Monday, August 19, 2013

Today's Internets - Very Kafkaesque.

"Did anyone ever imagine a government so scared of its own shadow? I can think of at least two people who did. One is novelist and essayist Robert Anton Wilson, who often wrote satirically about conspiracies. Any secret police agency, he suggested, must be monitored by another arm of the government, lest it be infiltrated by its enemies. But then “a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration...  So it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order” and so on. “In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.” The point applies not just to police but to any hierarchy with secrets to hide."

‘Daily Show’ Corespondents Hilariously Rip John Oliver on His Last Show - BroBible.com:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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"Hempfest began with an ominious feel. There was a security checkpoint, stocked with the natural enemy of the Pacific Northwest stoner: The Seattle PD. "It looked like the local cops were all fired up to harsh people’s mellow," wrote a Daily Beast reporter, "right as they walked through the gates and got their bags searched." Then cops, strangely, weren't there to confiscate smoking apparatuses or ounces of kush. They instead handed out bags of Doritos. Over 1,000 in all. Paranoid stoners looked for "suspicious powders" and other evidence of trickery. They found this hilarious sticker instead."

"It's an odd confluence of travel, updates, and location-checking, but it points out just how totally, irretrievably broken the idea of DRM and region-controls for ebooks is."


"NBC reports that senior US Attorney James Trump sent Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and his lawyer a veiled arrest threat when Levison shut down his private email service (used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden) rather than comply with a secret order to spy on his customers. Nothing more can be said definitively, because the order to Levison came with a gag order prohibiting Levison from discussing it. Everyone is pretty sure that Levison was served with a National Security Letter."

"The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National SecurityAgency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro."

"Theory #1: Native Americans are minions of Satan. 
Theory #2: A southern cabal killed presidents Harrison, Taylor, and Lincoln, and it tried to kill presidents Jackson and Buchanan. 
Theory #3: White doctors are conducting covert experiments on blacks. 
Theory #4: Working in secret, a conspiracy replaced the country's original constitution with a document that concentrated more power in the national government. 
Theory #5: The U.S. government deliberately undermined protest movements in the 1960s. 

Spoiler alert: The first two are fantasies; the next two are sometimes accurate and sometimes fantasies, depending on which version of the story you hear; the last is just plain true."

Korean Taekwondoist Throws One of the Best First Pitches of All Time - BroBible.com
"We’ve already established that baseball in America is a stuffy old boys club while baseball in Korea is a nonstop jamboree of fun and flair. If you need more evidence, here’s an example of some of the unbridled joy finding its way into the usually mundane realm of first pitches."


NSA Spying: The Three Pillars of Government Trust Have Fallen | Electronic Frontier Foundation: "First, the Executive. After a review of internal NSA audits of the spying programs provided by Edward Snowden, the Post lays out—in stark detail—that the claims of oversight inside the Executive Branch are empty. The article reveals that an internal NSA audit not shown to Congress, the President, or the FISA Court detailed thousands of violations where the NSA collected, stored, and accessed American's communications content and other information...

Second, the FISA Court. The Post presents a second article in which the Chief Judge of the FISA Court admits that the court is unable to act as a watchdog or stop the NSA's abuses...

Third, the Congress. Last week, Representative Sensenbrenner complained that "the practice of classified briefings are a 'rope-a-dope operation' in which lawmakers are given information and then forbidden from speaking out about it." Members of Congress who do not serve on the Intelligence Committees in the both the House and Senate have had difficulty in obtaining documents about the NSA spying. Last week, it was even uncovered that the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, failed to provide freshmen members of Congress vital documents about the NSA's activities during a key vote to reapprove the spying."


Bill Clinton continues his interesting relationship with words/truth, as a vegan who eats fish and eggs [truthfully, moreso just shoddy reporting...  still, funny.] - Bill Clinton Reveals How He Became a Vegan - AARP
"Once a week or so, he will have a helping of organic salmon or an omelet made with omega-3-fortified eggs"

"The U.S. is not a forgiving country, and most Americans believe in harsh punishment for serious crimes. I’ve no quarrel with that. But the principle of proportionality — really, the very notion of justice in sentencing — seems to have been overthrown. According to a forthcoming report from the American Civil Liberties Union, 2,074 federal inmates are serving sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes. Think about that...

