Archive for 2013
June 21, 2013
June 20, 2013
RADLEY BALKO: Welcome To The Police-Industrial Complex. “Want to make money on the drug war? Start a company that builds military equipment, then sell that gear to local police departments. Thanks to the generation-long trend toward more militarized police forces, there’s now massive and growing market for private companies to outfit your neighborhood cops with gear that’s more appropriate for a battlefield.”
WHILE LEAVING GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA SPEECH UNTOUCHED: Sens. Tester & Murphy’s Constitutional Amendment Would Strip Rights from Corporate-Owned Newspapers, Advocacy Groups, Etc.
DATING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: Gone Catfishin’: How I Was Lured By An Online Dating Con Artist.
AT AMAZON, clearance deals on watches.
RICH LOWRY: The Rand Paul Moment.
You won’t find him on any Federal Election Commission disclosure forms, but Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is the biggest in-kind donor to the incipient Rand Paul for president campaign.
Whatever its merits, the National Security Agency meta-data program couldn’t be better fashioned to play into fears of the government. Is it vast? Yes. Was it secret? Check. Does it arguably run outside the normal checks and balances of government? Uh-huh. Does it raise profound questions about privacy? Roger.
This is the kind of issue Rand Paul was born and (literally) raised to raise holy hell over. And it isn’t just the NSA program lately. The leak about the program came on the heels of revelations that the IRS was singling out tea party groups for extra scrutiny and invasive questions, and on the heels of the AP and James Rosen investigations.
Add in the gun control fight from earlier this year and Paul is nearly 4-for-4 in fights sticking up, in his view, for the first four amendments of the Bill of Rights. The only thing that is missing is the third, because no has proposed the quartering of troops in our homes — yet.
Yet, indeed. Plus: “Paul has that quality that can’t be learned or bought: He’s interesting.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Mother Charged With Murder After Allegedly Encouraging Boyfriend To Rape Baby. “In those text messages she suggested and encouraged some unspeakable things.”
GOOD NEWS: NASA’s 2013 Astronaut Candidate Class Is Half Women.
Bad news: NASA doesn’t have any actual, you know, spaceships.
NEWEST WEDDING TREND: Seminaked Boudoir Group Photos For Bride, Bridesmaids. Takeaway: “It was great because the whole point was to feel good about ourselves.”
AT AMAZON, Coupons Galore on Household Supplies.
REASON TV: Police Posing as Punks Bust Rockers: Don’t Cops Have Better Things to Do?!
“Don’t cops have better things to do? Well, yes, especially in a city with more pressing problems, like, say, unsolved murders. The Boston Globe calls the ‘painfully slow rate at which most killings are solved’ is one of Beantown’s most ‘intractable problems.’ So instead of playing pretend online, maybe cops could spend more time in the real world catching real criminals.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Is a College Degree Worth It? Yes, according to Bill Bennett — if it’s in “the right subject at the right place for the right price.”
Plus: “An unusually bipartisan swath of Washington — including Republican Senator Marco Rubio and House majority leader Eric Cantor as well as representatives of the Obama administration — has united in recent months behind a call for more data about college graduates’ salaries. Efforts are under way in some states to make that information available, at least for graduates who stay in-state after graduation.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, OUR PRESIDENT’S BUMBLING DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS WOULD INSPIRE MOCKERY FROM THE BRITS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Barack Obama bombs in Berlin: a weak, underwhelming address from a floundering president.
HIRE A VET: Amputee vet Alex Minsky returns from war, becomes underwear model.
Much prejudice against the disabled comes from dread of winding up that way. As prosthetics have gotten better, I think people dread losing a limb less, which makes them more accepting of this sort of thing. A nice side effect of progress.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Home Brewer.
IRS PUT TEA PARTY GROUPS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE, let union-related group slide by.
EX-WIFE WHO DIVORCED EXONERATED MAN WHILE HE WAS IN JAIL now wants cut of restitution money.
BIG BROTHER IS INVESTING IN YOU: Silicon Valley and Spy Agency Bound by Strengthening Web. “Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly.”
This is also why it’s possible that know-how from NSA projects found its way into the Obama Campaign’s vaunted Big Data operation.
AFRICAN TECH LEADERS NOT SO HOT ON GOOGLE’S INTERNET BALLOON IDEA.
For one thing, the service would only provide 3G connectivity, meaning that it would need to compete with cellular networks that are expanding and becoming ever cheaper to use. “In Kenya, most parts of the country have 3G access,” says Phares Kariuki, previously a technology consultant to the World Bank, who now leads an effort to build a supercomputing cluster at iHub, the tech startup space in Nairobi.
And even if Google managed to deliver faster speeds from future balloon fleets, they’d be solving the wrong problem, Kariuki adds: “The barrier to Internet adoption is not so much the lack of connectivity. It’s the high cost of the equipment.” People in poor areas simply can’t afford laptops and smartphones, Kariuki says, and generally prefer cheap feature phones.
Read the whole thing.
STACY MCCAIN: The Short Career and Sudden Death of Michael Hastings. “Details of the circumstances leading to his death remained elusive. While the journalistic world paid tribute to their late colleague, none offered any explanation of why Hastings, who married a former Bush administration staffer two years ago, would have been driving recklessly through the palm-lined streets of northwest Los Angeles in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning. Hastings had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, but there was no immediate indication from police officials that he was intoxicated at the time of his fiery fatal accident. The Los Angeles Times reported that ‘neither the LAPD nor the coroner’s department could officially identify the body found in the vehicle,’ which was ‘burned beyond recognition.'” Sounds like the beginning to a thriller novel.
NINE TOP TECH MYTHS, debunked.
GUN CONTROLLERS SEEM KINDA SLOPPY WITH FACTS: Oops: Bloomberg’s Gun Control Group Also Lists Cop Killers As Victims.
Although Mayor Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) has apologized for listing Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a victim of gun violence at their Concord, NH rally on June 18, it is now apparent that the “list of names” was pregnant with criminals and cop killers as well.
In fact, the New Hampshire Republican State Committee is pointing out the list also included Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer who went on a killing spree before finally dying in a fire after a gun fight with police. Dorner killed two police officers.
The name of Kevin Bailey was also read in Concord at the gun control rally. Bailey died in a shootout after exiting his car in Solon, OH and opening fire on police.
See, this is what happens when you focus on people who are “killed by guns,” without distinguishing between those who do, and don’t, need killing.