Category: Uncategorized

Federal interference: international edition

The unanticipated consequences of the NSA’s insane global spying are beginning to bite US corporations in the backside:

Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they’re requiring – in writing – that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.

In Canada, a pharmaceutical company and government agency have now both added language to that effect to their contracts with suppliers, as did a grocery chain in the U.K., according to J.J. Thompson, chief executive officer of Rook Consulting, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based security-consulting firm. He declined to name the companies, which are using Rook to manage the segmentation and keep the data out of the U.S.

Thompson said the language began appearing in contracts over the past couple weeks, and could be an early indicator of things to come as businesses adapt to a landscape altered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks. Documents leaked by Snowden indicate that the NSA has tapped fiber-optic cables abroad, circumvented or cracked encryption and is massively collecting telephone records and Internet traffic. Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo were among 15 technology companies that asked President Barack Obama Dec. 17 to restrain the spy programs. Cisco said Nov. 13 that NSA spying has caused delays to networking equipment orders.

U.S.-based technology companies face a serious threat. The NSA disclosures may reduce U.S. technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion, or 25 percent of information technology services, by 2016, according to Forrester Research Inc., a group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This isn’t a hypothetical threat. Already funds are indicating that they disdain US owners and startups are building their business models around the assumption that no one outside the USA will want to use software services beholden to the US government. The USA is in the ironic state of professing free trade in goods while laboring hard to ensure that no one wants to utilize its services.

The extent of the effects will take some time to become apparent, but the problem is that once they become clear, there will be no returning from them. I suspect the revelation of the NSA spying, and not the Iraq or Afghanistan invations will one day be seen as the Peak Empire point for the USA.

Drunk with authority

The way the authority-drunk New Model Police are behaving these days is making even veteran military policemen nervous:

For the past fifteen years, I have worked every day on the same very small military installation as a contractor. This morning, as I was approaching the main gate, when I started off after the stoplight, I didn’t shift upshift. So, the Goat was just wailing that sweet V8 growl as I approached the gate. About fifty yards from the gate, I slowed down, rolled down my window, and had my ID outside the car as I approached. Usually, there are civilian DoD police at the gate, but this morning, it was manned by a reservist, a 2nd Class Master at Arms—the Navy’s equivalent to Military Police. We had a brief conversation that went, as nearly as I can remember it like this:

PO2: (Snippy) Are you running late this morning?

Me: No.

(At this point, I could instantly see that my answer displeased him.)

PO2: (Scowling) You need to keep your speed down.

Me: I always observe the speed limits when I’m on the installation.

PO2: (Waving me through) You need to keep your speed down off-base, too.

Me: (Starting to drive away) What happens off-base isn’t your jurisdiction.

I got to my office, turned on my computer, and went into the break area to warm up a couple of delicious whole-wheat Eggos. While I was standing in the kitchen, a uniformed DoD police officer walked in and asked me if I owned the Red GTO. When I said I did, he then asked for my driver’s license. I asked, since I wasn’t operating a motor vehicle, if I was required to show it to him. (In CA, you are not required to do so when not operating a vehicle, nor are you required to show an ID otherwise. It’s different on military bases, of course, in that you are required to show an ID).

When I gave it to him, he then began to tell me how bad my attitude was, and how I should be more respectful of the police, what with them having such a hard job and all. I said that, when it came to respect, maybe the gate guard should’ve been a little less snippy. He said they didn’t need me making smart remarks about their jurisdiction, because they have a close relationship with civilian law enforcement, and he himself, had worked for Atlanta PD for fifteen years. I denied driving at an excessive speed when I approached the gate, said that my comment about jurisdiction was completely valid and that did not have the authority to issue traffic citations off-base, and that if they felt they needed to call CHP to give me a citation, they should do so. Otherwise, he should present me with a citation or arrest me for a military-related offense. Failing that, I was uninterested in further conversation. He seemed a bit upset when he left.

About twenty minutes later, two more DoD policemen came into my office….

This guy made two mistakes. Police are like children; they absolutely hate to hear the word no, especially from someone they consider an inferior. If the guy had simply smiled and said “I hope not”, he would have been fine. Then he compounded his error by twice contradicting the gate guard.

Lesson: don’t ever talk back to police or contradict them. Don’t say any more than you absolutely have to. If they start asking you questions, don’t answer except to apologetically tell them you are invoking your right to remain silent as well as your right to record their interactions with the public. You don’t have to actually be recording anything for that to force them to start behaving; it’s actually better if they have no idea where your putative recording device is.

It’s probably not a bad idea to have a copy of the relevant recording law or statement by local public officials about the legality of such laws in your jurisdiction laminated in your wallet which you can hand them along with your ID.  Below are the laws that govern 20 different states. If anyone wishes to provide information on the rest, I will put them all together in a summary post, complete with the relevant legal citations for printing out and carrying.

