Category: in the news.

in the news. masters and servants.

the surveillance state eats its own.

Here’s an excellent Salon.com article on the most worrisome and least-addressed aspect of the Petraeus affair—the fact that the Feds were able to dig up what they did without evidence of a crime, and without any warrants.

Money quote:

“Having the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.”

One assumes General Petraeus fully supports the current reach of the surveillance state in much the same way post-Reconstruction whites supported gun control—it’s all fine and dandy as long as the Sheriffs remember that it’s just supposed to be used against Those People. But if the director of the CIA can have his emails snooped without a warrant or evidence of a crime, I doubt that looking through mine or yours would give the FBI even a twinge of civil liberties concerns.

in the news. new hampshah.

earth….quake?

So we had an earthquake here in New England on Tuesday night. How about that?

I was hooking up the water line to our new fridge when the place started shaking. It felt like a washing machine severely out of balance, and that’s exactly what I thought it was at first…until Robin said that there wasn’t any laundry going. Apparently it was a 4.0 quake centered in Maine somewhere. (I think it’s God’s retribution for all that lobster-killing and Zumba whoring.)

Now, a 4.0 quake won’t even make you folks in California look up from your Cheerios, but to us here in Upper Cryogenica, any earthquake is a big deal, especially one you can actually feel. I’m already seeing t-shirts online saying “I Survived The Great New England Quake of 2012”, and pictures are making the rounds on the Intertubes with the obligatory Very Minor Damage (think “trashcan/lawn chair fallen over”) captioned NEVER FORGET. I love the Internets and the human capacity for humor.

capitalism. in the news. masters and servants.

capitalism is bad, except when it’s *my* profit.

There’s a new party in Germany. They call themselves the “Pirate Party”, and they’re a loose conglomerate of people well left of the already pretty left-of-center mainstream Social Democrats: anti-Capitalism, anti-establishment, anti-soap-and-deodorant, the usual coffee house anarchists.

One of the platforms of the Pirate Party is that “information should be free.” They advocate unrestricted Internet sharing of books, music, movies, and whatever else can be uploaded to a file-sharing server, without any regard for copyright or intellectual property. One of the members of the Pirate Party’s executive committee, a 26-year-old named Julia Schramm, even called the idea of intellectual property “disgusting.”

Here’s where it gets really hilarious. Said Julia Schramm just landed a book deal with Albrecht Knaus, a German publisher owned by Random House. She netted a 100,000 euro advance for her anti-capitalist book “Click Me”. Some people uploaded the PDF version of the book to a file-sharing server and spread the link around via Twitter and Facebook, along with info about the Pirate Party’s stance on “free information”.

The author promptly issued a DMCA take-down request, and the file was removed.

There’s a saying in German that goes something like, “Preaching water and drinking wine.” It’s pretty amazing how often a politician’s bedrock philosophies only apply to other people, and are conveniently forgotten when one’s own ox is in line for goring. (And no, it’s not just those on the left of the political spectrum.)

in the news.

I’m no dummy. I went to collige.

Whenever a college fraternity or sorority makes the news, it’s usually not for any great feat of intellect. This one is no different:

Sorority vandalizes wrong car in response to hazing complaint.

The Greek D is “Delta”. Too bad the Greek alphabet doesn’t have a U or H.

in the news. masters and servants. this monkey house.

how u spel deficet?

So the Chicago Public Day Care System’s wardens—who, on average, earn $76,000 a year—are striking because the 16% pay increase over four years offered by the city just won’t cut it. Meanwhile, the Chicago school system has a dropout rate that’s close to 50%. But if you question the right of public sector union workers to have a guaranteed job for life and cushy pensions, you’re “playing political games on the backs of our children,” or something like that.

I’m not anti-union, strictly speaking, but between the strike in Chicago and the public sector unions in California driving the state into bankruptcy, it’s not all that hard to see where this is going. With our tax bills, we’re feeding an ever-expanding public sector whose unions have no qualms at all about blackmailing everyone else for 16% pay increases. (Remember—that money isn’t out of some mystical Chicago city money bin, it comes out of the paychecks of everyone else.) Don’t want to pony up For The Children™? Here are 400,000 kids on the streets—good luck finding daycare.

Meanwhile, Joe and Jane Taxpayer get shafted twice. They get to contribute an ever-increasing portion of their paycheck to enlarge the public sector, and that public sector’s busywork usually involves nickel-and-diming Joe and Jane and gagging them with red tape.

in the news.

how to react to an armed robbery attempt, textbook solution.

Here’s a video of an attempted armed robbery at an Internet cafe in Florida. Three guys rush in, guns in their hands…and the security guard, seated behind a desk, gets up, draws his gun, and starts firing not three seconds after the bad guys open that front door.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_c3#/video/bestoftv/2012/08/31/pkg-security-guard-shoots-thieves-internet-cafe.weshpkg-security-guard-shoots-thieves-internet-cafe.wesh

This was in the wee hours of the morning, when human reaction times are at their worst, and the guy has a job that’s probably pretty boring most of the time, but he went from checking his computer screen to Battle Stations in absolutely no time. He didn’t hesitate or freeze under stress, he just committed himself to action and then followed through, protecting himself and the customers of that Internet cafe against armed and numerically superior aggressors. That’s how it’s done, folks.

