Guilty Pleasures – Scientology

Everyone has their guilty pleasures. One of mine is watching the Church of Scientology. They are so weird…

National Security Agency Wins – Groklaw Shuts Down

Groklaw

On Tuesday August 20, 2013, PJ announced that Groklaw would shut down. To quote her final post:

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too.

There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum.

What to do?

The whole NSA spying on emails thing came out of left field to most people. I knew a fair bit about it before it hit the news – I’d been corresponding with a variety of people who were nibbling around the issue from various directions. The problem was that they were all working on different angles, and everything seemed to lead into one direction, which seemed like pure paranoia.

Unfortunately it wasn’t.

Why I Know They are Lying in Steubenville – High School – Spring of 1971

 

The Steubenville Case has hit really hard. Here’s why.

Steubenville Update – Some Background for Outsiders

Steubenville Ohio, image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Over 26,000 people were on the live stream of the feed from the rally today. Many are from outside the United States, and may not have the background to understand some of the events. I’m not an American either, but my interest in law enforcement means I know a bit.

If I’m wrong at any point, please comment. I’ll post links where possible.

Faux Libertarians

The recent American election was troubling. Not so much for the results, which went as I predicted back in July, but for the aftermath, which is still playing out into the New Year.

What’s really interesting is that we are seeing the same complaints that we saw after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, just coming from the other party.

FBI Blows it – Barrett Brown Arrested

The FBI just shot themselves in the foot. With a cannon.

Running the Stats

Kleo and Me

Kleo and I have a fantastic stats package. If you run a Word Press Blog, I strongly suggest that you install Jetpack by WordPress.com and WP-Stats-Dashboard. Between the two of them, they’ll tell you most of what you need to know.

They are really useful for spotting odd things.

Occupy Wall Street – Take the Bull by the Balls With a Huge Pair of Pliers…

 

Mat Taibbi makes some suggestions. I added to them of course 🙂 I also changed the numbers just to confuse things.

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. (No Shit Sherlock.)
2. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
3. An additional point that needs to be added, is that no stockholder can be allowed to hold stocks, bonds, or other investment instruments of any sorts in more than one of any types of these. The penalty for doing so is a ten year penitentiary sentence in Club Fed, and a full forfeiture of the stocks involved.

Romas/COIN by Barrett Brown

This is a reprint of a report written by Barrett Brown. A lot of people think that Barrett is paranoid.

Doctor Who, Ethics, And The British Fee Protests

At this point I’m pretty certain that a lot of people are shaking their heads. What do the three things above had to do with each other? Lots actually. Let’s look at them.