Nothing to see here, just move along.

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

Enjoy your holiday. I'm doing yard work laying waste to stuff with a chain saw...its a good way to vent frustrations. Noisy, stuff being rended violently, and crashing down. Good times baby.

Anger management therapy

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:37 AM | Comments (156)
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Posted by: andy at 03:26 AM | Comments (551)
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Quote of the Day: You Can't Handle the Truth

In which a female environmental engineering student complains to Vox Day about his views on perfect sexual equality, abortion, marriage, children, and favoritism towards women in academia among others.

Now I'm going to teach you a hard, but very important lesson.  You see, I don't care you how feel.  I really don't.  More importantly, neither does anyone else.  Only about 200 people on a planet of 7 billion actually care about your feelings, and that's if you're lucky.  The sooner you grasp this lesson, the better off you will be.  And since almost no one gives a damn what you do, say, think, or feel, appealing to your feelings when you encounter differences of opinion is not only illogical, but useless.

...Another thing you have no reason to know is that young women are reliably bad at foreseeing what they will want to do in the near future.  I graduated with a number of women like you.  None of them thought they were interested in marriage and children until they were about 27.  Then they suddenly changed their minds and some of them were very upset that they had spent the previous ten years pursuing goals that were now unimportant to them.  I even wrote a column about it called Spiting Their Pretty Faces back in 2003, you can google it.  Think about 2003.  You were ten.  Are your goals the same now as they were then?  If not, then how can you be certain that your goals, and your opinion about marriage and children, will be the same when you are 30?

I have no idea who Vox Day is or whether I agree entirely with his views (probably not) but this right here is some solid hammer of truth gold. But as is often the case honest truth is wasted upon those who are not prepared to hear it.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:09 PM | Comments (906)
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Before that, Bobby Jindhal tweeted today:

It's not supposed to work this way in America.

A president does not gain the powers of a tyrant simply because the unelected media likes him.

I don't think anyone before Obama would have asserted that he has the right to change laws on his own whim.

Posted by: Ace at 04:27 PM | Comments (493)
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Great article at PJM about how Mursi got elected on promises of forming an inclusive government with responsibility and power spread to all elements of Egypt's power blocs -- and broke every one of them.

First of all, in final run-off balloting for the presidency, the two candidates offered to the public were the Muslim Brotherhood's idiot Mursi and a general associated with the Mubarak regime. Not the options most of the public wanted.

To convince non-Islamists to vote for Mursi, he made some promises.

The second-line Muslim Brotherhood leaders started connecting with revolutionary figures, opposition leaders, and youth movements to convince them to support Morsi in the run-off election. These MB leaders asked for political support for the MB candidate, but the leaders of the January 25th revolution had some demands of their own. They wanted to “reconstruct the constitution drafting assembly to represent all Egyptians; appoint 3 vice presidents: a woman, a revolutionary youth leader, and a Christian; and to appoint a national unity government.” Eventually, Morsi and his allies approved the deal and signed a document to guarantee the achievement of these promises.

The Egyptian people decided to trust the Muslim Brotherhood at the time because they couldnÂ’t accept military rule represented by General Shafiq.

...

But after a while, everything became clear to us. He broke all his presidential promises. He excluded the opposition from the government, which consisted mainly of old Mubarak ministers and Muslim Brotherhood members. In addition, he appointed a Muslim Brotherhood ally as his vice president.

All the aforementioned broken promises are nothing compared to the constitution drafting assembly. More Muslim Brotherhood members were appointed than was promised. Christians, opposition leaders, and revolutionaries were banned from the assembly. The Islamists then wrote the worst constitution in the whole history of Egypt and the Middle East.

If you like your pluralistic government you can keep your pluralistic government. Psyche!

There's more too, but I can only steal so much.

On page 2, he explains his theory as to why Obama has been such a Muslim Brotherhood Booster. He thinks it's all because of Syria, if you can imagine that, and the Muslim Brotherhood making promises about getting Assad out and keeping the flow of heavy weapons in check and making sure Syria follows a non-jihadist course and etc.

And obviously Obama should believe this, because Mursi kept all his promises before, right?

Mursi's disastrous, inept, oath-breaking reign might wind up doing more to advance republicanism than, if you can believe this, a single gaseous speech by Obama.

One can only hope that America learns from Obama as Egypt learned from Obama's pet Mursi.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:29 PM | Comments (540)
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Here are the details of the military's roadmap back to democracy.

Suspending the constitution provisionally;

-The chief justice of the constitutional court will declare the early presidential elections;

-Interim period until president elected. Chief Justice will have presidential powers;

-A technocrat, capable national government will be formed;

-The committee will offer all its expertise to review the new constitution;

-The Supreme Constitutional Law will address the draft law and prepare for parliamentary elections;

-Securing and guaranteeing freedom of expression, freedom of media

-All necessary measures will be taken to empower youth so they can take part in decision making processes

-The EAF appeal to the Egyptian people with all its spectrum to steer away from violence and remain peaceful. The Armed Forced warn it will stand up firmly and strictly to any act deviating from peacefulness based on its patriotic and historic responsibility.