The U.S. Courts of Appeals have recognized the
First Amendment right to record the police and/or other public
officials:

MA, ME, NH, RI

  • First Circuit Glik v. Cunniffe,
    655 F.3d 78, 85 (1st Cir. 2011) (“[A] citizen’s right to film
    government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the
    discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and
    well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment.”); Iacobucci v. Boulter,
    193 F.3d 14 (1st Cir. 1999) (police lacked authority to prohibit
    citizen from recording commissioners in town hall “because [the
    citizen’s] activities were peaceful, not performed in derogation of any
    law, and done in the exercise of his First Amendment rights[.]”).

IL, IN, WI

  • Seventh Circuit ACLU v. Alvarez,
    679 F.3d 583, 595 (7th Cir. 2012) (“The act of making an audio or
    audiovisual recording is necessarily included within the First
    Amendment’s guarantee of speech and press rights as a corollary of the
    right to disseminate the resulting recording.”).

AK, AR, CA, HI, ID, MO, OR, WA

  • Ninth Circuit Fordyce v. City of Seattle, 55 F.3d 436, 438 (9th Cir. 1995) (assuming a First Amendment right to record the police); see also Adkins v. Limtiaco,  _ Fed. App’x _, No. 11-17543, 2013 WL 4046720 (9th Cir. Aug. 12, 2013) (recognizing First Amendment right to photograph police, citing Fordyce).

AL, FL, GA 

  • Eleventh Circuit Smith v. City of Cumming,
    212 F.3d 1332, 1333 (11th Cir. 2000) (“The First Amendment protects the
    right to gather information about what public officials do on public
    property, and specifically, a right to record matters of public
    interest.”).

ILLEGAL TO RECORD POLICE

MN Ramsey County
TX Senate Bill 897 introduced, but not passed.

Merry Christmas

Treats will be given. Tails will be wagged. A gift day. A holiday… and a new bed in front of the radiator!
– Christmas from the perspective of a viszla

A Very Merry Christmas to you all. I encourage you to embrace the joy and to permit yourself see it again through the eyes of your childhood.

UPDATE: Spacebunny won Christmas this year. She gave me a PAL Intellivision with 12 games, the third volume in the Cambridge Ancient History series, and as the coup de grâce, a newly published book by Umberto Eco that I hadn’t even heard about, The Book of Legendary Lands, as well as the latest collection of his essays.

A less material Christmas

It appears Americans are cutting back on their Christmas spending this year:

That it has been one of the most lacklustre shopping seasons in recent years has already been repeatedly covered, with average holiday spending expected to decline for the first time since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, all this despite record promotions and an ever earlier start to Black Friday. However, while the early start to shopping season has missed expectations, driven primarily by an unprecedented weakness in traditional bricks and mortar outlets, there was some hope that the last stretch into Christmas and the New Year would provide a much needed, last minute bump. Those hopes were dashed last night when Shoppertrack reported that retail traffic plummeted by an unprecedented 21% last week, and in-store sales decreased 3.1% from the year before, dashing retailers’ hopes that the final stretch before Christmas would offset soft sales numbers earlier in the holiday shopping season.

Now, I wonder why that might be? I know we’re celebrating in a more modest fashion than in previous years. And I’m not at all surprised that we’re not the only ones.

Holiday survival guide

It’s Christmas Eve. The round of parties are reaching their climax and
the gift-giving is about to begin in earnest. It may be helpful,
therefore, to consider the how to approach the social aspects of the
celebrations from a socio-sexual perspective.

If you are a man:

  1. Remember that the women are putting in a lot of work and are feeling
    a lot of stress. This is not the time to remember things at the last
    minute or lament how things were done differently when you were a child.
    Avoid throwing curve balls.
  2. Don’t tell her to relax. She’s not going to do so anymore than you
    are during a hard fought basketball game. Holiday-hosting can perhaps be best understood as a
    competitive sport for women, even if the only competitors are in her
    mind.
  3. Ask her if there is anything you can do twice per day, once in the
    morning and once in the afternoon. Simply having someone willing to run
    out to the store for her once or twice, if necessary, can save considerable time and reduce any tensions.
  4. Pour yourself a glass of wine as soon as it gets dark. Offer her one. She’ll probably need it.
  5. Don’t let her get away with snapping at you or anyone else. The objective is to be helpful and considerate, not a doormat.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

And with regards to #7 for the women, the most gracious response to a present I’ve ever seen was when a little child unwrapped a present and discovered a box that said it contained a potato ricer. This was not because the present was, in fact, a potato ricer, but because European retailers are considerably stingier with boxes than their American counterparts and the toy was inside the potato ricer box.

“A potato weisso? I’ve always wanted a potato weisso! What’s a potato weisso?”

