lookin

And they call me snoopy !

Perhaps he stumbled across my February post. Could Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri have imagined, in their wildest dreams, that the destruction of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the rule of law could all have occurred within a single generation?

Sounds liked he prefers to be buzzed. By a long shot, my favorite pizzas are the take 'n' bake ones. Cheaper too.

For me, my user name above the F4F banner is the one that stays lit. It's my user name below the banner that switches off after a few minutes. The user name above the banner stays on, even though the site logs me out. I usually log in only on the Message Forum page. But, when I log out above the banner, it boots me back to the Main page. Then I have to come bage to the Message Forum page and log in again. Rinse and repeat. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't happen every few minutes.

Hito, the piece you seem to be overlooking is that the intentions of a government - or any organization - can change over time. Even if those currently in power remain committed to your freedoms, right up until the day they leave office, new officials will eventually be elected or appointed. And those new officials may not be as committed to the freedoms you enjoy today. What if someone decides in secret one day that you are a threat to the "Homeland"? While you may be unable or unwilling to consider that possibility, I'd encourage you to start paying some heed to it. History is full of examples of bad folks grabbing power from good folks, and of good folks turning into bad folks, and of folks who started out acting good and then ended up acting bad. Plenty of Germans were happy to see Hitler become a dictator, as he promised a renewed country with goodies for all but a very few. It was only after he became der Führer that the dangers of that form of government began to manifest themselves. Just because you're happy to open yourself up to those in power today doesn't mean you'll be happy if tomorrow's government officials become anti-freedom, anti-gay, or - Heaven forfend! - anti-Ferragamo. Unless we're all soothsayers, we can't predict that future. All we can do is try to set up a government that is based on the rule of law - law that we all get to know about, and law that we all get to vote on - and then fight like hell to protect that form of government. If we start giving up our active roles in how that government operates, there will be no shortage of folks who will be eager to mold that government to their own ends. If you are in a position to be one of the inner circle, you may be fine. But, should you find yourself an outsider one day, you may regret having surrendered your voice.

I'll say! My log-in used to last for an hour, at least. Now I get logged out before I can hit the 'post' button. And, by the time I get to the end of a long post, I can no longer hit the 'like' button. It says something about not having permission for that function. It's not even sure whether I'm logged in or not. In one part of the screen, my user name appears, just as if I'm logged in. In another part of the screen, my user name has disappeared. And I can't just log in again. First, I have to go to the screen where my user name appears, then I have to pull down the menu and hit 'log out', then it takes me to the main screen where I have to select 'Go to the message board', then I have to log in again on the message board. Then that whole process has to be repeated every five minutes. Not sure if these changes are intentional, or just something to keep us on our toes.

It sure seems there would be a market opening for foreign companies to begin replicating at least some of the services offered by U. S. communications and social media companies, and then adding a privacy guarantee that U. S. companies can't match. Not that foreign companies could yet replicate all of the communications infrastructure of U. S. companies, and not that they would remain forever free of NSA's tentacles, but they could certainly take some business from the U. S. companies whose brands are now being tarnished by their cozy relationship with the NSA. Even a modest flight of customers from the information sieve of U. S. companies to more secure communications through foreign companies with a stronger privacy story should get the attention of CEO's and stockholders in U. S. companies. Once these big-bucks campaign donors start seeing their bonuses and fortunes dwindle, maybe the politicians would start to get the message that U. S. voters have so far been unable to deliver. As for me, I've had to hold my nose the last few times I voted for Senator Feinstein. I'm not planning to vote for her again. In fact, I may not vote for any politician in the future who does not have a strong privacy element in her or his campaign platform. I'm also planning to cut back, just a little but whenever practical, in my phone use and to make a modest donation to the ACLU. Tiny steps, no doubt, but hopefully matched by others who are getting equally fed up with government intrusion into their personal lives. I'm willing to rethink my position if strong evidence is presented that these runaway surveillance tactics have borne substantial fruit, but I'm certainly not moved by mealy-mouthed statements that some unnamed 'terrorist' somewhere, somehow, was defused just as he was fixin' to stuff a cherry bomb up his ass and climb on a bus. Any politician or government official who thinks we are 'winning the war on terror' by dismantling the civil liberties of U. S. citizens might do well to look up the definition of 'winning'.

Bring back the short-arm inspection!

Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself.

