January 2013

The plight of the "high-status/low-income" public intellectual
Masterpieces of 90's paranoiac cinema: They Live and The Matrix
Linguistic analysis can uncover Anonymous members
Mocking the father of (the term) "cyberspace"
How John McAfee out-smarted the entire Belizean government
"Rocket launchers" turned in @ recent LA gun buy-back photo op debunked
Even with less competition Barnes & Noble sold less books, media in 2012
 Homeschooling is gaining acceptance even among NYC bobos

December 2012

Jack Donovan on "Police State Liberals"
Contra expatriating
Reaping what you sow: SF murals being defaced by taggers
Soviet-era spy tech still spying on ex-satellite states
The long, strange (ego) trip of Anonymous member "Commander X"
Game show host talks about his sensory deprivation chamber experiences
 Obama should jail his opposition "like a third-world dictator"
Making brain cells from urine
Is it time to put a "may be dangerous to your financial future" warning label on graduate school?
 Experimental handcuffs under development can shock, inject drugs as well as restrain
Urban Outfitters buys garage sale clothes and resells them to hipsters
Items found between the pages of second-hand books
NTSB seeking to require black-box recording devices in all new cars
Defending the world, bankrupting ourselves
Small business owners, white collar professionals are today's kulaks
Amsterdam to create "scum town" neighborhood to exile its anti-social residents to
 Obama campaign still asking for contributions a month after winning re-election
Elites prefer to rule an impoverished citizenry to not ruling at all
 Fresh crop of "celebrity victims" making the mainstream media get real about SWATTING
 CA city official tells residents to "lock your doors" and "load your guns" after PD lay-offs

In a brave twist, Microsoft releases an ad for IE 10 that mocks those who hate Internet Explorer

The Limits of Libertarian Binaries [American Conservative]

Ex-mobster turned FBI informant, low-life crook, and cultural icon Henry Hill's obit [Breitbart]

There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. [Wired]

" 'Do what you love; the money will follow.' I doubt that." [Hooligan Libertarian]

The love affair teenagers and young adults have with technology doesn’t necessarily translate into interest in a career in IT [CompTIA]

Data brokers aren't keen to delete your personal data but they will happily sell it to anyone [Technology Review]

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik says 'prison is like dying with your eyes open'  [NY Daily News]

The story of an ex-CIA agent's legal problems after she kidnapped a terror suspect in Italy. Now she's wanted by Interpol [Foreign Policy]

What Facebook knows about you [Technology Review]

The American Jewish Future: Orthodox, Right-Wing, Poor? [The Volokh Conspiracy, JTA]

Detroit Corporation Counsel's lawsuit to void emergency state aid agreement dismissed by judge [Detroit News]

A Handgun When You Can’t Buy a Handgun [Gunsamerica]

Thursday's tidbits from the web

The story of students being harassed by Gay sex predators teaching at an elite NYC prep school over the years [NY Times Magazine]

What to do about budding psychopaths? [NY Times]

Failed recall effort in Wisconsin a victory for Gov. Snyder in Michigan [Detroit News, AnnArbor.com]

U of Washington researcher posits that crows have cognitive abilities equal to apes and dolphins. [Popular Science, Amazon.com ]

Where Is The Outrage Over the Domestic Use of Drones? [reason.com/]

The actual reason that mediocre but attractive talking heads continue appearing on cable news channels is: "...because however hard [they] try, they cannot outsmart their hosts (O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Dylan Ratigan, and Martin Bashir)."[Taki Mag]

Surfing the net

Two gangs of Detroit teens started a gunfight over who makes the best Kool-aid last week. Not kiddin'. That's just how gangsters roll. You can be shot any time over anything there. Seriously. [Huffington Post/Detroit News]

Surfin' the net!

