lookin

Mine comes and goes depending on whether I wear shorts or pants. My calves are pretty big and, back in my tight-pants days, they were almost always bald. But it's been coming back, especially now that I'm dressing for summer.

A local eatery that's been in the news lately is Bacon Bacon. Their former neighbors shut them down until they got a new exhaust system with a more effective filter, but they've recently reopened in a more porcine-friendly area. This being San Francisco, one of their big sellers is the LGBT. Little Gem Lettuce, Five Strips of Bacon and Organic Tomato with Herbed Goat Cheese Spread on Pullman Toast

Who ever heard of a wedding without liquor? . .. . . . Look closer. The groom's got a flask.

I've got my holiday shopping done!

Sounds like he hasn't told his partner what he's up to, so you already know there are potential trust issues here. You also know that he thinks the boundaries of friendship haven't been crossed, and you're inclined to think they have. Unless it's just sex you're both after, with no emotional ties beyond your existing friendship, those kinds of warning signs after three months sound like swamp territory to me. Although it may just be that you're a bigger bayou fan than I am.

Hito, I trust Obama too, pretty much, as I think it's foolhardy to put a hundred percent trust in any government official. Even with that trust, though, Obama will be President for another three-and-a-half years. Then it will be someone else. You and I may trust that person. Or we may not. But trust in an individual should not be the determining factor in whether or not our government keeps secrets from us, or spies on us, or abridges our rights as citizens. That's why we set up our government as one of laws, and not of men. I know that you and I know this, but it can't hurt to remind ourselves once in a while. When Edward Snowden exposed the fact that some men in our government were 'interpreting' the law, and keeping those interpretations hidden from ordinary citizens and from their elected officials and, perhaps, from the President himself, it became time for this whole process to see the light of day and to enter the public debate for the first time ever. As I hope it will now do. The 'interpretations' as they now exist, in my opinion, stink. And who knows how they might be 'interpreted' in the future? From AdamSmith's cited article: Secret minimization procedures dating from 2009, published in June by the Guardian, revealed that the NSA could make use of any "inadvertently acquired" information on US persons under a defined range of circumstances, including if they held usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity. Suppose, for example, that Rick Santorum becomes our next President. He was, if one can believe it, the Republican front-runner at a time when Obama's popularity was on the descent. And suppose he gets on his moral high horse and decides to go after prostitution. And suppose you and I show up in a call log one or two rings away from a 'person of interest'. Will you still be so trusting when you get your subpoena to testify in court? It's my natural temptation to think that things are going to keep going in a positive direction as far as civil rights are concerned. And I feel that way today, as I think you do too. But I'd be nuts to think that it's OK to start discarding the laws that got us here, and to count on trust in all future elected officials to keep us moving forward. We need these laws, and we need our Constitution, and we need to hold our government officials accountable for following them. As an old Russian (pre-Putin) proverb reminds us, Доверяй, но проверяй.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

A while back I signed up for one of those dating web sites where you fill out a questionnaire and they match up your profile with hundreds of others. Nearly every call I got was from a mental hospital. That and a guy working his way through college.

Now that sounds like a nice trip!

German companies to automatically encrypt emails Friday, August 9, 2013 BERLIN (AP) — Two of Germany's biggest Internet service providers say they will encrypt customers' emails by default following reports that the U.S. National Security Agency monitors international electronic communications. Deutsche Telekom AG and United Internet AGsay emails sent by their customers will be automatically encrypted starting Friday. Initially the encryption will only be secure between customers of Deutsche Telekom's T-Onlineservice and United Internet's GMX and WEB.DE services. The companies claim these three providers account for two-thirds of primary email addresses in Germany. Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann says the initiative came because "Germans are deeply unsettled by the latest reports on the potential interception of communication data" revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. It wasn't immediately clear if German security services would have a key to decrypt the emails. Well, it would be nice to know who can decrypt the encryptions. Still, I continue to believe there's a market opportunity for an ISP, somewhere in the world, to offer a reliable promise of privacy to its customers without jumping through extra hoops to sign up and use the service. And it seems this would be the time to start marketing it to potential U. S. customers. It would be nice if a U. S. company would take it on, but I'm not holding my breath.

Well, I should hope so!

Kirobo the talking robot rockets into space. Kirobo, a knee-high talking robot with red boots and a black and white body, has blasted off from Japan for the International Space Station to test how machines can help astronauts with their work. The Japanese-speaking robot, equipped with voice- and facial-recognition technology, was packed into an unmanned cargo vessel along with tonnes of supplies and equipment for the crew of the orbital research base. . . . At a recent demonstration, Kirobo said it "hoped to create a future where humans and robots live together and get along". Oh, my!

Why it's Edward Snowden on the run instead of James Clapper is beyond me.

The downside is that great posters are lost too soon to the ages. StuCotts now has only one post in the archives, and he had lots of great ones that will be fun to read again. I'd hate to have to trouble the NSA every time I want to find one.