TY, I hope this didn't come off as confrontational. I didn't intend it that way when I wrote it but realized, when I read it later, that it may have come across that way. I'm sorry if it did. I really am interested in what you and others think might be done before we find ourselves without legal protections. It's easy to think it could never happen, and I think the odds are against it, but I become less sure with the passing days. This is not a trajectory I'd like to stay on. AdamSmith, once again I'm grateful that you find and post these thought-provoking articles. I noticed that many of them come from The Guardian. I bookmarked their site a few months ago and will start reading it more regularly. Sometimes it seems that those outside the U. S. see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

TY, I hope this didn't come off as confrontational. I didn't intend it that way when I wrote it but realized, when I read it later that it may have come across that way. I'm sorry if it did. I really am interested in what you and others think might be done before we find ourselves without legal protections. It's easy to think it could never happen, and I think the odds are against it, but I become less sure with the passing days. That's not a trajectory I'd like to stay on. AdamSmith, once again I'm grateful that you find and post these thought-provoking articles. I noticed that many of them come from The Guardian. I bookmarked their site a few months ago and will start reading it more regularly. Sometimes it seems that those outside the U. S. see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

And who do you think will do these investigations? So far, I haven't seen anyone lining up to look into, let alone prosecute, these incidents that seem to smack of extralegal death sentences. My take on the article was that the author was concerned that extralegal activities carried out abroad are providing a template for extralegal activities to be carried out at home. As these appear in the newspapers with increasing frequency, but with very little reaction, I think the author can be forgiven a bit of hyperbole. Even then, it sure hasn't been enough to get anyone capable of launching an investigation to actually do so. If we won't so much as investigate, where is the hope that we will prosecute? And, if we won't prosecute, or even investigate, is it such a large step to actually condoning these activities? Anyone who rings the bell loudly to call attention to these possibilities gets a pass, from me anyway, for throwing in as much hyperbole as needed to get some attention.

Frasier, of course, especially during the Joe Keenan years.

I've already talked to police. Now I wish they would leave me in peace. They confronted me twice And were not very nice. It's the last time I'm coming to Nice.

If you liked that post, you may also enjoy this one.

Yo! Guess who failed his drug test with flying colors.

I used an older version of this one. And here's another one that looks like it might be better. But let me tell you that it was tedious. I think I was able to scan a half-dozen slides at a time, but each image had to be saved separately. Even in flat-out 'production mode', I doubt you'll spend less than a minute per slide. I did it because I wanted high quality, and the local scanning service was merely middlin'. Hope someone has a better suggestion. Or perhaps you could hire an eager college student to run them through for you over the summer.

As a general rule, I'd prefer my government to have fewer secrets, and to let me have more. It just feels a little cheerier somehow. The New Yorker ran an interesting article some years back, soon after 9/11, in which they contrasted Germany's views on government intelligence with our own, and noted that the Germans believed their government should be transparent to the citizenry, and the citizenry should be opaque to the government. They were reacting to the excesses of the Third Reich, of course, but it seemed like a pretty good formula to me. I worry about a government with a lot of secrets. First of all, there's the apparatus that needs to be put in place to make sure the secrets don't get out, and then there's the vulnerability that arises when they eventually do. And then the apparatus gets further hardened and a cycle continues that generally does not bode well for the masses. Another problem with secrets is who gets to decide that something's a secret and how they make that decision. Since it's a secret, we don't get to know the who, or the why, or the what. We just have to rely on faith that it's all good. And that's another trajectory that doesn't always make for happy landings. It's not clear, to me anyway, that someone in government who decides that something should be a secret is necessarily morally superior to someone outside of government who decides that it shouldn't. If we all start believing that government is the last word in moral superiority, then aren't we on our way to a dictatorship? And, finally, why should we take it as fact that exposing a government secret will necessarily cost human lives? Isn't it equally possible that exposing a government secret might save human lives? Bradley Manning's Wikileaks caused a lot of embarrassment, no doubt, but, in spite of the hue and cry, I haven't yet seen an analysis that his exposed secrets cost any more lives than they saved. In fact, I wonder what the body count would have been if the secret 'intelligence' that got us into the Iraq war had been exposed before Secretary of State Powell fired up the UN, rather than after. I guess, at this point, I have a lot more questions than answers. The only thing I'm fairly sure of is that the government has more resources for keeping secrets from me than I have for keeping secrets from it, even with guys like James Rosen 'conspiring' to level the playing field. Extra Credit Question: Why is it a 'conspiracy' when a citizen unlocks a government secret, but not when a government functionary locks it up in the first place?

Skid marks on my bed sheets make me crabby. Skid marks on my pillow make me gag. Skid marks on the duvet look so tacky. Skid marks nearly always are a drag.

Whaddya mean the sixteen hundred dollars went down the washer?

55 20 32

The average person has 0.14 grams of fecal material on their "perianal surface" that can rinse into a pool if a person doesn't shower first, according to the report. Perianal surface, my ass!

I'll do my best to get along. It could not hurt to chill a bit. To carp and bicker just feels wrong. Life's much too short for all that shit. I'll try to be a kinder fellow, Ignore all jibes, and let them pass. But if you plan to harsh my mellow, Please pucker up and kiss my ass.

My hero! Never even noticed that switch and must have inadvertently toggled it in a prior paroxysm of posting. Thank you!

It's a Philco Predicta which was introduced in 1959. The glowing knob below the rotating (!) picture tube is the VHF channel changer. I think there's an outside ring on it which tunes UHF channels, an unusual feature for the time. The TV's were very advanced when they were introduced and are quite collectible today.