answered you, Mr. Schmalfeldt. It has told you: No, John Hoge does not have to answer your questions or read your statements, however you choose to deliver them. Not in tweets, nor in any other way. Maryland has answered your questions, sir. It has gathered up your statements. The authority you like to claim — in imperatives to others — has now been turned on you.”
— Becca Lower, “Bill Schmalfeldt, You Must”

Life is not fair. Some people have necks and some people don’t and — rather than seeking gainful employment as a carnival sideshow attraction — The Amazing Neckless Troll Man seems to be under the impression that his problems are our fault. He is wrong, as usual.

Saturday, while I was busy working on a 2,000-word article about Edward Snowden for ViralRead, Bill Schmalfeldt showed up in the comments of two Friday posts — “Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement” and “Hoge’s Victory Lap” — in an apparent effort to win in the court of public opinion what he could not win in the Circuit Court of Carroll County, Maryland: The right to use the Internet to harass people he hates.

If all of Schmalfeldt’s comments have not yet been deleted, they will be, and I offer apologies to all our commenters who now, because of the disappearance of Schmalfeldt’s comments, may appear to have been arguing with someone who is not actually there. And, let’s face it: Bill Schmalfeldt hasn’t been “all there” in a long, long time.

Attempting to convince a madman that he is out of his mind is a hopeless task, and it’s best not to encourage Schmalfeldt in the delusion that he has anything to say that any sane person is obligated to notice, much less bothering to refute the kook. Nevertheless, here’s part of the “argument” Schmalfeldt made in one of his comments:

It’s actually quite humorous, the responses I’ve gotten. And quite revealing about your nature and your temperament. . . . You’ve been told I’m crazed and evil, therefore I am crazed and evil and that’s the end of the discussion. I deserve to be defamed and mocked with dishonestly cropped pictures.

“Dishonestly cropped pictures.” The loss of self-awareness indicated by that complaint speaks diagnostic volumes about the nature of Schmalfeldt’s derangement. Perhaps it is unnecessary to remind readers of what Bill Schmalfeldt once did with a photo of Sarah Palin:

Schmalfeldt created that Photoshop of Palin bleeding with a stake through her forehead to illustrate a post he wrote under his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner. We need not rehearse here all the hateful acts of self-destructive madness Bill Schmalfeldt has engaged in during his sad descent into gibbering lunacy. It will perhaps be sufficient for anyone new to this psychiatric case-study to know that Schmalfeldt was banned from Daily Kos because of his writings about anal sex.

Go read it for yourself. I double-dog dare you.

Having lost the privilege of posting his demented ravings at Daily Kos, and having been similarly banished from contributing to the Examiner because of his habitual dishonesty, now this monstrous pervert wants to hijack the comments at this blog to claim victimhood.

Well, no. And there’s this: “Stalkers have no right to directly address you after they have been warned to cease and desist.”

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing about trolls like Bill Schmalfeldt.

The myth of “troll rights” is a persistent and dangerous delusion. You can write what you will on your own blog, Mr. Schmalfeldt, but the fact that no decent, honest or intelligent person cares to read your blog is not my problem. Likewise, the fact that the only use you seem to find for your Twitter account is to harass people you hate — not my problem.

Schmalfeldt’s problem can be described in two words: Bill Schmalfeldt.

Good luck fixing that problem, sir. It seems to be beyond repair.




 

 


Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

FMJRA 2.0: The Planets

Posted on | June 15, 2013 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science

Edward Snowden’s Dubious Heroism

Rush Limbaugh: Still Winning

The Gang of Eight Liars

Naked 19-Year-Old News Update

‘Relationship’ as a Euphemism: What Does This Tell Us About the Culture?

Al Gore Has More Nerve Than The NHL Has Hockey Sticks

World’s Youngest Blogger Dismayed By #OccupyResoluteDesk News

FMJRA 2.0: Secret World

This Is What #OccupyResoluteDesk Meant By ‘Fundamentally Transforming The USA’

‘Oh, My God. They Were Everywhere’

Why Aren’t You Homeschooling Yet?

Obsessed? Who, Me?

The Five Million Dollar Idiot

What I’d Like To Hear From @DMataconis

You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Movement

Holy Freaking Crap! How Did NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Get Security Clearance?

