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Pat Condell: Our crippling fear of the truth
July 5, 2013 — xanthippaEFF Sues NSA, DOJ Over Secret Surveillance Program
June 24, 2013 — xanthippaWhile on the topic, the Western Center for Journalism asks if, perhaps, some of this NSA-collected material might have been used to influence Chief Justice Roberts to change his vote at the last minute on Obamacare.
And if you still cling to the foolish and long debunked ‘I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to worry about’ fallacy, please, consider the following book: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate. Here is an excerpt from a review of the book:
‘The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.’
After all, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student, faced 2 felony charges of bomb-making and was to be tried as an adult for a school science-experiment that produced a ‘pop’, in which nobody was hurt and no damage happened – only popular outcry forced the authorities to eventually drop the charges.
And, of course, who can forget why ‘the authorities’ kept such a concise log on citizens’ activities in Fahrenheit 451! If they could not catch the real culprit, an early-morning dog-walker would be a suitable substitute… (Yes, it is since having read this book in English that I cannot bring myself to use the word ‘fireman’ and instead use ‘fire-fighter’.)
And, if you think that ‘just’ collecting metadata does not tell ‘the regime’ a lot about you, please, consider this interesting, humorously written article which graphically demonstrates how the analysis of metadata would have helped identify and ‘neutralize’ Paul Revere.
P.S. In the above video, they say that when the EFF asked the US government to clarify how they were interpreting the laws, they were told the answer was ‘classified’. Consider the implications of that! How can you possibly follow the laws if you are not permitted to know how the government will enforce them? Do you still think you have ‘nothing to hide’?!?!?
Megaupload data massacre
June 19, 2013 — xanthippaKim Dotcom is charged with having facilitated a large scale piracy operation with his Megaupload, where people uploaded and stored their own, personal files. He faces 20 years in prison, if convicted, on a multitude of charges.
His primary defense had been that the vast majority of the data stored on his servers was of personal nature or backups of business deals and only a tiny percentage held copyrighted material. The US Department of Justice had told the owner of the servers that Megaupload had rented for the storage that since the DOJ has enough data to prosecute Kim Dotcom, they can proceed to delete the files. Kim Dotcom protested on two grounds: the data stored in these servers was the personal intellectual property of his customers and nobody had the right to deprive them of it, and he needed the data for his defense.
Now, without warning, all the data had been deleted…
‘The information stored on the dormant servers – “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property” – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.
“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter.
Lawyers representing his former company “have repeatedly asked Leaseweb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the US,” he added. ‘
Yeah – go ahead and defend yourself – now that the evidence in your favour had been destroyed!
Kim Dotcom also said:
“My goal is, within the next five years, I want to encrypt half of the Internet. Just re-establish a balance between a person – an individual – and the state,” Dotcom said in an interview with RT. “Because right now, we are living very close to this vision of George Orwell and I think it’s not the right way. It’s the wrong path that the government is on, thinking that they can spy on everybody.”
And you wonder why the US government is targeting him?!?!?
US Supreme Court rules silence may be used as evidence of guilt
June 17, 2013 — xanthippaEnd well, this will not…
According to the 5-4 split US Supreme Court ruling, refusing to answer questions and remaining silent can indeed be used as evidence of guilt in a court of law, if you have not had your Miranda rights read to you prior to the questioning.
Gee, how could this possibly go wrong?
I am speechless (no pun intended)!
UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix
June 10, 2013 — xanthippaWhat was that about government coercion?
And those pesky ‘free markets’?
Adam Kokesh Arrested at Smoke Down Prohibition: Joint Summit with President Choom
June 10, 2013 — xanthippaWhat was that about government coercion?
Milton Friedman – Free Markets and Human Freedom
June 10, 2013 — xanthippaParticularly important now…
As the one branch of the US government that actually listens to its people – the NSA – collects information about everyone, many people are saying that if a person is not doing anything illegal, they have nothing to fear from the loss of privacy. If you read this blog regularly, you know my contempt for this mode of thinking, because…
The more you know about someone, the more you know what is important to them and how they make their decisions – the more easy it will be for you to coerce them.
Knowledge is power…always was, always will be. And, even the most innocent things, strung together in certain ways and presented in a spun way, can make a person look guilty of something if the government decides they don’t like the way they are complaining about something.
Milton Friedman has it right – freedom is being free of coercion.
Dependency on government for services – from public transport to medicare to food stamps – opens one to easier and easier coercion, as does the loss of privacy. That is why totalitarians always foster dependence and erode privacy.
And that is corruption of freedom!
Thunderf00t: Feminism versus FACTS (Part 3, RE Damsel in distress II)
June 6, 2013 — xanthippaWhen I was about 14 years old, my parents hosted a dinner party. One group of their guests was a family much like ours: mother, father and a daughter, an only child. Except that the other family’s daughter was about 5 years my senior and, while I was in High School, she was already attending University.
During the meal, the matriarch of this guest family, with an indulgently patronizing smile, responded to something my dad had said with: “How can you say that, with two fine young feminists sitting at the table?”
Well, that got my hackles up!
I immediately responded with (loosely translated to English): “I am no such thing as a feminist! Please, don’t insult my intelligence by calling me one!”
Which seemed to puzzle my parents’ guests (both of whom [the parents] held doctorates in Physics): they could not possibly imagine a young woman who isn’t driven by her immature teenage rebellion into the foolishness that is ‘Western feminism’. Their own daughter was, indeed, a full blown feminist and a Marxist to boot – and, to the best of my knowledge, has remained so till now…
OK, it was one of my Aspie moments, I had embarrassed my parents and all that. Jaws dropped all around – perhaps due to the passion with which my statement was delivered – and, looking back, my parents had a hard time getting the conversation back into the ‘safe’ zone.
Yet, even at the age of 14, I recognized and despised – to the core of my being – the hypocrisy of modern-day Western feminists who, far from attempting to create a ‘level playing field’ where every individual is treated equally, regardless of where they fall in the demographics game, were all about a power/money grab for a specific snotty elite…a corruption of an ideal if there ever was one!
I, for one, considered myself ‘an equalist’ – someone who despises special privileges for anyone. for any reason. The rules of life (aka ‘the laws of the land’) had to apply to everyone equally!
After all, that is why we came to Canada: so my family would no longer be persecuted because of my father’s beliefs (not actions, just beliefs). Where teachers would not regularly single me out because of my pigmentation, my pale skin and hair and eye colour – ‘just the king of kid the Nazis would have liked – unlike the rest of my classmates, whom they would have gladly have exterminated’: a statement my grade 3-5 homeroom teacher made, in class, several times week, and which inevitably led to a school-yard beating for me…at least, until I learned how to fight back…
So, I guess I learned the hard way to wish for the rules to apply to everyone equally – even to pale freaks like me! And, I had expected that immigrating to a country with a heritage of liberal democracy, like Canada, would provide that!
How very Aspie of me…
The Cultural Marxists – led/bullied by the ‘feminists’ – had corrupted the spirit of liberal democracy in Canada long before I got here.
It saddens me to see so many smart people fall for their scam.
Yet, I am glad Thunderf00t is not one of them!
Benghazi? We don’t know nothing about no Benghazi!!!
May 10, 2013 — xanthippaUPDATE: The ever-eloquent Mark Steyn explains why it does, indeed, matter.
Of course reality matters…
And a bit of the testimony here:
It would be simply sad if it were not so dangerous…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 