Driver's licenses are not about driving a motor vehicle on public roads. That hasn't been the case for a while now. Driver's licenses nowadays are actually a De facto  national ID card. Some people understand this, but sadly most people do not. [Hooligan Libertarian]

Putting a bio-electronic "bar code" into each and every human being on Earth would make "society more organized", and therefore (presumably) "better" says some unknown sci-fi writer. Whatever. The statist bureaucrats can't even make the trains run on time let alone regulate human society. And even if they could I'd still be against it. We're not cattle. [New York Daily News] [Hat-tip to Infowars.com]


Popular Science has this story about the Pentagon's latest intrusion/intel gathering technology which is currently being field-tested in Afghanistan. Little golf ball-sized sensor devices that transmit data for up to two years. The snoops sure could have fun with that technology. Scatter them around and send an armed UAV drone to check any "suspicious activity". Scary.

DC Comics' super-hero Green Lantern is gay.  North Star is too, if you care. [io9]

"How Chemistry Stymies Attempts To Regulate Synthetic Drugs" [Slashdot.org/]
Make a molecule illegal and amateur chemists will build an analog to it. Every time you try and make something "fool-proof" nature evolves a better fool. Just sayin'. 

If you spy on the "governance class" it is a felony. Now, if they spy on you, well then it's: "Got something to hide citizen?" [Ann Arbor.com]

Our new enemy: The UAV (spy drones)

The under $300 UAV

Alex Jones at InfoWars has started a new sport; shooting down UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles AKA "drones") for target practice. Expensive fun too considering what drones cost but I take Jones' point. I don't want those fucking things flying over or around my house either. However a better way to take them down (besides the 12 gauge 00 buckshot Jones used in the vid)  needs to be developed. Those .33 caliber lead balls have got to come down somewhere after all and which is a real problem especially if you live in a city or suburban neighborhood. Maybe a DIY type of EMP weapon or some anti-aircraft "chaff" technology can be developed perhaps?

In any event it is probably prudent to start thinking about how to cheaply and permanently ground those things now, before the feds and local LEO types start wide scale deployment of these aerial snoopers. And look for non-government sorts like the paparazzi, bill collectors, lawyers, political operatives, pissed-off ex-spouses, unscrupulous business rivals, miscellaneous creepy weirdos, and other low-lifes to try their  hand at UAV spying as well.

If you're considering going ex-pat you should probably take Belize off your list of places to emigrate to

John McAfee, the millionaire anti-virus software company founder, claims that he has been continually shaken down for bribes and payoffs by the local politicians and cops since he moved down there CNet News is reporting.

McAffee claims that the local politicos and their minions on the police force are hitting him up for money in return for not raiding his home. McAffee's home has been raided by the Belizian cops at least four times he claims. McAffee  also claims the cops shot his dog during their last raid on his home the result of which he now faces illegal weapons possession and among other charges.

I think that this information might be a good reason to take that particular Turd-World location off my potential ex-pat list if it were me, Belize's great beaches and cheap real estate notwithstanding.

Whatever

* Teenagers are now using 3-D printing technology to fabricate brass knuckles says Popular Science. This does not surprise me. Me and my buds used to make dope pipes, bongs, brass knuckles, shivs, and pipe bombs, and other instruments of mayhem with the skills we learned in shop class back in the day too.

* I had thought BloggingHeadsTV was dead but apparently this is not so. I never liked to watch/listen to that site very much myself. It was like C-Span without the depth and Crossfire without the passion. I had understood that BHTv went on "permanent hiatus" when founder Bob Wright was hired as a regular blogger over at the Atlantic and so I took it off of my favorites list. Sure didn't miss it much, either.

* You can now lock down your computer so others can't use it when you aren't around by using an encrypted flash drive as an on/off key.

* Religious and political websites have more malware and other bad shit infesting them than do most porn sites says a report by the computer security firm Symantec.