Let’s Debate Fourth Amendment Rights, and Also Send Snowden to Leavenworth

Rule 5 Monday

Happily Never After

Recusing Myself On Recent Events, Let Me Bring Up A Point About Tiananmen Square

This Was Probably Inevitable

Hollywood Script: Hipster Geek With Hot Girlfriend Fights ‘Omniscient’ Government

‘It’s for the Children!’

Senator @TedCruz Demolishes Gang Of 8 Immigration Bill

Online Evidence Shows Kaitlyn Hunt Contacted Victim After Sex Arrest

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.12.13

Republican Senators Sell Out, Vote for Cloture on ‘Gang of Eight’ Amnesty Bill

The #FreeKate Criminal Caucus

Well, What Is the Rate?

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.13.13

Chuck Schumer’s Compromise Plan: ‘Bend Over and Grab Your Ankles, Republicans’

‘A Little Girl on Her Way to School’

‘Mommy, Why Is an Orange Man on TV?’

Gary Herndon: ‘Model Citizen’

Who’s the Liberal: Hannity or Coulter?

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.14.13

The Politics of Feeling

Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement

Chicago School System’s $1 Billion Deficit Forces Layoffs for 850 Teachers, Staff

Well, a healthy crop of links this week, for which thanks to everyone!

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (40 the hard way; no credit for tweets or Viral Read links)
  2. (tied) The Camp of the Saints and The Conservatory (7)
  3. (tied) Daley Gator, Lowering The Boom, and A View From The Beach (5)

Thanks again to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline for submitting links to next week’s FMJRA is Friday, June 21.

Category: FMJRA Award

Hoge’s Victory Lap

Posted on | June 14, 2013 | 53 Comments

After his stunning courtroom triumph today over the atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt, John Hoge recounts at length exactly what kind of atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt is:

On 14 February, I received 40 tweets in less than one hour from @BreitbartUnmask ranting about Lee Stranahan, Aaron Walker, and me. Just after midnight on 15 February, I posted a notice on this blog and on Twitter addressed to @OldUncleBastard, @BreitbartUnmask, and @OccupyRebellion demanding that they stop communicating directly with me.

Now this relates to two sections of Maryland law, Harassment (§3-803) and Misuse of Electronic Communication (§3-805), that Hoge had read and which apparently Schmalfeldt hadn’t.

Understand this: It is one thing to say mean things about someone, but another to say mean things to someone.

The use of e-mail or Twitter to communicate hateful messages to someone — when the recipient has demanded that you cease such communications, notifying you that further messages will result in a complaint under the above sections of the law — is quite foolhardy.

And . . . Bill Schmalfeldt is quite a fool.

Such a fool is Bill Schmalfeldt that he supposed he might bring legal action against Hoge — don’t ask me to explain that — and listened to some of his online friends (including “Breitbart Unmasked”) who encouraged him to think that he, Schmalfeldt, was actually a victim.

Sadly, no.

Friday afternoon I talked to a friend, an attorney of no small reputation, who was somewhat skeptical of the use of Maryland’s law in this manner, which he felt might establish a bad precedent — a chilling effect on free speech, as it were. And so I began to say in a very serious way, how deeply I was concerned about the possible infringement of Bill Schmalfeldt’s First Amendment rights.

Then I laughed and laughed and laughed.

After I’d finished laughing — it took a while, I gotta tell ya — I eventually went over to Hoge’s blog and hit the tip jar. Everybody should.

And then you, too, can laugh and laugh and laugh and . . .

 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

Chicago School System’s $1 Billion Deficit Forces Layoffs for 850 Teachers, Staff

Posted on | June 14, 2013 | 24 Comments

Is this the Hope or the Change?

The worst fears of Chicago Public School teachers and staffers were confirmed Friday when district officials announced it was laying off some 850 employees.
“Given the historic financial crisis facing our District, next year’s budget will not come without painful decisions, which is why we are making tough choices at central office in order to minimize impacts to our classrooms,” said CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett in a statement Friday. “We will continue this work over the next several weeks to further identify reductions to central office spending to help close the District’s $1 billion deficit and make sure that every dollar helps protect precious classroom funding.”
Affected employees are those in the 55 schools closing at the end of the current school year as well as those slated for “turnaround”, WBEZ reports. CPS said a portion of those losing their jobs were either probationary teachers or teachers with unsatisfactory performance reviews.

(Insert “recovery summer” joke here.)

