Out of My Mind for 5 August 2009

Freed! From a couple of months imprisoned in North Korea: Comrade-journos (whih is to say real, non-MSM journos) Laura Ling and Euna Lee. (More here.)

Big Pharma’s deadly fraud: The story and the proof.

Sub-cretinous idiots with too much time on their hands and no sense; read about them and their stupidity here.

A tiny bit of justice: Creationist owner of creationist amusement park busted for tax fraud; him and Al Cap[one…. He would have paid his taxes, it’s just that God told him not to….

The shame that is modern journalism: a pathological refusal to deal in facts and accuracy, everything must be undercut to the point of meaninglessness. Maybe the MSM’s infected by this pathology…? And here’s another, related example of their inherent corruption and deliberate dishonesty.

America: It ain’t what it used to be (which I of course credit to what I call the Raygun counter-revolution*.) We’re ever more subsumed which is to say we’re ever more losing freedom…. (*For every revolution, there’s an equally powerful counter-revolution of one sort or another.)

What makes ours the World’s Greatest Healthcare System!

The GOP believes there’s no problem for which tax cuts aren’t the solution. Bad idea (you knew that but here’s proof.) Republicans: Only good if you hate America.

Cretinous scumbag: Orly Taitz. Can’t someone please shut her up since the MSM seems to find her newsworthy? And if you don’t believe she’s utter garbage, here’s proof.

Murderous Christian scumbag? Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

So, the next Mac OS has more pre-orders on Amazon than Win7. What I wonder: What percentage of PC owners buy upgrades as opposed to just getting them with new hardware as compared to Mac owners.

This is cool! (Warning: Site takes forever to load.)

Stormy Thursday: Out of My Mind for 4 June 2009

Jeez, if you go by greatest harm to the nation, I’m torn whether Ronnie Raygun is the worst president since the Civil War, beating even Beloved Leader. (I refuse to go back further than the Civil War because of simple historical ignorance.) I contend that the nation’s elite — Big Business — developed a very screwed up attitude on Ronnie’s watch that resulted in the current Global Economic Meltdown. This is of course the worship of immediate profits at any societal cost: CDOs, investing in money-losing businesses for no good reason, taking on gobs of debt for no good reason, and so on and so forth. Dunno that Beloved Leader did quite as much harm….

Our freedom just took another hit. Some judge thinks it’s OK of FISA to unconstitutionally destroy our freedom. (Read this too.)

Fun! Learn how to make exploding drinks here!

Book of the day for pre-teen girls.

Watch the power of belief:

Genius chimps!

Learn about the real world beyond your computer here!

The world’s greatest health system insures that after your life is saved you wish you were dead.

Is this the world's greatest invention??

Proven: Bill O’Reilly accessory to Tiller’s assassination. More proof here. Video elsewhere on the site.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution Shot, Mortally Wounded

George Walker Bush’s legacy.

One report is here.

Glenn Greenwald’s knowledgeable and lucid analysis is here.

U.S. Torturer Confesses: Torture Doesn’t Work

Before jumping here to learn more, think about it: How could it except in a fluke, and meanwhile you’ve probably done far more harm than good. Of course, Our Leaders believed otherwise but really, do you want your kids to be like Our Leaders?

Google Knows More About You than You’ll Know. Or be Able to Google

Link.

Our Leaders Steal Our Freedom

Thank God George W. Bush is president!

Ars Technica:

Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target’s location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that “triggerfish” technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all.

Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone’s precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.

This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundationsued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI’s cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they’ve received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.

As one of the documents intended to provide guidance for DOJ employees explains, triggerfish can be deployed “without the user knowing about it, and without involving the cell phone provider.” That may be significant because the legal rulings requiring law enforcement to meet a high “probable cause” standard before acquiring cell location records have, thus far, pertained to requests for information from providers, pursuant to statutes such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and the Stored Communications Act.

The Justice Department’s electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices—which allow tracking of incoming and outgoing calls from a phone subject to much less stringent evidentiary standards—to gather location data. “By its very terms,” according to the manual, “this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities.Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones.”  

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s only with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 that the government has needed any kind of court order to use triggerfish. While previously, the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology. Under the updated definition, these explicitly include any “device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information.”

Sarah Palin Defends the First Amendment: A Fictional Version of the First Amendment

Then again, the modern GOP runs on perversion. So to speak.

War Room:

In a radio interview that aired Friday morning, Sarah Palin said Americans’ First Amendment rights are in danger. Ironically, it’s apparently the press who’s threatening those rights.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin said, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

That is, to be clear, a fundamental misunderstanding of what the First Amendment is about. Let’s review the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

To put it succinctly: the press can’t violate Palin’s First Amendment rights. If the government were to criminalize her speech, that would be a violation. But what the press is doing in criticizing Palin is exercising the First Amendment.

Greenwald has an analysis.

Big Business Protects Global Freedoms for Us with a Limp Noodle

Read how we will be protected by bluster and sweet dreams here.

Read an analysis here.

What Gets Censored? A Sex-Free Stick-Figure Comic Strip

Of course.

Read about it here and here.

How the Secret Service Protects *Us* When Not Protecting Beloved Leader and the Others

From CHARLES FISHMAN: Okay, let’s review. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post writes that the Secret Service has been preventing reporters travelling with Sarah Palin from entering the crowd at her rallies to interview attendees.

Then comes Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan to protest that it’s really not so. But now, it seems, even the Secret Service, of all respected organizations, is infested with Orwellian spin. Because right there in the interview he gave to ProPublica, Donovan admits that the Secret Service does *exactly what Dana Milbank accused them of*: It refuses to let reporters out of their Secret Service pen, into the audience, at Palin rallies.

ProPublica writes, paraphrasing Donovan, “Donovan said that at rallies for all the candidates, the Secret Service sometimes separates the press corps that is credentialed to cover the event—known as the pool—from the general public. That is for logistical and security reasons, he said.

” ‘ Being in a press pool gives them special access,’ said Donovan.
‘But the other side is that they have to stay together. You keep national press away from the local press for the same reason.’

“Any journalist can get around these restrictions simply by attending the rally as a member of the public rather than a part of the press pool, he said.”

Let’s review:

• The Secret Service has never been asked to restrict reporters covering presidential campaign events.

• The Secret Service does this all the time, at every event, without being asked, because you can’t have credentialled national political reporters mixing with either the crowd at events, or other local reporters, for security reasons. 

• In this way, the Secret Service provides those reporters with special access, which they must enjoy together.

It’s perfect, head-spinning, double talk. Why can’t the Secret Service –
which has credentialed and vetted the national reporters — let them into the crowd? Who’s security is at risk? The candidate? The crowd? The reporters? Does the Secret Service let the reporters go sleep alone in their hotel rooms every night, then rejoin the candidates in the morning — without knowing where they’ve been all night long?

Here’s an idea: Restrict access to the reporting platform to the reporters, 
but let the reporters with credentials roam where they may. All they have to do is make the bus at the time the Secret Service tells them.

This is ridiculous. And frankly, shame on ProPublica for not seeing the double talk as it was being issued, for not challenging it, for producing a headline that says the Secret Service denies bad behavior that it clearly admits right in the story. And why no followup phone call to Dana Milbank and other campaign reporters? ProPublica of all places should not be issuing Secret Service press releases. Link.