The processes regarding the Grand Juries are so terribly flawed – and there is no ‘taking the fifth’! It is precisely the Grand Jury process that was so abused during the Aaron Swartz investigation.
P.S. I have officially joined the Evangelical Church of Kopimism.
Here is an email I received yesterday: it took me a while to blog it because I just did not want to think about it….it’s that bad.
Having lived in a totalitarian state, I can honestly explain the number 1 tool totalitarians government use for keeping control over their populace: pass laws that NOBODY can ‘not break’ at one time or another. Then, if someone becomes ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘too uppity’ or starts saying things the people in power (usually the apartchiks – the bureaucrats who make the totalitarian regime possible), they will selectively enforce the laws against them.
CISPA not only ends all expectation of privacy in ALL online activity, it also creates an environment where regular citizens will, inevitably, break one or another of its provisions: and THAT makes it a very dangerous thing!
Friend,
If you’re a Google, Facebook, or Twitter user, or if your friends are, you should be worried.
Today, Congress held a secret vote on CISPA, the modern government surveillance system that every website, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter could participate in, if it becomes law.
Here’s one important way to protect all that data they have on you right now.
Facebook supported CISPA when it was proposed last year. This time, even Facebook is saying the bill has privacy problems, but we still haven’t heard from Google or Twitter.
Will they let the government get all of our data against all privacy laws? Will they share your personal data with the government once you’re no longer able to sue them for it? We don’t know.
This is an important moment to get them before it’s too late.
That’s why Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis, called Google’s CEO himself to ask them about where they stand on CISPA.
We’re making headway — FFTF is delivering 300,000 signatures to CISPA co-sponsors one by one over Twitter. But the threat of CISPA moving forward in the House is very real. The bill passed out of Committee today and will be rushing to a floor vote next week.
Help your friends too and forward this email.
It’s your email; tell Google to support your right to keep it private!
It’s your private information; tell Facebook and Twitter to keep it that way!
Take an important step to protect all that data they have on you right now.
Thank you for everything,
Tiffiniy Cheng, Fight for the Future
P.S. want more awesome stuff like this? Can you kick down $10 to support our campaigns for Internet freedom? Thanks! Oh, and we also accept bitcoins now! Check it out.
CaspianReport is a YouTube channel I came across which has some very intelligent analysis of world politics from outside the North American/Western viewpoint.
As such, I’d like to bring to your attention their analysis of the current political situation in North Korea and how it might evolve:
Here is a humorous description of the background information.
It seems that he is eager to demonstrate his position as an appropriately humble dhimmi!
Yet another confirmation that Christianity will never stand up to Islam…
Perhaps he’ll become known as the ‘Dhimmi Pope’!
In other news this fine Easter, Cadbury gets ‘Halal’ certification for their chocolate Easter eggs, making them unsuitable for consumption by Christians.
Happy Easter everyone!
UPDATE: Here is an article showing the various labels used to denote Halal-certified foods.
And here are some links to sites that let you check which restaurants and stores are ‘halal’.
If you have not heard of ‘Donglegate’, you are likely not plugged in to the IT world – because anyone even remotely connected to the tech world has not been so lucky.
In a nutshell – Adria Richards, a non-technical person whose job was to make life easier for socially-awkward software developers (her actual job title was ‘developer evangelist’) eavesdropped on a ‘big dongle’ joke by a couple of socially-awkward software developers at a Python software developers conference and made such a public spectacle of just how offensive that was that she managed to get the guy who told the joke fired from his job. Anonymous – the hactivist group – took exception to her actions and targeted both her blog (where she continued to make a big fuss over the dongle joke and revealed herself to be an even more unstable flake than before) and her employer with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – until, that is, her employer realized that Adria was not, after all, very good at evangelizing on behalf of developers, making the world a nicer place for them… and fired her.
Here is a most excellent account of the event and its fallout.
And, since he’s been talking about feminism lately, here is Thunderf00t’s take on it:
Frankly, I think people like Adria Richards should never work in a position of influence or power over anyone – and hope she never does!
UPDATE: A couple of days before she overheard the ‘dongle’ joke, Adria Richards Tweeted a sexist joke about a male friend stuffing a sock down his pants to appear to have a larger penis.…’Nough said!
It would have been nice had the video also addressed ‘Constitutional Monarchy’, which is a law-based system of governance but different from a republic. Still, it is well done:
It seems timely that, just after publishing Thunderf00t’s critique of a particularly silly feminist and the comments to it (one of which, CodeSlinger’s, I had turned into a post of its own), I came across an interesting article.
In it, a self-described feminists recounts a talk by a former radical feminist, attended by (among others) feminists from modern academic circles. Her article is titled ‘Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover’. It is a most interesting read…
In it, the author, Emma Teitel, quotes the speaker, Janice Fiamengo, as well as gives her own opinions on the evening. I’d like to pique your curiosity with little quotes from both (or, rather, Teitel quoting Fiamengo).
The discipline has devolved into an “intellectually incoherent and dishonest” one, she argued, replacing a “callow set of slogans for real thought.” It’s man-hating, anti-Western, and fundamentally illiberal. “It champions a “kind of masculinity that isn’t very masculine at all,” and shuts down freedom of debate, hence the fire alarm. [the fire alarm was used in an attempt to cancel the event]
…
She referenced the male to female death ratio on the Titanic, and declared that “self sacrifice and heroism are not exclusive to men,” “but they are distinctive to men.” Students scowled behind their wayfarers. She railed against affirmative action, a family court system skewed unjustly to favour mothers over fathers, and the deep vein of anti-Western sentiment running through academic feminism that makes it okay to decry gender inequality in the West, and keep quiet about vaginal mutilation and honour killings in the East. [my emphasis]
The women’s studies crowd looked constipated. Fiamengo’s arguments weren’t going down easy, this one—her best—in particular: women’s studies “can’t be about the pursuit of truth” because it has an “ideological base.” Its goal is to push the ideology that women are victims and men are perpetrators. Therefore, any evidence to the contrary, regardless of its veracity, is unwelcome. In other words, ideology censors truth. “If you believe you are righteous,” she said, “you don’t challenge other views.”[my emphasis]
She also writes about the Q&A that followed:
Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.
A thoroughly thought-provoking read!
H/T: BCF
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 