Category Archives: Technology

Turning The State Against Itself

Barack Obama, Ethics, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Morality, Technology, Terrorism, The State

Morality as you and I think of it is already in short supply in government. Barack Obama has taken the initiative to weed out any vestiges of ethical impulses in government workers, the kind of urges that motivate whistleblowers, for instance.

The tyrant has launched the “Insider Threat Program,” “an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for ‘high-risk persons or behaviors’ among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.”

Correction: The creep-in-chief issued the edict way back, after he jailed Army Pfc. Bradley Manning for exposing US war crimes. (There is a hell of a lot we don’t know about the foolish filth that is in office, as media have been unwilling to track this man’s infractions.)

The state spying on itself could turn out well for its subjects. Let the oink sector turn on itself. Let these pampered state workers be permanently consumed with and distracted by suspicion and fear, lest they end up in jail.

UPDATED: ILANA MERCER Twitter Identity Hijacked & Is Google Now A Proxy For The NSA? (DuckDuckGo.com’s NSA-Proof)

Fascism, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Media, Propaganda, Technology, The State

The ILANA MERCER handle on Twitter—name and identity—has been hijacked by at least one rogue actor on Twitter, acting maliciously to impersonate me.

The holder of this fraudulent account has, naturally, altered his account’s URL, but is otherwise masquerading as me, down to my description on the original Ilana Mercer Twitter account. This shameless fraud calls his account “Live It Up.”

Another likely bad actor using my name (ILANA MERCER) on Twitter calls herself “Ilana Mercer (Viola_ti_do).” She has not appropriated the identity/description associated with my Twitter account.

What’s really suspicious is the results of the latest Google Search for “ILANA MERCER Twitter.” On a search for “ILANA MERCER TWITTER,” Google has suddenly (literally starting today) begun to throw up first these imposter handles and their puerile postings.

Understand: The impersonators’ posts are not current. Mine are. Yet a Google sweep has placed them first up on a search for “ilana mercer twitter,” and has made it well-nigh impossible to trace the authentic “ilana mercer twitter” account on its Search.

Questioning Google operations is far from unreasonable in light of the revelation that “the National Security Agency has ‘direct access to the systems of Google.” This writer, like many other libertarians, has moreover, written of Google’s collusion with the administration in “‘Thank You For Your Service, Mr. Snowden,'” the widely read WND, EPJ and American Daily Herald column.

Well before the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal broke, when the teletwits—legal experts included—were deferring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) respectfully as a protector of rights—this column had warned against the filthy FISA Court. In “From Sexting To Snooping In Surveillance-State USA,” I cautioned, in particular, that “Companies that give up … information to the government have ‘immunity,’ which has been ‘built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.’”

Name and shame impersonators and mischief-makers on social media.

Question the search engine whose search algorithms appear to favor the “Statist Quo,” as opposed to reality.

Share, Re-tweet, and Like this post on social media.

And remember, this could happen to YOU!

UPDATED: The NSA-Proof DuckDuckGo.com search engine gets it right. We are blessed with pockets of free-market innovators. One of them is an NSA-proof new search engine, DuckDuckGo.com. Guess what? Plugged into this NSA-proof search engine, the search “ilana mercer twitter” yields the authentic account, rather than the imposter accounts.

This is interesting.

Will freedom-lovers ditch Google for DuckDuckGo.com?

Low-Wattage US President Clueless About Rolling Blackouts In South Africa

Affirmative Action, Africa, Foreign Aid, Free Markets, Regulation, Science, South-Africa, Technology

Our low-wattage president, Barack Obama, is clueless about the reasons for “rolling blackouts”—“’load shedding’ is the local euphemism,” in South Africa, where, since “freedom,” the electrical grid has been degraded at every level: generation, transmission, and distribution. Distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities.

Dumbo has pledged to borrow some more from China, $7 billion to be precise, “to help combat frequent power blackouts in sub-Saharan Africa.”

You’ll find explanations to some of the problems in Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (pages 99-100):

…pylons and poles are routinely flattened, stolen, and then smelted. Indeed, blackouts and blowouts are intricately connected to the breakdown of law and order. “Up to 100 miles of cables may be going missing every year, destined for markets such as China and India where booming economies have created insatiable demand for copper and aluminum,”[26] reports Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “The result has been entire suburbs plunged into darkness, thousands of train passengers stranded, and frequent chaos on the roads as traffic lights fail.”[27]
As The New York Times saw it, “[t]he country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply.”[28] (My emphasis.) Not quite. I’ve lived through Highveld thunder storms and Cape, South-Easter, gale-force winds. Few and far between were the blackouts. (I purchased a generator in the U.S., after experiencing my first three-day power outage.) No, Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE. “‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,”[29] reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008, and uncovered by the Carte Blanche investigative television program. The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from “other” suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.[30]

Ideally, the power grid ought to be privatized:

Unlike private firms, state-mediated utilities need not respond to profit and loss signals. So long as they have taxpayer funds to make good their errors, these hydra-headed creatures have the option to produce at a loss. Thus, in a market in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the information they relay in an unhampered market, and will invariably fail in guiding producers to meet consumer demand. Electricity is best entrusted to fully free markets. Only private enterprise raises initial capital voluntarily and applies careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavors. Left to their devices, entrepreneurs will, in the long run and in response to price signals, build more capacity—electricity-generating plants—and prices will inevitably fall. Only entrepreneurs in competition with one another have the incentive to satisfy the customer, on whom they depend for their very survival.

