Category Archives: Intelligence

Assange Dishes About Facebook

Business, Constitution, Government, Intelligence, Law, Technology, The State

In an interview with RT (Russia Today) Julian Assange claimed that Facebook “in particular, is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.”

“Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.”

More than anything else Assange’s statement about the overweening nature of the American state. Most businesses capitulate for fear of prosecution.

UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Reason, Socialism, Taxation

The following is from my new, WND column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid”:

“How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.

Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday’s “debt-reduction” address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the “rugged individualism,” “self-reliance,” and “healthy skepticism of too much government”—all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech — can survive in the shadow of his government.

During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.

For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone, by the end of this decade, if not sooner.

How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us a nation, and ensures that “we … do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, “We would not be a great country without [these programs]”? …

… But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great State of Texas, teaches, ‘You can’t fix stupid.’

‘There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.'”

Read the complete column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE (April 15): An Ivy-League education is increasingly not indicative of intelligence. What with affirmative action, one can hardly assume that Obama’s admission to these institutions bodes well for his IQ. It certainly does nothing of the sort for his wife’s; anyone who has read her graduation thesis will confirm what I’m saying. This effort is written on a high-school level. Obama’s transcripts remain well-concealed. Despite being appointed as an editor for the Harvard Law Review, Obama has never written a serious jouranl article for this publication.

Obama’s easy passage through this country’s finest schools shows just how worthless these once-proud institutions have become, and how worthwhile it is to be a privileged minority. (Or, in the case of Bush, McCain’s mindless daughter, and the likes—to belong to an American political dynasty.)

By the way, I agree that BHO has the cunning of a fox. But that’s a far cry from the brilliance with which he has been credited.

UPDATED: The Babes Leading The Blind

English, Free Markets, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Literature, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, The Zeitgeist

With apologies in advance to all non-human primates. In the quest for the lowest common denominator, mainstream American publishers will publish the musings of a monkey, or worse: a small boy. Colton Burpo, barely out of short pants, is the “author” of a best seller, “Heaven is for Real.” ALLEGEDLY, this “four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor, during emergency surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He survives and begins talking about being able to look down and see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.'” Yeah, I kid you not.

The only scientific variable worth noting in this equation is the fact of a father with a vested interest in the belief system. (Hypothesis: Boys whose fathers believe are more likely to develop after-life ideation than boys whose parents don’t believe. Examine whether the difference between the groups is statistically significant.)

The same awe accorded to the Nobel Savage and to the natural world is accorded in American culture to The Child, who is seen as possessing uncanny prescience; a primordial, pristine, un-spoilt wisdom.

Heaven help us! Errant adults elevate infants as philosopher kings.

I love the free market, as was said here, but faith in the free market need not require a nearly equal faith in popular culture. Why does it follow that a product produced and exchanged in the process of making a living must inspire faith? More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art, pop culture, or literature. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers.

Aguilera (Christina) sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney and Burpo outdo Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

Seriously, that America’s adults are reading this tripe (and bopping in front of a TV screen using Microsoft Kinect) goes a long way to explain a hell of a lot.

UPDATED: Guys, you’re missing the point: the problem here is not the issue of faith in the afterlife; it’s the publishing of this tyke. A nation that looks to kids for spiritual, intellectual, and moral guidance is a nation without any idea of ordered liberty, which demands a certain hierarchy in terms of age, intelligence, experience, knowledge, etc. It’s something the Japanese know about. Adults should not be reading books written by kids.

Nullifying Brimelow’s Seminal Work On Unions?

Education, Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race

Steve Sailer has an interesting take on “the media-celebrated documentary ‘Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and by extension, on the “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions” (the title of my new, WND column). “Davis Guggenheim, white liberal dad, winner of an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary,” writes Sailer, “drives past three public schools in Venice every morning to get to a private school in Santa Monica. He muses on the narration that he felt he was ‘betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.'”

Why, then, doesn’t he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn’t think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He’d never get another Oscar.

[Read “Hoist By Their Own Petard In Wisconsin”]

Is Steve implying that the thesis of “The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,” a pathbreaking book by VDARE.COM editor Peter Brimelow, no longer obtains? In “The Worm,” Brimelow mounted a devastating case against the monopolistic nature of public education as the root of most of this system’s evils. He did so by analyzing “the efficiency of the education system, as expressed in its output and input.”

I would say that both the liberal director of “Waiting for Superman” and Steve Sailer are resorting to reductionism. There is more to the colossal failure of American schooling than the aggregate racial achievement gap in schools that are increasingly dominated by minorities. Conversely, government unions are not the whole story.

From my perspective, the film “Idiocracy” offered the most multifaceted treatment of creeping cretinism in America. The best of social science (kidding, of course).