Monday links
Monday, May 5th, 2014- JPFO has a brand-new Twitter feed managed by the amazing Nicki.
- Obama’s war on government watchdogs.
- Very nice tribute to Don Kates.
- Of course the growing cybermilitary will never be used against thee and me. Never. How could you even think such a thing? But now that you have thought such a thing, you can be sure that the NSA, the Pentagon, and a whole bunch of rich government contractors know what to do about it. (H/T H)
- But while we’re on the subject: “What a toilet hoax can tell us about the future of surveillance.” Eeeeeew.
- In other non-news: government has made the country inept and the individuals involved with government immoral. (From the interesting-sounding book, The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government.)
- To really screw things up it takes a computer — and a 50-year-old spyplane.
- And in your awwwwwww news for the day: teenager takes his great-grandma to the prom.
- Now if you need an antidote to all that sappiness, here’s a laugh.
Share or Bookmark
May 5th, 2014
You had me worried with the tribute to Don Kates, but I see now it is to his continuing work, phew!
May 5th, 2014
“…as if our only choice, as comedian Jon Stewart put it, is that “government must go away completely—or we must be run by an incompetent bureaucracy.”
Well, yes, those are exactly the only honest choices. Either people take ownership/responsibility for their lives and dependents, or continue giving others the power to control and abuse them.
No non-voluntary government has any legitimate authority to control anything or anyone. Most people are conditioned to believe that this “authority” exists and is legitimate, somehow, and so grant the “rulers” that power, even when they complain about it or are greviously harmed by it.
But that power can’t really be “limited.” A is A. You either own youself or you don’t.
May 5th, 2014
Well, at least the monkeywrenchers now know how to screw up the ATC system: Just set your transponder to the wrong mode. (When I saw that headline the other day, I thought it would turn out that the plane had an activated ECM pod running — saw that happen in New Mexico with an F-15; lots of fun.)
May 6th, 2014
Don Kates is a hero!
I still have a copy of his Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out that I got back in 1979, when it first came out. It was my first breath of fresh air after ten years of looking for gun-rights facts. Just the fact that most of the contributors were pro-gun-control until their own research gave them unexpected results was a game-changer. The book was the cornerstone of gun-rights research, and what Don and others built on it is today our citadel of facts. Anti-gun researchers, in contrast, are simply unarmed.
Then there’s the political side of the game. [sigh] I received an email yesterday from the FBI warning me that my computer was compromised, and asking for personal information they needed to help me fix it. My first thought was, “How dumb do these clowns think I am? The real FBI would have my information from the NSA.”
“But there’s hope” category: Armed good Samaritan comes to the aid of purse-snatching victim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzekv74f-cI
Listen to how the newsheads cover the story, and the person-on-the-street comments.
True, it’s Texas, but it’s deep blue Houston, Texas. Wow.