Pot shots

My alma mater has decided that now is good time to start up a Jewish Studies program and so undergrads can now get  a Jewish Studies a minor with their bachelor's degree. Two issues: Why, with money being so tight, is the university even doing this? There are many better ways those funds could be used other than to study Jewishness. Second, this opens the door still yet further for every ethnic group, religion, race, or sexual preference and etcetera to demand their own "studies" program too.

A tech columnist at C/Net decries some guy shooting himself in his ample gut to test the effectiveness of his body armor (AKA  a "bullet-proof vest") and posting it on YouTube. I guess the thought that this moron is getting the attention that he seems to crave from people like the columnist and that it might encourage him or others like him to do it again or with bigger, better weapons didn't occur to Mr. High Tech Columnist.

If you put your Doomsday Survival Library on a tablet, laptop, or cellphone you don't have lug all those books around with you while trying to survive the apocalypse. But ah, electronics are also prone to failure, breakage, and need to be recharged at frequent intervals, so there's that. A conundrum to be sure.

Digital age pioneer Scott McNealy's admonition notwithstanding, I think it's a good idea to clear your Google web history ASAP because (as Google has duly warned us) "all your information and data is belong to us"(Google = "us") to do with what they will once their new [sic] "privacy policy" comes into effect this March. Time to just embrace the suck and opt out. Some privacy is better than none.

A fair warning: Two lines from a country music song by Josh Thompson:

"Our houses are protected by the good Lord and a gun/
You might meet 'em both if you show up here not welcome, son."

I'm thinking of having that stanza printed on a floor mat for my front porch. A gentlemen is supposed give fair warning and all.

Software bug in some home security cameras exposes the cam's live feed to hackers

"Within days of his revelation, readers had found more than 600 cameras through their web addresses, which included cameras inside businesses and children’s bedrooms. As more cameras were exposed, some readers posted screenshots from the cameras as well as Google Maps purporting to identify the exact location of the cameras." [my emphasis]              

Yikes! Read it all here. [Threat Level blog @ Wired.com/]

Friday potshots

How would we in America feel about having Iranian aircraft carriers "patrolling" in the Gulf of Mexico or Iranian paramilitary commando teams operating on the border? A little empathy test for the warlike neo-cons and their dupes. Just sayin'.

Trolling on the website of a county Sheriff's Department that is trying to find and arrest you is truly stupid. But some people have this show-off mentality and so they do. Go figure?

There is a bill in the NJ legislature now seeking to ban most handgun and rifle ammo. The anti-gunners couldn't manage to legally ban guns but ammo, they say, is another story.

People who desire privacy on the Internet may be terrorists says the FBI.

The strange addiction that control and power have on some people is just plain baffling, not to mention kind of scary.

Silly boondoggle or law enforcement theatre? Does it matter?

InfoWars and the AP are reporting that East Orange, NJ cops are gonna put red colored spotlights on telephone poles in high crime areas to shine red colored light beams on suspicious persons or activity to let the potential culprits and the public know that the cops are watching them and/or on the way.

I guess the crooks and thugs in East Orange have never heard of shooting out lights or wearing masks to disguise their identity. The cost of this bullshit is to be borne by the federal treasury of course.  Given the human cesspool that inhabits East Orange demographics-wise perhaps that is the case. However they will no doubt quickly learn and adapt. After all even amoebas learn from simple stimulus-response cycles. What a laugh. Scary and funny at the same time.

Beware the police-industrial complex too

Echoing the words of former President Eisenhower I wonder why the NYC based Police Foundation is so generous in funding new technology solutions as detailed here in this City Journal article. The piece references a mobile scanner set up so that the cops can run people through it like cattle in feedlot (or passengers at an airport) to scan them for guns and knives and other weapons so they won't have to do so much hands-on stop & frisk patrol activity but which tend to annoy the citizens. Being the cynical sort that I am I have to wonder if the directors of the Police Foundation have a financial interest in these technologies and hope to get some positive buzz for them via the NYPD and other first adopter PD's and who will then lobby Washington to make DoJ, DHS, etc. grants available to other PDs to buy it as well?

