Author Archives: admin

Casual Friday—Penny

So, the second comic introduces Penny with a joke(?) I’d been telling for years.  I often (still) respond to people asking me about my relationship with or belief in God by asking which one.  I am a polytheist and feel no particular need to hide it.  So, since I was introducing Penny, a 500-ish-year-old fairy, I figured I’d go ahead and expand on my snarky response with a personal connection.

The two evangelists are Sara Feela and a blonde guy who’s name escapes me (if he ever had one).  Sara was going to be a recurring character and we were going to eventually find that she was once Scot’s girlfriend (or thought she was).  She was only ever featured once again, as a substitute when Scot went out of town with the History Club.

The artwork is terrible, and I apologize.  Believe me when I say there are worse abominations to come (some will be fixed, I promise…my wife assures me I have a soul, and no one would inflict some of the things I drew on the public twice).  Actually the only really BAD panel here is that fourth panel where Sara and whatsisface look like cardboard cutouts.

The Real Discussion

So while a few people are getting their tights in a wad about race, I think it’s time to open the real discussion in the Trayvon Martin case:  Why did the media repeatedly and continuously misrepresent and manipulate the facts in the George Zimmerman self-defense trial?

Why did NBC and other news outlets edit the portion of the Zimmerman police dispatch call so, instead of the dispatcher asking him what race the suspect was (and Zimmerman giving a how-should-I-know pause then saying, “He looks black.”)

Why has no one in the media mentioned that gated communities, like the Retreats at Twin Lakes, do not have public thoroughfares. You can’t put a gate across a public road.  The streets and common walkways are owned and maintained by the community, and yes, that makes them private property.  Martin was a guest of a community resident, which allowed him certain, limited access to community amenities, but he was not “gunned down on a public street” as has been presented.

Why do the media keep presenting a picture of a 12- or 13-year-old Martin and not a more recent picture?  Admittedly, he still has a baby face in the more recent photos, but positioning a posed photo of a twelve-year-old next to a mug shot is just manipulative.

A young man is dead, and another young man (Zimmerman was only 29) will probably never get his life back.  I’m not going to stir the pot on guilty or not.  I just want to know why the media ginned up a tragic story into a national nightmare of misrepresentation?

PS:  As a balance, Fox, Hannity, whoever else, please stop muddying the waters with your info that Skittles and Arizona Tea are two of the ingredients in some bizarre cheapass high school drug.  Who gives a shit?  If he was planning to make the crap (and I’m not saying he was, if the stuff exists), it still has no immediate bearing on the case.

Spamtastic

Due to the insane amounts of spam I’ve had to delete, comments are now limited to registered users.  Registration is free and I really don’t look at your info (nor will I sell it or give it away).

Heresy by Thought (part 2)

Of course everyone with a working concept of the enormity of the data involved in Project PRISM and the cell phone record grab is surprised that anyone would even want to do it.  It would be more productive to buy a million monkeys and throw them in a room with a million typewriters to see if one can come up with a working script for Hamlet II:  the Revenge than it would be to hire and maintain the staff necessary to trawl through the reams and reams of minutiae generated by the Modern American Desperate Need for Contact (cheaper, too).

Yes, I know that much of the grunt work is done by crawlers similar to webspiders that look for key words and country codes before passing them on to a human (or a more advanced program), but even with flag catchers, the resultant mountain of data has to be tremendous.  Those crawlers don’t have discretion, so they can’t tell the difference between a Hezbollah operative contacting his handler in Tehran and a Persian immigrant calling his mother (assuming she’s allowed contact with an American phone number) any more than your IT department’s traffic managing software can tell the difference between your websearch for “kilts” because you promised a friend you’d dress up for the local Renn Fest and Frank from Accounting’s search for Catholic School Girl porn.

The thing is, the point of data mining is not to acquire working evidence of any kind.  The point is to justify other questionable methods of obtaining “evidence” after the fact.  The Director of the CIA cited (actually, he only cited four, but he referenced) fifty separate potential incidents forestalled by the sweeping invasion-of-privacy programs.  The Director of the NSA (notably, an Army General who was not asked to resign his commission before accepting a high-ranking seat in the civilian government) was less optimistic, say “at least ten” and “dozens” alternately during interviews and public appearances.

