So, I needed to clean the ol' iMac today, and I can do that best by standing behind it. This makes for less wear and tear on my wrists and arms, but since I have to look around the side or over the top, it's hard to tell the difference between what's there legitimately and what needs to be gone. Thinking it was a bit of snot or phlegm or mayonnaise or whatever, I just spent close to a full minute trying to scrub the cursor off my computer screen. It occurs to me that I may be spending way too much time calling other people stoopid.
The GOP fucks us over by knocking down FCC privacy regs, so here's one small thing we can do to fuck 'em back. Every day, I go to Google to look something up - OK OK, every day, I go to Google about 40-leven times to look something up. But every time, before I do anything else, I Google these: Fuck Comcast Fuck AT&T Fuck the GOP Fuck American oligarchy Fuck Google Analytics Fuck autoplay video ads And I do it a dozen or more times each. Once you type it in and hit ENTER, all you have to do is click in the search box and hit ENTER again. The Google Bomb works - ask Rick Santorum. Takes maybe 90 seconds for the whole thing. Show your discontentment. Fight back.
It's possible Devin Nunes really thinks he's doing what we pay him to do - and it is possible he actually is doing what we pay him to do, even as he does it in a very unorthodox and troubling way. It's also possible I can make the jack of spades jump out of a brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. (with apologies to Sky Masterson's dad for turning that one around) NYT:
WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Mr. Nunes then discussed with President Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.
- and -
Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.
The Daddy State approacheth. “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.”
Soon every mistake you’ve ever made online will not only be available to your internet service provider (ISP) — it will be available to any corporation or foreign government who wants to see those mistakes.
Thanks to last week’s US Senate decision (update March 28: and today’s House decision), ISPs can sell your entire web browsing history to literally anyone without your permission. The only rules that prevented this are all being repealed, and won’t be reinstated any time soon (it would take an act of congress).
ISPs can also sell any information they want from your online activity and mobile app usage — financial information, medical information, your children’s information, your social security number — even the contents of your emails.
They can even sell your geolocation information. That’s right, ISPs can take your exact physical location from minute to minute and sell it to a third party.
You might be wondering: who benefits from repealing these protections? Other than those four monopoly ISPs that control America’s “last mile” of internet cables and cell towers?
No one. No one else benefits in any way. Our privacy — and our nation’s security — have been diminished, just so a few mega-corporations can make a little extra cash.
I'll take exception to that last bit - about how nobody benefits in any way. My basic skepticism (ie: my cynical - tho' perfectly justifiable - paranoia) is waving flags like it's laundry day at Redneck Central Headquarters.
This looks a whole lot like standard Political Duplicity - privacy snoops disguised as profiteers to give the illusion of separation from Officialdom, so nobody in government is accountable to voters for the inevitable fuckery.
And the bonus is that the ISP cartel can peddle our information to Da Gubmint (aka: the Lunker Customer everybody's always gunnin' for, so you know it'll happen), which will confer upon us the supreme privilege of paying them to fuck us over - again.
Cronies get richer
Congress Critters get re-elected
We get fucked
'Twas ever thus with the Radical Right, and ever thus 'twill be.
Anyway, privacy is pretty much the whole banana in a free state, and there seems to an even fuckier fuckery afoot.
Roe v Wade is based on the concept of a Consitutional Right To Privacy. If this ISP thing stands up to challenge in the courts, kiss that one good-bye. And then it's really open season on everybody's rights across the board.
Now, I realize I'm pretty close to the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but these things happen step-by-step, so I'm just trying to follow it out to the logical extreme. And it's not like we haven't seen some of this shit already. The bullshit SCOTUS ruling on Voting Rights comes to mind.
