Faceblock

And these Stinque Book Clubs? All me. He picks the book, I do the rest. Thankless.

Speaking of Star Wars…

Don’t fuck with a Wookie or at least the guy who wore the costume.
http://gawker.com/tsa-attempts-to-confiscate-chewbacca-actors-light-sabe-512212752

@blogenfreude: But who is this TED, and why is he always talking?

Writing as one who has no clue what he’s talking about, reading Snowden’s remarks re the immanent police state makes me think of Glenn Beck. Someone please edgamacate me more better.

@Benedick: What a coincedence, GB has cited him as a hero. What’s really appalling is the percentage of NSA work is done by CONTRACTORS! In my experience within and without government, 95% of the problems arose from contractors. Thanks private enterprise, you do a great job and it only costs twice as much.

@Benedick:

The interviews with Snowden explain what’s at stake:

Snowden: You can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk… But at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you. And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you’re willing to accept, and I think it many of us are it’s the human nature; you can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.
But if you realize that that’s the world you helped create and it’s gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied.

Greenwald: Why should people care about surveillance?

Snowden: Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

Then there’s the ACLU:

With this sensitive data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. The data sits indefinitely in government databases, and the names of many innocent Americans end up on bloated and inaccurate watch lists that affect whether we can fly on commercial airlines, whether we can renew our passports, whether we are called aside for “secondary screening” at airports and borders, and even whether we can open bank accounts.
Dragnet surveillance undermines the right to privacy and the freedoms of speech, association, and religion.

Also there’s the small fact that the nation’s “intelligence” directors have been openly lying to Congress for years.

I don’t know. I find him very peculiar. If I’d done what he did I wouldn’t be hiding out in Hong Kong. Or declaring that I’d go to Iceland for sanctuary since it’s loosely affiliated with NATO. It suggests to me a remove from, for want of a better expression, reality. As does his biography. And Glenn Greenwald seems extremely self-righteous.

Speaking as one given to flights of self-righteous assholery I recognize the signs. And I find the use of the word ‘dossiers’ extremely suspect suggesting as it does a physical folder full of physical papers on a physical desk. Which seems to be the antithesis of what’s going on. And if he’s got more to tell why doesn’t he tell it? If it’s all so desperately important why doesn’t he release it? What’s with the tease? I don’t feel this way about Bradley Manning who did, in an amazingly naive way, try to do something good for people who were suffering. I get a very different vibe from this Newton chap.

Here’s something fun, speaking of dossiers, I saw my very own FBI file on the desk of the London consul in 1977. It was about 2 inches thick. At a time when I was having a hard time coming up with a professional bio that filled all of one page. And I have been on no-fly lists. I remember being pulled out of the line in Toronto on a flight to Boston and being taken into a back room to be grilled (“So you say you live in the States, eh?’). Of course, being white and having an English accent I could show the border officials my wallet with drivers license, credit cards, union cards, etc, and call them fucking ridiculous. Not everyone can get away with that. But you know how I fixed it? I called my senator. His staff was dynamite.

And really, whether one thinks it right or wrong, surely we all know by now that every keystroke, every phone call, is logged. Can’t all that info be put to some use? Or have I got all this completely and entirely wrong?

@Benedick: I don’t think you have it wrong. The world we live in now doesn’t allow skeletons in closets any more. Every thoughtless word you utter on the phone or type on a keyboard, every stupid text you send in a drunken haze, every time you run a red light late at night thinking no one is watching: chances are it all goes into your electronic file.

Obviously somebody has access to this stuff. I believe the threat of making private information public will be used to keep people in line in both the public and private sectors. This looks like a perfect example of who is watching the watchers.

@Benedick: There are Daniel Ellsbergs, then there are Bradley Mannings and this guy. I think the latter are young, idealistic and (as you say) probably disconnected-from-reality versions of the former.

He had all that time to plan for this, and then went to Hong Kong? With designs on Iceland? Gimmeafugginbreak.

The data mining “reveal” doesn’t stir up anything except the Crazees who have another craw full of poo to sling at POTUS – who’s wife, BTW, did this on national television. How can you stay angry with Hopey after that?

BTW, he’s probs not in Hong Kong. If I were him, I’d be yellin’ from the internets about my Hong Kong hotel room and plans to move to Iceland… all from the safety of my Costa Rican mountain hideaway.

@¡Andrew!: exactly. I assumed he was in Venezuela or Argentina during his interview from the Hong Kong hotel room.

And don’t get me started about Cicely Tyson.

@Beggars Biscuit: What? I love that. It is history in all its freakish glory.

Which is also how I felt about Little Big League 2: The Second Inning,, incidentally.

I still have a Civics Class understanding of the Fourth Amendment, so yeah, I care about this shi—

OOOH, LOOK! NEW SHINY FROM APPLE!

@Benedick: Or her former bf Miles Davis from Bitches Brew on.

get to the sandbox, folks.

RIP Baked

I’d like to share what I mentioned to Ms. Cyn in that I inferred over the years that Baked really struggled for a long time, and I’m so sorry that it ended this way. I wish that there were something that we could do to ease the grief of her daughter, granddaughter, and her beloved dog; my heart goes out to them. Like many of us, Baked was lost and trying to find her way in this insane world. I hope that she is at peace now.