If a police dog can sniff around your car why can't it sniff around your house?

Asks poster Orrin Kerr at the law blog Volokh Conspiracy. One thing is for sure though; once the dog appears sure as hell the cops are gonna be rifling through your stuff quite soon.

Coming to skies above you soon

Police deployed UAV's. They are unarmed (for now anyway) but they are engineered to have the capability to be armed with a variety of weapons. The drones are to be put into active service soon in the skies above Montgomery county, Texas. (h/t: Slashdot.org/)
*

GM's On-Star service spies on you

A lot of people don't care for this General Motors service. For some very good reasons too.
*

Weblog

China's threat to America is economic not military (Mark Thompson, Battleland blog)
"Military relations are fundamentally altered, he argues, when the prospective foe is making 90 iPhones a minute for the U.S. and world markets, and American Walmarts are crammed with its goods...".

If  the US Gov would just balance its budget (and so quit borrowing money from the PRC) they'd be more vulnerable to Americans than we'd be to them. Just a thought.

Ex-Democratic Party goon "operative" charged with planting bomb in St. Louis attorney's car (St. Louis Today)
"A former political operative with a history of gun and drug charges has been indicted in the 2008 bombing that seriously injured a Clayton, MO lawyer."

WTF is does being an "operative" mean in this context? This guy worked on some Dem campaigns and stuff but his criminal convictions as well as this indictment was all strictly personal stuff unrelated to politics. Or so it seems anyhow. But the Reps would say, "but what if it was a Republican"? And they have a point. You'd never hear the end of it from the mainstream media types.

Someone super-gluing protractors all over Pittsburgh (Rob Beschizza, BoingBoing)
"One of the oddest things I've seen since coming to Pittsburgh was a protractor superglued to the stone in my neighborhood. It turns out that there are hundreds of them cropping up, sealed to surfaces so securely that authorities intend to charge whoever is doing it with a felony. Each is penned with a unique number, and tracking them down is becoming a local mystery."

One person's vandalism is another person's street art I guess. I doubt if the cops and property owners  see it that way though.

A documentary film on the Earth Liberation Front  (via Outside)
"For years, the ELF—operating in separate anonymous cells without any central leadership—had launched spectacular arsons against dozens of businesses they accused of destroying the environment: timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a $12 million ski lodge at Vail, Colorado."

One person's "environmentalist wacko" is another person's freedom fighter. But the feds don't see it that way at all though.  The ELF terror campaign compared with the much bally-hooed Weather Underground in the '70s didn't kill anyone and caused much more damage to their enemies. Weather Underground did just the opposite. Just sayin'.

Swedish doctors grow trachea from patient's own stem cells and then transplant it into him (Popular Science)
Kind of amazing. The best thing about this is that the patient can recover without the harsh regimen of anti-rejection drugs.

Revenge of the wage slaves: A movie review of Horrible Bosses (Kurt Loder, reason.com/)
Everybody (who is a wage slave) secretly yearns to kill their bosses.

Tips for talking to the police about your electronic devices (Adam Pash, Lifehacker.com)
A tip sheet from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Congress Whines, But Won’t Defund Libya War (Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room)
Gutless losers with no spine or integrity at all. At least 229 of them anyhow. Sheesh.

Weblog

Livonia based U.S. Rep. McCotter decides to run for GOP presidential nomination (Det News)
It's hard to see why though.

Anti-affirmative action Michigan Proposal 2 (passed in 2006) overturned by US Appeals court (Michigan Daily)
The usual suspects are crowing about this big victory. Good for them. But somehow I don't think this is over.

Suburban LA counties looking into seceding, form their own state (CBS-TV)
Fat chance of that ever happening but I understand the sentiment. Futile as it may appear  I support all anti-state activity. Was anybody predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1987? Nope, that was impossible. Until in happened.