But here’s the thing, of the four incidents he cited, he only gave details on two and even those details were sketchy and didn’t show evidence that supported his claim.  The most noted one, a “planned attack on Wall Street that could have been as bad as 9/11” resulted in a few arrests and one guilty plea, all for money laundering.  The principal in this case, a naturalized citizen living in Kansas, had been funneling money to a Yemeni organization that General Alexander claimed was connected to Al ‘Qaeda.  He didn’t name the organization, nor did he show any evidence that they had made any notable moves toward their alleged plan of bombing Wall Street.  He simply said that the fact the accused parties were convicted by a jury shows that they must have been serious.  Except the accused parties were all convicted of monetary crimes under RiCO, not any sort of Terrorist activity.

In any case, you catch the movement of money by tracking international bank transfers (this is a legal activity done every day by the Federal Reserve, since  the full faith and trust of the US Treasury is put to the test every time US currency leaves the country in any way), not by tracking phone conversations.  It’s far more likely that they used the data mining to compile ex post facto evidence for a jury to consider so they wouldn’t have to admit that they had been hacking into privacy-assured banking systems in other countries.

The only other way to make efficient use of data mining is to use it to get a back-dated warrant for something you’ve already done.  A wire-tap, say, or a tracking worm.  Of course, the FISA courts were set up in the ’80’s to check all that stuff an make sure it’s all on the up and up, right.  I mean, if you can’t trust a secret court with no appeal or public regulation, who can you trust?  Father Gustavo can’t use squassation as a means of getting your confession and a list of fellow heretics unless the Grand Inquisitor says it’s okay, right?

But then, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t have anything to fear, do you?  It’s not like making a donation to a foreign aid charity can be turned to look like anything bad.  You know, unless that charity is located in Somalia, or, well anywhere with a foreign-sounding name.  But it’ll probably be all right.  Nobody really cares about the web research you’ve been doing for your planned vacation to Uruguay.

You do realize that Uruguay has no extradition treaty with the United States don’t you?  Why would you plan a “vacation” in a country with no extradition treaty?

Heresy by Thought

So if you’ve spent the last month sleeping under a rock, you should know that a number of “scandals” have hit the press, centered around the Obama Administration, and its repetitive intrusions into American privacy.  It started with the Justice Department acquiring the records of a Fox reporter and the entire Associated Press Editorial Staff, but has since been expanded because a former National Security Administration contractor released classified documents that outlined the NSA’s ongoing effort to acquire every bit of information available on every person in the US, on the off-chance that Frank from accounting is making terroristic plans on the Catholic Schoolgirl website he alt-tabs out of every time someone comes into his office.

The horrible traitor, Edward Snowden by name, informed the country that not only was the NSA spying on American lives and conversations, but that they were outsourcing access and analysis of sensitive and classified material.  Never mind that Big Brother is poking his nose in our business, it also turns out, he’s a moron.  You don’t give a contractor access to classified material for the same reason you don’t let your plumber thumb through the boudoir pics your wife had made for your ninth anniversary:  It’s none of his business and you can’t trust him to keep it to himself.

So, anyway, I can call Mr. Snowden a traitor because Speaker of the House Jon Boehner called him a traitor, and who am I to contradict the Speaker of the House.  I mean, sure, Snowden committed exactly zero of the two definitions of treason found in the Constitution, but, if we’re going to limit our definition of treason to the only one that legally exists, then how are we going to get rid of all the bad men who wake us up and spill water on our beds every night?

Sure, I know what you think.  Why don’t we do what we’ve always done:  wait for people to commit an actual crime before treating them like criminals.  Pfft!  What do you think this is 1978?  The Post-9/11 world is all about prevention!  “Never Again” is the motto and the watchword, and justifies every act from moronically expelling kids for having a finger-gun battle in the schoolyard to murdering an American citizen with a robot because a couple of his known enemies said he was probably a terrorist.

And thank god we do, too, because that attitude has prevented any number of terrorist threats that none of us ever knew about because they were handled quietly and remanded to a secret court (the same one that decides whether or not it’s okay to spy on and/or murder American citizens, I assume).  I’d tell you what they are, but then I’d have to schedule a drone strike for your next crowded commute.  Suffice to say, that if we weren’t being constantly watched, recorded and analyzed, then events like the Boston Marathon Bombing and Newtown shooting would just be Tuesday.  I mean, the Marathon Bombers were just normal citizens who flew well below the Justice Department’s radar, right?  (No, they weren’t.)