 

Category: Budget, Chicago, Education

Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement

Posted on | June 14, 2013 | 31 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland

John Hoge has the peace order granted today by Maryland Judge Thomas Stansfield, forbidding Bill Schmalfeldt from contacting Hoge.

People who have followed this story know that, in June 2012, Schmalfeldt began cyberstalking Aaron Walker, whose legal conflicts with Brett Kimberlin had become a subject of widespread public attention. From there, Schmalfeldt steadily expanded his target range to include all of Walker’s supporters, including Hoge. By November, when Schmalfeldt took over the pro-Kimberlin site “Breitbart Unmasked,” he made himself a general nuisance. Schmalfeldt’s vicious attacks on Lee Stranahan’s family were particularly distressing. Did I mention that in July 2012, Schmalfeldt created a “Dead Andrew” site to mock the late Andrew Breitbart and disparage Breitbart’s conservative colleagues?

Trying to get judges to understand how the Internet works has proven problematic in the long struggle against Team Kimberlin. Today was a rare victory, as Aaron Walker reports:

Tae Kim showed up as Schmalfeldt’s attorney again, and did present the argument that electronic harassment is not harassment.  The judge rejected that out of hand.
It is also worth noting that Schmalfeldt was also subpoenaed to produce documents.  He refused to comply with that, a fact that Hoge’s able counsel, Zoa Barnes, exploited repeatedly to show that Schmalfeldt didn’t respect the law.
So the case was pretty straightforward from there.  Barnes established that Schmalfeldt had been told repeatedly to stop contacting Hoge and despite being told by numerous people (including a judge), he just kept going, even up until last night.  The judge found the conduct to be harassment, comparing it to junk mail, and granted the peace order.  For the next six months, Bill Schmalfeldt will be prohibited from contacting Hoge by any means.  He can talk about him—that is his First Amendment right—but he can’t actually contact him.

Something else Aaron Walker reports: Brett Kimberlin showed up in court for Schmalfeldt’s hearing.

This is something Schmalfeldt will not explain — this is what the document subpoena was about — because the facts would not likely be flattering to Schmalfeldt’s patron. It is a reasonable surmise that Schmalfeldt’s communications would show the extent to which his harassment of Hoge, Walker and others was undertaken with the encouragement of Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser. Walker and others believe they have been the targets of an orchestrated campaign of harassment aimed at Kimberlin’s enemies.

One might argue that Bill Schmalfeldt is merely a nutjob, but Kimberlin’s presence at today’s court hearing certainly suggests that the focus of Schmalfeldt’s madness was not entirely random.

Check John Hoge’s blog for further news.




 

 


Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

The Politics of Feeling

Posted on | June 14, 2013 | 40 Comments

“You can’t do that.”
   But it makes me feel good.
“It’s against the law.”
   Then we should change the law.
“Why?”
   Because it makes me feel good.
“Who cares about your feelings?”
   Hater.

Why does the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” appear in our Declaration of Independence? Most people don’t know enough about history or political philosophy even to understand why this is an important question. Instructed with the simple-minded sentimentalism of an elementary school pageant, people cling to the phrase — along with whatever other bits and pieces of their education managed to stick in their minds — with the fierce emotion of a toddler clinging to his mother. Urging such a person to examine the facts critically is likely to produce antagonism, as if you were somehow unpatriotic for insisting that actual history is preferable to flattering mythology.

Diana West’s new book American Betrayal dares to question some of the sentimental gush about the 20th century that too many of us have swallowed without thinking about it, and the problem is that once people integrate false narratives into their worldview, it’s very hard to get them to re-examine their erroneous beliefs.

That’s why I’m calling attention to “the pursuit of happiness,” that curious phrase of Thomas Jefferson’s which ought to arouse more curiosity than it usually does. There is a timely relevance to this matter, but rather than explain that “ripped from the headlines” factor up front, let me continue with the philosophical discussion and let shallow minds look elsewhere for something to arouse them.

The formula of rights that Jefferson meant to invoke in the preamble of the Declaration was “life, liberty and property” — John Locke’s summary of what fundamental goods of the citizen the government was supposed to protect as the justification of its existence. It helps here to quote Jefferson’s preamble at length:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Please read this carefully and ask, “What’s the point?”

How odd that Americans so seldom ask this question. Thomas Jefferson (who drafted the Declaration as part of a committee that also included Benjamin Franklin and John Adams) wasn’t engaged in some abstract philosophical discussion, after all.