Recent Ann Arbor shooting over botched dope rip-off begs the question: "When was the last time anyone got shot over a beer deal?" (Lee Higgins, annarbor.com/)
Enough already. Let people have their dope. Illegal black-market stuff like dope deals breeds this kind of thing. Let's redirect the drug warriors and let 'em get back to real public safety work. Peace and order
first, eh?

Portrait of a "professional activist" (Peter David Blaska, Blaska's Blog)
"Jeremy [Ryan] tells us he is 'vital to the overall movement' because 'I ... make the GOP legislators very nervous. My mere presence causes automatic tension in any committee meeting.' Now, after harassing people in the Capitol for the last four months, the lad is out of money, can't pay the rent on his admittedly expensive apartment. (He does not mention the $3,600 on 15 citations for disorderly conduct.)"
A full-time hell-raiser up in Madison, WI since last January Jeremy Ryan has now run out funds to pay his rent and and other bills and so now is begging for money.  Hope all his friends in the public employee unions and the Madison activist community come through for him. Of course he could always go get a job though, eh? Sheesh. Dipshit slacker.

Living and working in the "1099 economy" (Erik Pages, NewGeography.com/)
"We used to call it 'Free Agent Nation.'  Now, it seems like the new term of art will be 'The 1099 Economy.'   While the names may change, they all point to a phenomenon of rising importance: the growing number of Americans who don’t have a 'regular job'  but instead work on individual contracts with employers or customers.   These folks don’t get the traditional W-2 paystub at the end of the year; they report their taxes with the IRS form"

Google Chrome hits 20% global share as Microsoft continues browser slide (NetWorkWorld)
I'm not sure it's really any smarter to trust Google than it is to trust Micro$oft. Corporations are corporations. A pox on both their houses.

weblog

Everyone owning their own home is an idea who's time is past (W.R. Mead, The American Interest)
As one American dream dies another emerges. Happened before and it'll happen again.

Low wages, low growth, low employment: Brace for the age of contraction. (Ron Smith, Baltimore Sun)
Tell me some good news.

Amazing story from WW2 of a fighter plane being downed by fire from a Model 1911 .45 caliber U.S. service pistol!
(Phil Bourjaily, The Gun Nut blog)

So-called "dazzle" camouflage fools the eye better than the blend-in kind (Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9)
Doesn't fool radar, sonar, infrared or most other forms of detection though. Sounds like it was written by a English or Art  History major with no understanding of modern war technology.

 Shabaab claims American carried out suicide attack (Bill Roggio, Long War Journal)
"If Abdullahi Ahmed was indeed an American and did carry out the attack, he would be the eighth American citizen to have executed a suicide bombing in Somalia"

Keeping your communications secret is still possible (J.W. Rawles, Survival Blog)
But it's a lot of work. Seems more like something from a spy novel but all the techniques listed should hold up pretty well, provided you're not detected and/or captured that is. Interesting read.

Encrypted website lets you buy any drug you want to (Adrian Chen, Wired)
"Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics — and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals."

Wisconsin lefties to set up a tent city named "Walkerville" to create a semi-permanent encampment at the state capitol (Ann Althouse, Ann Althouse)
Madison reminds me of Ann Arbor in the way it often operates like a state within a state. And with it's large demographic of kooks, flakes, leftists, crazies, unionists, professional agitators and such like. Ought to be interesting. Either the public will get tired of this and vote the Reps out or that they'll get angry and vote more in.

German police training vultures to find bodies (BBC)
Makes sense.

Ten Great Things About Old Men (Gavin McInnes, Taki Mag)
"#10. THEY’RE THE REAL DEAL
While couch potatriots and armchair activists sit indoors screaming through their keyboards, old dudes are walking softly outside with a big stick. They’re not particularly fond of fags, but if the government decided all homosexuals must be killed immediately, the ragtag rebellion’s frontlines would be filled with old dudes. Platitudes such as, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” aren’t platitudes to old guys. They really will grab a gun and fight for you. They already did."