On that "technocrat" government thing: I read a piece a few weeks ago -- before this revolution actually became a full revolution -- that stated that no one in Egypt's government had any experience governing or had any idea what the hell they were doing. Basically the government consisted of people who had done nothing but read the Koran all day long all their lives.

I wonder if the military's statement that a "technocrat, capable" government is a code for "We're not allowing firebrand clerics to hold positions of responsibility over finance and trade, for God's sake."

Live pictures of Tahrir, lots of fireworks.

That's ABC. Here's Al Jazeera.

Of course, just because the military says it doesn't make it so. Or, rather: the military will almost certainly prevail, but this drama isn't necessarily over; the Muslim Brotherhood is not above terrorism.

And now they actually have a semi-decent reason to feel aggrieved that doesn't date back to the 8th century AD.

Mursi Arrested?

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (490)
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All information on exteriors of envelopes -- addressee, return address -- is being photographed and kept for possible future law enforcement purposes.

It's not known how long this information is kept.

This is not really a Fourth Amendment issue per se because the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information or expressions rendered publicly -- and of course, when you place your mail in the hands of a government courier, the addressee and return address are public information. That's why they're on the outside. The mail couldn't function of such information were "private."

Still... it's getting very weird.

Part of this is a technological shift. In the past, we didn't have to worry about these things because practical reality kept government datavores in check. In the past, for example, when all fingerprint analysis was done by human hand, with magnifying glasses and comparisons to old cards on file, there was an inherent cost in manhours that naturally limited such things.

60 years ago, you couldn't say "Well what if they just check everyone's fingerprints against every database?!?!" except as the most far-out hypothetical. 60 years ago, one answer would have been, "As a practical matter, they could never do that, you doofus, so the issue is moot."

But it's not moot anymore, because now the government really can check every fingerprint on file against every other fingerprint on file at a fairly trivial cost in terms of man-hours, and the government really can photograph and save, forever, the exterior of every single envelope put into the US mail.

The old limiting factor of the cost of human labor to do these things is now removed entirely. We didn't have to worry as much about constitutional restraints, or non-constitutional prudential limitations, because there were significant practical restraints such as limited budgets, limited personnel, and basic human laziness (or at least the fact that we need to eat and sleep and otherwise not devote all of our hours to collating, comparing, and storing examplars.)

Now we are in fact presented with a lot of questions, along the lines of "What if they did this for every single citizen for every single public action that citizen conducts?," a question which not only describes the merely possible, but the actual current practice.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (205)
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At Buzzfeed.

This is Thomas Jefferson punching out a giant gorilla.

This is self explanatory.

And a good satirical song at Reason.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (239)
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Erika Johnson has a round-up on this monstrosity.

Even reporters at CBSNews can't pretend this isn't a purely political gesture designed to keep hiding the pernicious effects of ObamaCare until after the public has voted one more time.

One thing they're not reporting: That this move is perfectly illegal. The law does not allow any discretion whatsoever in its timetables. Obama is simply voting himself, Putin-like, unprecedented powers, and the sheep of the media just baa and call it America.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:05 AM | Comments (318)
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Armored vehicles and military troop transports (these latter really just trucks painted sand-brown) are moving around the city. Reporters keep saying "tanks" but I think they mean armored vehicles. Because reporters are dumb.

These vehicles are especially being deployed around the places where pro-Mursi forces are rallying.

The head of the Egyptian military, General al Sisi (incidentally, the worst general's name of all time), is delaying their own statement -- which will likely simply proclaim that Mursi is no longer in power -- in order to avoid violence, they say. Which I take to mean they want to get their armored vehicles and soldiers into place in a show of force designed to discourage a counter-coup.

8 pm Egypt time would be 2 pm Eastern time.

Al Jazeera has live reports.

There are reports that Mursi is under house arrest, but that was denied. It's my guess that report was a misreporting of the true story, that airport officials say a travel ban has been issued for Mursi, forbidding him from getting on a plane.

I would imagine the point of this is to let him know that if there is violence, he will not be able to flee the country to escape retribution for it.

The military has moved some of its people into Egyptian media buildings.

Before the deadline expired at 5 p.m. local time (11 a.m. ET), employees at Egypt's state TV station said military officers were present in the newsroom monitoring its output, but not interfering with their work.

The military also beefed up the presence of troops inside the building, the employees told the Associated Press, though they were not visible outside. Even before the crisis, a small army contingent usually guards the state TV headquarters.

Tweets from Egypt (which seem legit, but YMMV) say that it has been announced that Mursi is no longer "part of the decision making process" at Egypt's state newspaper Al Ahram and at its state television channel. A more direct way to say this is that the military has taken over the state media.

So then here's Al Ahram's prognostication:

On Al Jazeera, there are pictures of celebrating citizens standing on top of troop transports, next to soldiers armed with machine guns, in case there was any question that the protesters and military were now part of the same force.

Meanwhile, Egyptian men continue surrounding women in Tahrir Square and raping them or sexually assaulting them in wolfpack style.

Posted by: Ace at 09:18 AM | Comments (334)
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