The Wren’s Nest

The U.S. Senate  showed by vote today how spineless they are in the defense of their citizens’ rights today with their vote giving Telecoms immunity against patently unauthorized eavesdropping on U.S. Citizens.

I understand now how Churchill felt when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich with an agreement signed by Hitler guaranteeing “Peace in our time”!

The Senate had a chance to uphold the law and do the right thing - they did neither and those who voted for this provision should be ashamed - if not tarred and feathered and run out of D.C.

Now is the time when you should begin your search for “Encrypted Mobile Phones“.

FAST requires an assessment of three specific symptoms of stroke.

Facial weakness - can the person smile? Has their mouth or eye drooped?
Arm weakness - can the person raise both arms?
Speech problems - can the person speak clearly and understand what you say?
Test all three symptoms

Lord knows I’m not a fan of Sen. Kennedy’s politics - but I do wish him and his family well as what it appears to be that he had a stroke.

My dad had a stroke last year which left him a shell of a man and ultimately caused his death.

I don’t wish this on anyone.

This man is looking into NFL ’spytapes’. Does he have nothing better to do? Does our Nation not have more pressing problems than this guy has to deal with than to stick his nose in the NFL? I call for the citizens of Pennsylvania to call for his impeachment. If he doesn’t want to handle ‘real’ problems, let’s find someone who can!

“Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!”

I was talking to a lady cop the other day - she just earned her Captain’s bars - and she told me how afraid she was of the government’s giant “sucking” of information on our personal lives. She liases with the DEA, Homeland Security, the FBI, ATF, etc. She has some “inside track”.

I’ve long argued that the FISA courts, created in the ’70s in the Carter administration,  are perfectly equipped to deal with surveillance of American citizens. But after the knee-jerk reaction after 9/11 with the brain-damaged so-called “Patriot Act” we have been released from (or perhaps introduced to [in]sanity. And as Benjamin Franklin said “A bell cannot be un-rung”. We’ll never be able to go back to where we were.

Which is why I am an ardent support of strong cryptography and encryption although few use it. I encourage all my correspondents to use either PGP or S/MIME but few do.

If you’re interested in learning more, you are welcome to contact me - or check out Thunderbird and the companion Enigmail plugin. It’s seamless and transparent - and most importantly - it’s secure.

As every schoolboy learning Latin learns, the Roman Emperor Caesar said “Veni, Vedi, Vici” or “I came, I saw, I conquered”.

The “Thug-in-Chief” of Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s motto might be best be labeled as:

I Came

I Looted

I Lied

Two weeks into Zimbabwe’s “alleged” elections, they are still “allegedly” counting. Now, if you were the average peasant on the ground, subsisting with 20,000% percent  inflation (no, not a typo) would you vote for the incumbent party? I thought not. And the Thug-in-Chief has elected not to go to African emergency session in Zambia. Hmmmmmm…………

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any”" - Alice Walker

I genuflect that I have survived in riots, having been shot at, been in famines, even survived in a Labour Government - there is nothing that these bastards can do to me that I have not already experienced a 1000-fold.

But these bastards at Comcast have lied to me, jacked-me and generally pissed me off!

I do not generally get mad as a rule. But these guys shut off my internet access on Wednesday - said “I had requested it”. I said no such thing. It took me until today to rectify ‘their’ error.

In England, in the House of Commons, it is against House rules to accuse another Member of Parliament of ‘lying.’ Famously, Winston Churchill got around this little bent by declaiming a fellow member of having a “terminological-inexactitude”. That is precisely what the customer service representatives of Comcast did with us - they sprayed us with terminological inexactictudes as a Veterinarian would spray a stray for fleas, hoping they would get rid of both us and the mangy outcasts.

I am taking all these particulars down to the Massachusetts Court House tomorrow to file a claim against these guys pursuant to the Consumer Division of the Department of the Telecommunications and Energy toll.

By God if you’re going to have a State-sanctioned monopoly, then the State has an interest (you greedy bastards!)

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Zimbabwe, neé Rhodesia and have long lamented the sorry state that the Thug-in-Chief Robert Mugabe has brought that country to. Now that the Times is reporting that Opposition party seems to have overwhelmingly won the election (provided there is no squelching of the results by the military) the question arises: How will the next administration deal with Zimbabwe’s *extraordinary* hyperinflation?

Price controls are an obvious start in order to keep basic commodities available to the ‘everyman’. But as the Wikipedia link on hyperinflation above correctly points out, they’re not a full stop. They’ll have to be a re-evaluation of the money of course. A few years ago we may even have seen it pegged to the U.S. dollar; today its probably not such a great idea and I can’t see it being pegged to the Euro either.  In any event, things will be getting  worse before they get better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/washington/25cnd-texas.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

This is a bullshit case. My friend Greg introduced me to the concept of  ‘bullshit’ and I have embraced it over the years.

The people of the Soverign State of Texas have jurisdiction in this matter - not you or I.   We are a nation under God. And under Law. Read the Law. Learn it. Obey it.

One of the wiser things I ever did in my life was to take Latin in high-school. There, I had a hard-ass Latin teacher, who herself was about 3000 years old and knew the Romans personally. Or at least that’s how us kids felt at the time.

I learned how to diagram an English sentence properly, let alone a Latin one. I acquired a basic understanding of English grammar and vocabulary which I depend upon to this very day.

I’m stalling here. There is a topic which I want to address but I find it very hard to. And thus I resort to the Latin.

“Ex malo bonum” - From evil there can be good.

President Bush today vetoed the bill on abolishing torture of terror suspects. There. I’ve said it.  It’s a reprehensible bill, but it treats a reprehensible set of crimes.  When my friend WFB died earlier these past few weeks I made a vow that I would get more involved politically - this is one of those times.

I cannot say that I would not advocate torture if it involved my loved-ones, my family, or indeed innocents if I knew in my heart-of-hearts that it was the right thing. I *do* object to not having civil trials for those accused and held as ‘enemy-combatants’.

I know I will have offended some, especially some of my friends. And as my old Latin teacher used to say, “Res ipso loquitur” - “The fact remains“.

My first job out of college in Tennessee I had this old grizzled boss who definitely did not like “college-boys”. From time-to-time whenever I would screw-up he would take me aside and tell me “You can put a tuxedo on a donkey, but he still a jackass!”

I’ve been thinking about that quote in regards to that pompous poppinjay Chavez down in Venezuela. This thug is getting ready to create an all-out war between 3 South American countries simply because he’s an ass.  This guy needs to get fitted for a Tux.