The Declaration was written with a purpose: To rally support for the American rebellion, first among the colonists themselves; secondly, among the English people, as a means of undermining political support for the measures undertaken by the Crown to suppress the rebellion; and finally, as an appeal for support from England’s rival powers in Europe, especially the French.

We are in danger of missing the point of the whole thing if we fail to understand the Declaration in this historical context. Yet most Americans nowadays know so little of actual history that they lack the means by which to contextualize the Declaration’s phrases which, without any facts to encumber them, are allowed to float around in our minds as abstract ideas divorced of any real meaning.

Jefferson invokes “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” as necessitating the Declaration: “Americans are not illiterate savages,” he is telling his readership, whom he knows to include ministers in the courts of France and other nations. In deciding to separate themselves from England and taking up an “equal station” as a nation in their own right, Jefferson says, the American colonists understand that they must justify their cause in the eyes of the world — to recount the grievances of a people oppressed by unlawful despotism — as “the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The very eloquence of Jefferson’s prose, its calm and dignified language, was arguably the strongest part of his argument. It signified that these Americans were not (as the British Crown viewed them) an inferior rabble, but rather men of quality, deserving of respect.

Well, what about that curious phrase, “the pursuit of happiness”?

Whereas Locke and others spoke of “life, liberty and property” as the rights government was supposed to protect, Jefferson did not speak of “property” for two important reasons:

  1. The colonists’ dispute with England arose over issues of taxation. Other European nations, France among them, taxed their people far more heavily than anything that King George III and his ministers had inflicted on the American colonies. If Jefferson had invoked property rights, this may have been interpreted as questioning all taxation, and may have conveyed the impression that the Americans were rebelling for narrowly selfish financial purposes.
  2. There was, after all, the matter of slavery. Among the species of “property” held by Americans were about half a million African slaves, and more than a few opponents of the colonial rebellion had chastised them as hypocrites for demanding a liberty that they denied their servants.

Now, here we might digress into a long examination of this seeming contradiction in the Declaration, which expresses in such elegant phrases a philosophy of universal equality, even though the man who wrote it was the owner of more than 100 slaves. That discussion, however, would be irrelevant to my point, namely that Jefferson’s famous phrase “the pursuit of happiness” cannot properly be understood outside its historical context.

What did Jefferson mean by “happiness,” anyway? Considering that this phrase occurs where “property” would be found in the classic Lockean formulation of rights, Jefferson means “happiness” not as some mere sentimental feeling, but rather in the sense of “good fortune,” which to an 18th-century mind, would mean what we today mean when we say “success” or “prosperity” — the contented enjoyment of the accumulated fruits of one’s labor. Of course, the mind of an 18th-century colonial plantation owner is so remote from our own culture that we might as well try to understand the worldview of the Pharoahs.

Still, my point is exactly this: Our sentimental reverence for these phrases — “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and so forth — hinders our ability to think about what the Declaration was really all about, and unless we have the maturity to transcend our childish emotionalism, we aren’t really thinking, but merely feeling.

This is how we end up in situations where the discussion of public policy is warped by the claim that our arguments are wrong because we might make people feel bad about themselves. Read more

Category: History

Who’s the Liberal: Hannity or Coulter?

Posted on | June 14, 2013 | 52 Comments

Sean Hannity has a bad habit of interrupting and hectoring guests he disagrees with and, in the case of the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, Hannity has evidently decided that criticism of Marco Rubio is impermissible. This led to an interesting exchange Wednesday night:

Hannity asked [Ann Coulter] what she would do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States.
“This is a total fraud and a fig leaf that the American people can’t sleep at night,” Coulter responded, “because the situation is exactly the same today as it was –”
“You’re not answering my question,” Hannity interrupted. “You’re like a liberal.”
Ooh! That got a reaction.
“No, you are like a liberal, making a silly argument,” Coulter retorted. “It’s a straw man argument. Nobody cares. This idea that it’s an emergency, it’s a crisis — it’s preposterous. The same thing will happen as is happening now.”

You can watch the video at ViralRead. And obviously, Coulter is right: Hannity is “like a liberal,” because he is letting his emotional empathy with Marco Rubio overwhelm facts and logic. Also, he’s “like a liberal,” interrupting and hectoring his guest.

 


Category: Ann Coulter, Fox News, Immigration
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