Golly, did I ever land in the wrong thread!

I really liked this quote from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel : Everything will be alright in the end. So if it's not alright, it is not yet the end.

Stop!, he bellowed.

As it is the case with everybody-I-can-think-of's articles. If you can find an article anywhere that's complete, balanced, and gives a full picture, I'd be grateful if you'd post a link. In the meantime, I guess we'll just have to keep reading as widely as we can and doing our own critical thinking. Or not.

The next president of Egypt may be an el-Sissi.

Tomorrow, so they say, Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Palestinian lead negotiator Saeb Erekat will begin peace talks in Washington, the first in three years. I sure didn't see this one coming, and it's a triumph for Secretary of State John Kerry, who's been working diligently for months to get it to happen. He got the Israeli's to release 104 Palestinian prisoners, and he got the Palestinians to drop their demands for a prior Israeli commitment to stop new settlements and to return to pre-1967 borders. Not sure how he did it, but he did it. I won't begin to guess the outcome or how long the talks will last, but I'm sure glad to see them start. Anyone care to offer any predictions?

Gotta agree, he's used up his hyperbole allocation for today, but he must be wondering what else he can try to get us to sit up and take even a little notice of the privacy invasion and profiling story that's been served up to us on a silver platter. Perhaps he'll think of a better way to get our attention.

Nope. Peace Corps. More to my liking. Fairly low, but, again, no direct experience. This is another one of those questions that just cries out for a bit of context. I've come across other opinions that were so appealing, I've latched onto them as my own. Then there were some others that were real stinkers. Case-by-case is my motto.

Had you reversed the order of those two sentences, I'd be in full agreement.

Can't speak for ihpguy but it would sure be hard for me to drum up respect for an opinion that it's OK for our government to toss its citizens (even one - especially one) into an internment camp without due process. I wouldn't like being 're-located', and I'll bet it's a 'sacrifice' you wouldn't like making either, even if it came with all the food you could eat and all the fuel you could burn. I'll grant you it's better than being cold and hungry, but it's still illegal imprisonment. And the folks who locked you up are the very same folks who could decide one morning that, from now on, it was gruel for you - breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The point is, the moment our government starts behaving extralegally, that's the time to start getting worked up about it. Not tomorrow, and not next year. History is chock full of examples of folks who figured they would never be personally affected by the bad things happening around them. Until they were. Erosion of civil rights doesn't just stop by itself. It takes awareness that it's happening and a commitment to stop it in its tracks. Last week, I watched a program called Hitler on Trial in which a young lawyer named Hans Litten put Hitler in the witness box during a 1931 trial of SA thugs who had stabbed two leftist German workers. Litten's purpose was to expose the violent underpinnings of the Nazi party at a time when Hitler was hellbent on bringing it into the political mainstream. Had Litten succeeded, and had German citizens paid attention, imagine what future anguish could have been avoided. I'm sure I'm 'preaching to the choir' here, RA1, as I believe we see many, if not most, of these issues through the same prism, you should pardon the expression. It's just that I think this is a time for an extra dose of clarity, as there are still many folks who do not yet appreciate what the harvest might be when a government starts treating its own citizens as the 'enemy'. (And it was George Santayana who said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.")

RA1, I expect we're still pretty much on the same path, at least on this issue. If you get a minute, look at my post again. You won't see anything that characterizes this surveillance as 'fair', 'legal' or 'Constitutional'. And the only thing equal about it is that all of us are getting our information hoovered up at the same time. What the NSA so far has been able to 'work around' is the issue of profiling. And that's because all the profiling is done behind a black curtain in Utah. It was real clear when we were profiling Japanese citizens seventy years ago because we kept them behind barbed wire. And it was real clear when we were profiling Muslims in New York because the cameras were mounted right outside their mosques. It took a while for the penny to drop and, if it hadn't been for AdamSmith's most estimable opening post, it would have taken a while longer, but it's pretty clear to me now that the 'data mining' that goes on in Bluffdale is profiling, pure and simple. Doing nothing more than mapping folks' phone calls creates a web of contacts with, for example, a Muslim-of-interest in the middle, and many rings of law-abiding Muslim citizens all around. And the FISA court, if it's even consulted, can expand the ring any time it sees fit, and give the OK for listening to phone calls. If the government actually said it was going to create a map of all U. S. Muslim contacts, there'd be a hue and cry, just as there eventually was with the Japanese camps, and just as there eventually was with snooping on Muslims in New York. And if it actually said it was profiling Tea Party Republicans or Progressive Democrats, which is quite doable with existing technology, the din would never die down. But the profiling that goes on in Bluffdale is hidden behind layers of secrecy and the majority of us haven't yet managed to give a shit. In fact, lots of folks think Edward Snowden should be put in jail for even calling it to our attention. And if the NSA ends up getting away with it, plus other stuff we may never even hear about, I'm going to call that a civil liberties workaround for the ages.