What is it with armed robberies of Internet cafes in Florida? What’s the potential take at an Internet cafe, other than the customer wallets and maybe a few laptops?

art. in the news.

crayola davinci.

Oh, this gave me a much-needed laugh today:

Amateur botches Spanish fresco restoration

The once-dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic, [the BBC correspondent] says.

in the news.

disgusted.

Over the past few days, the Internet has educated me that the Aurora massacre was really perpetrated by:

  • President Obama, to be able to push tighter gun control
  • The CIA, to eliminate the service members who were killed (the other audience members being “collateral alibi damage”)
  • The Jews, because, hey, Zionist World Conspiracy
  • The Tea Party, because those people are just so damn angry and violent
  • The Occupy movement, because those people are just so damn angry and violent
  • The BATFE, to draw attention away from the “Fast & Furious” investigations.

It seems that the natural tendency in the face of such appalling, senseless carnage is to assign responsibility to the people and political viewpoints one doesn’t like, and then to project one’s own attitudes onto them, all before the first bit of evidence comes in.

This is one of those weeks when I spend a great deal of time wondering how our species has ever made it down from the trees and off the African savanna. I can’t decide whether a species that has learned to harness the atom and fly to the moon, but whose members kill each other over trivial shit is too smart or too stupid for its own good. Somewhere in the galaxy there’s some civilization that uses humanity as a cautionary educational tale: “What happens when apes get smart enough to invent projectile weapons.”

And with that, I think I’ll turn this Intertubes thing off for a bit and go make something.

in the news. this monkey house.

pointless savagery.

When you’re young and in your physical prime, and the guy you punch is not, hands can become a lethal weapon, and you can find yourself facing first-degree murder charges.

Now imagine what would have happened if the old man had carried a handgun and shot his attacker in self-defense. How would the media have presented the incident? Would we have another case of clear-cut, racially-motivated murder?

capitalism. in the news.

you didn’t build that.

So the President gave a speech in which he used a modified form of Elizabeth Warren’s claims that “nobody builds a business alone”:

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” he said.

That one ticked me off when it made the rounds with my liberal friends on Facebook, but I held my tongue then. This time I feel compelled to add my two inflation-adjusted coppers.

Nobody who has any understanding about economics, taxation, and all the bureaucratic red tape choking business startups would ever make such a brain-dead claim. It sounds good on the surface to people with a particular mindset—that greedy plutocrats are helping themselves to public resources to build their own profit factories on the backs of everyone else—but it’s a load of bullshit, and it has nothing to do with the way things actually work in real life.

Let’s say Bob wants to build and open a restaurant, Bob’s Fried Opossum House. He has to first buy a plot of land. That means Bob is paying the real estate broker and the tax man. Then he needs all the necessary permissions and impact studies and health and safety and zoning inspections that come with building anything commercial anywhere, which means more fees and taxes to his local and state governments.

Once Bob has the red tape straightened out, he pays an architect to come up with a building design. Then he has to get that approved, which means more taxes and fees. Then Bob hires a construction company to put the thing together for him, a paving company to make a parking lot, an HVAC contractor to put in heat and air, another contractor to take care of the plumbing and sewage…you get the idea. Before the first bit of concrete is even poured, Bob has written out a lot of checks to a lot of people, and they all got to eat and pay their own taxes and mortgages from Bob’s business endeavor, all without assuming the risk that he has on his shoulders now.

Once the business is standing, Bob has to hire people to work for him. That means more paychecks, and more taxes: Bob’s share of his employees’ Social Security, Medicare, and so on. (Also their share plus their state and Federal income taxes, because they’re paying those out of the wages they got from Bob.)

By the time Bob’s Fried Opossum House finally opens its doors, a whole lot of people have gotten paid by Bob, and he has written a lot of tax and fee checks to government at all levels. Oh, and don’t forget that as a business owner, Bob gets to pre-pay his taxes on his expected income every quarter—something that should be a familiar to writers, a lot of whom file their freelance and fiction writing income taxes in the same fashion. And all the while, Bob has been working 100-hour weeks for a year and a half to get his Fried Opossum House off the ground.

Nobody builds a business alone, that’s true. But Bob didn’t make all those people work for free, and he didn’t make use of public resources without writing hefty tax checks for the privilege. Bob paid everyone, including his local, state, and federal government, before he even got to make his first dollar of profits. And Bob carries all the risk here. If his business tanks, his contractors aren’t going to return the money he gave them for their work, his employees aren’t going to give back their wages, and the government isn’t going to return the taxes and fees he paid. So why is it OK that when he’s successful enough to make a profit, some populist asshole politicians can stand up and say that “he hasn’t paid his fair share to society yet”?

There’s another thing that bothers me about the notion that just because Bob had his stuff delivered over a public road, and because Bob has hired publically-educated people for his business, that that somehow means that Bob owes society now. Like I said, Bob paid for the privilege—and suggesting that it’s not really his achievement because he used a resource which he’s been forced to subsidize all your life with taxes is tantamount to claiming that all business endeavors are therefore really a public accomplishment.

I think the only people who can say nonsense like that are those who have never started or run a business on their own, people who have eaten at the public trough all their lives and never had to deal with all the financial risk and the soul-crushing bureaucratic bullshit that comes with working for yourself.