The U.S. — a country that loves freedom, so I’m told — has virtually abolished trial by jury. According to one recent count, guilty pleas resolve 97 percent of federal cases that are prosecuted to a conclusion. Instead of bothersome trials, the U.S. has a plea-bargain system in which prosecutors not only bring the charge but also, in effect, determine guilt and pass sentence. As this astonishing assault on civil liberty proceeds, judges have allowed themselves to be turned into rubber-stamping functionaries, apparently for reasons of administrative simplicity...

In this system, everything — everything — depends on the decency and restraint of prosecutors. Most no doubt are indeed decent and restrained. (If that weren’t so, the demand for radical change would already be overwhelming.) But some lust after high political office and wish to make their mark; some are vain; some, as in any profession, are just bad people. The American way is to create checks and balances, so that the system’s integrity doesn’t depend on the incorruptibility of individuals. How strange that the country has made an exception for criminal justice...

You can tell from my puzzlement and outrage that I’m not a lawyer. It takes years of legal training to be acquainted with this system and not be appalled by it. Somebody who knows more about the law than I do will have to explain why plea bargains and mandatory minimum sentences don’t violate the Constitution’s requirements of “due process” and “equal protection of the laws,” or why life in prison without parole for a nonviolent offense isn’t an instance of the “cruel and unusual punishment” forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. You’ll need an expert to tell you why the Supreme Court was right to uphold a sentence of 50 years to life (under California’s three-strikes rule) for the crime of stealing nine video cassettes..."

"One day, he was pulled over for a traffic violation by a local cop who proceeded to display an array of puffing, threatening and abusive behavior of the sort we cover here. After an extended dose of this crap, my buddy turned to the cop, probably with a vein throbbing in his temple, if I know him, and said something to the effect of, "I work at X hospital in the emergency room. God help you if you ever end up there." The encounter abruptly ended on a note of detente. In this world, there are people it's dangerous to piss off, and that's as true for judges and police officers as it is for anybody else."


"I like to stay above the fray, but I really do want to refute all the common tired cliches that get busted out when people try to shame men from dating the young and hot...
“You just like younger girls because they’re the only ones who fall for your tricks! You like them because they are easier to manipulate!”
Let’s cut right to the core: Feminists say things like this because they hate young, beautiful girls and believe they are all stupid...
Girls are not stupid, innocent victims. They are predator, not prey. Girls of every age are the manipulators far more often than they are the manipulated. After age 24, women definitely do not get smarter about relationships... Besides, this premise is backwards. It is far easier to game older women into bed. They have less options...
“You date younger girls because you can’t get a girl your own age!”
Young girls being so in demand in the sexual market, any guy that can date one could easily pull an older one, he just doesn’t want to.
“No, really, an older woman would never put up with your shit!”
I won’t put up with her loose skin, baggage and jaded bitterness. Everybody wins!
“You’re intimidated by a strong, independent woman!”
Replace “intimidated by” with “not attracted to”, and you have the truth. When it comes to attracting a man, strength, independence and wisdom mean nothing. Youth, beauty and sweetness mean everything. Don’t Lean In.
“Younger girls are inexperienced, you should date someone older who knows what she wants!”
You see how most of the shaming tactics feminists use involve demeaning younger girls? Young girls know what they want just fine. Older women know what they want to: They want to be young again.
“Young girls are so immature!”
Age does not equal maturity...
“You date younger girls for your ego! You just want to brag about it because you’re insecure!”
Men date younger girls because they are hot... but any sense of well-being a guy gets from dating a young, beautiful, fertile girl is evolutionarily justified. Darwin says suck it...
“So you expect women to just go away and die when they get older? They have no value on earth?”
I am talking about sexual market value and attractiveness only. That you think sex is the only measure of female value says more about you than it does about me..."

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