An encouraging start

I was pleased to observe this morning that Quantum Mortis has officially gotten off to a better start than Selenoth. In the first month ATOB and AMB were available, they sold 957 copies. As of December 24th, 1,002 copies of QM:AMD and QM:GK have been sold. Thanks very much for all your support; I appreciate it and it is encouraging to hear that so many of you have enjoyed the books. While these numbers may sound trivial, (and indeed, they are trivial in comparison with the Kings and Rowlings of the world), keep in mind that the average midlist SF book published by a major publisher has a print run of 5,000 and sells around 3,300 copies.

So, I’m pleased to inform you that QM:2 will definitely be out this summer, most likely in company with a second novella since Steve and I are considerably ahead of schedule. Selenoth fans need not worry, however, as TAODAL Book Two is still on target for a December 2014 release.

Much to my surprise, the first translation has already been completed. The Bahasa Indonesian translation of A Magic Broken is entitled Mantra yang Rusak and I expect to release it early in the new year. If you happen to speak Indonesian and would be willing to proofread it, please let me know.

A model police murder

It is becoming increasingly apparent that some police are being intentionally trained to commit murder under the color of law:

Robert Cameron Redus was shot dead by officer Carter at 2 a.m. for nothing more than making a sarcastic remark toward the officer who pulled him over for speeding.. According to the police report, local KSAT News explains that witnesses affirmed that the cop literally “emptied his gun” into the student without warning.

“I didn’t hear him say anything like, ‘Get down on your hands and knees,’ you know?” one witness explained, “I didn’t hear him say anything. He just started shooting. He emptied the gun on him… Boom, boom, boom.Six shots — five or six.”

Mohammad Haidarasl also witnessed the murder, saying that Redus’ last words were “Oh, you’re gonna shoot me?”

Redus couldn’t believe officer Carter would actually go that far, but Haidarasl added that the cop kept yelling “Stop resisting, stop resisting,” even though it was clear Redus was offering no physical residence, only sarcastic comments.

In addition to the small problem of the cop murdering the young man for the non-crime of being disrespectful, what is worrisome is the way the cop was deceitfully and repeatedly shouting “stop resisting” even as he fired his weapon.  This is a tactic meant to allow the police to claim a shooting is justified even when it isn’t; it is so deceptive that those who are training the police to attempt to deceive the public in this manner bear a moral responsibility for the citizens who are subsequently murdered by the police.

At this point, it is abundantly clear that the police are not going to control themselves. Their refusal to submit themselves to the very laws they are employed to uphold means that only the only hope for redress for the families of the victims is to take vengeance into their own hands.

The police love to talk a tough game. But have you noticed that they significantly change their tune when the public stops respecting their badges? If the police are going to rely upon their guns instead, well, perhaps they should keep in mind that the public has a lot more of them.

The Patriarch teaches

Phil Robertson is now America’s Patriarch:

[H]e stood in front of the small class, at White’s Ferry Road Church wearing his full camouflage suit and addressed the group for around 45 minutes.

He said: ‘I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding.

‘I tell people, “You are a sinner, we all are. Do you want to hear my story before I give you the bottom line on your story?”

‘We murder each other and we steal from one another, sex and immorality goes ballistic. All the diseases that just so happen to follow sexual mischief… boy there are some microbes running around now.

‘Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action? If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there.

‘You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there.

‘Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, “It is a man and a woman.” Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about.

‘But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill.

‘Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?’

Then reading from the Bible he said, ‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious. Sexual immorality, is number one on the list. How many ways can we sin sexually? My goodness. You open up that can of worms and people will be mad at you over it.

‘I am just reading what was written over 2000 years ago. Those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom. All I did was quote from the scriptures, but they just didn’t know it. Whether I said it, or they read it, what’s the difference? The sins are the same, humans haven’t changed.

‘If you give them the bad news, they’ll start kicking and screaming. But you love them more than you fear them, so you tell them.

‘A lot of times they don’t even wait for you to finish and say, ‘But there’s a way out, do you want to hear the rest of the story or what?

‘Jesus will take sins away, if you’re a homosexual he’ll take it away, if you’re an adulterer, if you’re a liar, what’s the difference? If you break one sin you may as well break them all.

‘If we lose our morality, we will lose our country. It will happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all walk around without stealing from each other and killing each other?

‘Why don’t we just love each other enough that we wouldn’t want to do these things to each other?’

Robertson – who made his fortune from inventing and manufacturing hunting equipment before finding TV stardom – went on: ‘We are a bunch of rednecks from Louisiana, but I am not uneducated, I have a degree from Louisiana Tech.

‘But this week I have been called an ignoramus. This week I have been asked, “Is this the first time you have brought up sin?” I said, “Are you kidding? I have been traveling to and fro spreading this message.”