From “HOW NOT TO ‘PRIVATIZE’ THE POWER GRID.”

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UPDATED: Snowden In Search Of Pockets of Freedom

China, Foreign Policy, Government, Intelligence, Media, Propaganda, Russia, Technology, Terrorism, The State

You should have long since said adieu to the quaint idea of absolute freedom. With the triumph of the suprastate over the individual, achieved by rigid central planning and the harmonization of laws across the globe—only pockets of freedom remain. Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal counters mainstream media’s backward reasoning, according to which Edward Snowden is no freedom fighter because he has been protected by two other unfree powers (one spent; the other nascent).

That ridiculous notion has found expression in Henry Blodget’s smarmy tweet:

Snowden flees one paragon of freedom and privacy, China, for another–Russia

The Blodget conceit amounts to thinking in aggregates, reasons Robert Wenzel:

[Blodget] writes as though the circumstances for freedom are the same for everyone in a given country. This is far from the truth. I have written many times that even in a heavily totalitarian state some may be able to live just fine, a surfer dude for example. For others, in the US, time may be already up for some in the financial sector. Anyone putting deals together for very small companies, say, may find it much more attractive to work outside the constraints of US securities laws, which benefit no one other than major established players.

Pax Dickinson, contends Wenzel, is closer to the mark, tweeting sarcastically that, “Snowden should have fled to a noble & free country like the USA where we hold whistleblowers naked in solitary confinement without trial.”

Read Robert’s EPJ post (where you can also catch up on my latest weekly column, “Trying to be neighborly in the Evergreen State”).

Yesterday I heard a legal expert based in Hong Kong venturing that the imperative to hand Snowden over to US authorities was “not within the ambit of the American-Chinese extradition treaty.”

Yippee.

Today came the news, via the intrepid Guardian, that “Edward Snowden heads for Ecuador after flight to Russia leaves authorities in various countries amazed and infuriated”:
Snowden was five hours into his flight from Hong Kong, having already been served one of two hot meals, when news of his departure to Moscow began to electrify media organisations all over the world.
The Hong Kong authorities waited until Snowden was safely out of Chinese airspace before sending out a short press release that confirmed the intelligence whistle-blower had been allowed to leave on Aeroflot flight SU213, bound for Russia.
The 30-year-old had not been stopped on his way to Chek Lap Kok airport, and was allowed to slip away on a hot and humid morning, despite American demands that he be arrested and extradited to face trial for espionage offences.
The reason?
The Americans had mucked up the legal paperwork, the authorities claimed in a statement released at 4.05pm local time.
Hong Kong had no choice but to let the 30-year-old leave for “a third country through a lawful and normal channel”.
If the sudden “discovery” of a flaw in legal proceedings prompted sighs of relief around the island and across the rest of China, there would have been sharp intakes of breath in Washington and London, where diplomats and intelligence officials had been hoping the net around Snowden was finally tightening.

MORE.

UPDATE: Via The New York Times:

…Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in an interview from his own refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that he had raised Mr. Snowden’s case with Ecuador’s government and that his group had helped arrange the travel documents. Baltasar Garzón, the renowned Spanish jurist who advises WikiLeaks, said in a statement that “what is being done to Mr. Snowden and to Mr. Julian Assange — for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest — is an assault against the people.”
Obama administration officials privately expressed frustration that Hong Kong allowed Mr. Snowden to board an Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow on Sunday despite the American request for his detention. But they did not revoke Mr. Snowden’s passport until Saturday and did not ask Interpol to issue a “red notice” seeking his arrest.
Legal experts said the administration appeared to have flubbed Mr. Snowden’s case. “What mystifies me is that the State Department didn’t revoke his passport after the charges were filed” on June 14, said David H. Laufman, a former federal prosecutor. “They missed an opportunity to freeze him in place.” He said he was also puzzled by the decision to unseal the charges on Friday rather than waiting until the defendant was in custody. …
…While officials said Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked on Saturday, it was not clear whether the Hong Kong authorities knew that by the time he boarded the plane, nor was it clear whether revoking it earlier would have made a difference, given the Ecuadorean travel document that Mr. Assange said he helped arrange. When Mr. Snowden landed in Moscow, he was informed of his passport revocation.
Mr. Assange said he did not know whether Mr. Snowden might be able to travel beyond Moscow using the Ecuadorean document. “Different airlines have different rules, so it’s a technical matter whether they will accept the document,” he said.

MORE.

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