lookin

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.

A couple of weeks ago, the formatting menu in the 'Post' window stopped working. All the buttons are grayed out. I can't select fonts, sizes, colors, or even bold and italic. No way to center text or images, no way to insert a link, and even smilies are gone. It's like all the tools that allow for any kind of expressiveness are gone. When the 'Post' window first comes up, the formatting menu looks normal for about a half-second, and then all the tools become grayed out and unavailable. I Googled all the terms I can think of for Invision board formatting tools, and I can't find anyone who has had this problem. I don't recall changing any settings, and I checked all the settings I can think of to see if I screwed something up. But no luck. As a workaround, I've been trying to use HTML tags, but it's a whole lot harder than just clicking an icon in the formatting menu. I see others are managing to format their posts, and nobody's bitching, so it must be just me who's having these problems. So what am I missing? Is there just some box I forgot to check? Thanks in advance for any help.

Gosh, so how do we know these posts are really coming from Lucky? What if someone - or some thing - has commandeered his account over here too? I'm feeling Lucky today, Dave.

A very generous offer, and quite titillating too, even though 'probity' and 'penury' turned out to mean something other than what I first hoped they did.

I just gargled my first Bacon Scope, And then rinsed with a great deal of hope. Now my breath smells so clean, If a trifle porcine, That I've ordered some hog tallow soap.

Gosh! I didn't see that coming.

He says he's just here in town visiting someone. My, that's some mighty big hair. And the shoes! I sure hope my Bubba doesn't take a shine to him.