‘Then he said, “Well do you invite yourself to go and get your Bible and tell people what you are now sharing with us?” I said, “No they are inviting me.”

‘I have made hundreds and hundreds of speeches and you can pick them apart and the center has always been Jesus Christ.

‘Do many people get up and walk out? Yeah, all the time, do I hold it against them? No. Anybody can get up and stop listening. We are all just humans on this planet.’

He added: ‘Jesus Christ was the most perfect being to ever walk this planet and he was persecuted and nailed to the cross, so please don’t be surprised when we get a little static.’

The best part, however, was how he closed in prayer: “I will not give or back off from my path because you conquered death, Father, so we are not worried about all the repercussions.”

May God grant us all similar fearlessness in Jesus Christ. That spirit of fear you sometimes feel didn’t come from Him. We can always find a reason to back down, an excuse to worry about the repercussions. Phil Robertson reminds us that as Christians, we are always going to get a little static, so we may as well grow up spiritually and accept it.

VPFL Championship

74 Greenfield Grizzlies
57 Bane Sidhe

80 Fromundah Cheezheads
79 RR Redbeards

The two top teams all season are meeting in the VPFL Championship Game. Greenfield has had a banner year; as it happens, I’m meeting the White Buffalo in the MFL championship game.

National Review sharpens the blade

The sans-culottes at National Review are getting the guillotine ready again. As predicted by many, it appears Mark Steyn will be the next to follow in the footsteps of the John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Ann Coulter, and John Derbyshire?  Jason Lee Steorts, an editor at National Review, writes:

I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

To which Steyn responded:

I’m not inclined to euphemize intimidation and bullying as a lively exchange of ideas – “the use of speech to criticize other speech”, as Mr Steorts absurdly dignifies it. So do excuse me if I skip to the men’s room during his patronizing disquisition on the distinction between “state coercion” and “cultural coercion”. I’m well aware of that, thank you. In the early days of my free-speech battles in Canada, my friend Ezra Levant used a particular word to me: “de-normalize”. Our enemies didn’t particularly care whether they won in court. Whatever the verdict, they’d succeed in “de-normalizing” us – that’s to say, putting us beyond the pale of polite society and mainstream culture. “De-normalizing” is the business GLAAD and the other enforcers are in. You’ll recall Paula Deen’s accuser eventually lost in court – but the verdict came too late for Ms Deen’s book deal, and TV show, and endorsement contracts.

Up north, Ezra and I decided that, if they were going to “de-normalize” us, we’d “de-normalize” them. So we pushed back, and got the entire racket discredited and, eventually, the law repealed. It’s rough stuff, and exhausting, but the alternative is to let the control-freaks shrivel the bounds of public discourse remorselessly so that soon enough you lack even the words to mount an opposing argument. As this commenter to Mr Steorts noted, the point about unearthing two “derogatory” “puerile” yet weirdly prescient gags is that, pace Marx, these days comedy repeats as tragedy.

I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point – that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal. As to his kind but belated and conditional pledge to join me on the barricades, I had enough of that level of passionate support up in Canada to know that, when the call to arms comes, there will always be some “derogatory” or “puerile” expression that it will be more important to tut over. So thanks for the offer, but I don’t think you’d be much use, would you?

National Review doesn’t realize that its genteel world of polite dissent from left-liberal orthodoxy is over. It is no longer a significant voice on the Right; one could quite perhaps even argue that it is not even really conservative anymore. I can’t actually take a position on that, however, since I quit reading National Review after they fired John Derbyshire for failing to kowtow to liberal orthodoxy on race. National Review has long attempted to curry favor with the mainstream media by reading others out of the respectable Right. So it only seems just that increasingly people are not-reading National Review out of the relevant Right.

And it is more than a little ironic that Steorts is criticizing Steyn for his derogatory expressions when, after attacking Kathryn Lopez over gay marriage, he justified his attacks on her thusly:

So it is your view, Kathryn, that the action of democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the citizens of the State of New York, is tyrannical in a way that justifies comparison to North Korea, a state in which an absolute ruler has burned people alive in a stadium. Okay. But now I want a new word for what “tyranny” used to mean.

I would like to see the reaction of a North Korean refugee to your claim.

It would also be nice if you troubled yourself to make an argument.

Update: I see that several commenters find my tone beyond the pale. With respect, I think y’all are way too sensitive. The harshest thing here is the sarcasm of “trouble yourself,” which strikes me as mild by the standards of polemical writing generally and writing at NRO (including posts by commenters) in particular. 

Hmmm, I’m noticing a hypocritical inconsistency as well as the fact that the conservative position on a certain subject tends to upset the manage editor… I know absolutely nothing about Steorts, but on the basis of these two pieces, it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that Steorts is one of those putative “gay media conservatives” in the mold of Andrew Sullivan. Which, as we have come to learn, reliably indicate that he’s not conservative at all.