>Unk posted about Apple’s remote camera disable patent, to general complaint about jackboot-enablers.
It reminded me of an especially cute hardware hack, the keychan dongle that shuts off all nearby TV sets at the touch of a button. How long do you suppose it would be after the introduction of the camera-censoring tech that a nosy-cam version of TV-B-GONE showed up?
>At noon yesterday, Hoosiers rallied on the Statehouse grounds, protesting the recent “no right to resist unlawful police entry” ruling from our State Supreme Court (“60% dimwit by weight!”)
AP had a bit about the protest on their wires that most media ran as sent; stories on most media websites weren’t even updated for versions timestamped after the event. One local station sent a reporter and a cameraman; the Indy Fishwrap & Steam-Powered News covered it in a little more detail. I’d like to think the others did too, but there’s no proving that with a Google search.
I guess it’s not real news when Wookies do it? (Yeah, just keep on thinkin’ that; this issue has legs way out of proportion to its actual effects).
“Hundreds” reportedly at the rally, not bad for a Facebook flash-crowd on a work day with storms forecast. I was sorry to see they spoke of removing Justice Steven David but seem to have given his fellow Constitutional criminals a pass — all three need to be replaced with folks who won’t attempt to rewrite protected rights.
Even the winning attorney, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, wants the court to think again; he never asked for the ruling and would just as soon the hot potato went back to the hands that baked it.
>Reporter (struggling to ad lib a breaking story live on the scene, someone’s house blazing away in the background): “Firefighters say everyone in the house got out in time. Paramedics are still treating four people in the fire.”
Me: “They should get ’em out of the fire, first! ‘Lady, there’s your problem’ Sheesh!”
It really is harder than it looks — but not as difficult as they make it look sometimes. (And the treated people were, in fact, well away from the burning building).
>Random person, commenting on a Vanity Fair bit Claire Wolfe linked to:
“I believe the government and the media are owned outright by Corporate America…”
I’m not so sure about the first — I think they believe they own one another, in a kind of twisted, Rand-villain way — but as for the second, what did he think all those big, moribund newspapers, TV networks and broadcast-station groups were? Amphictionies? Sodalities? Heck yes, “Corpoarate Ameica” owns the media; built a lot of it from the ground up and wrote a check for the rest. To whom is this a surprise?
Jeepers, RCA and AT&T, Giant Soulless Corporations to the core, invented the radio network; they didn’t even need Roswell UFO technology or the Trilateral Commission to do it. Good? Bad? It means they all tend to shovel out a certain level of mediocre dreck; it means they will lie to you out of laziness. But conspiring? I am even less likely to to believe it of ’em than I am of Uncle Sam, mostly ‘cos they would sell one another out in a heartbeat.
>From the Could Not Have Said It Better Myself Dep’t, Wick Allison:
…The difference being, Wick voted for Mr. Obama (and endorsed him in print) — the linked article being subtitled, “Why I am recanting my 2008 endorsement of Barack Obama.” (We can, finally, be pretty sure that it’s not over his birth certificate).
Semi-relatedly, The Week offers five takes on why he-who-must-not-be-named (R0n P@u1) is running for Prez again. Who knows, maybe this time his own party’ll let him say a few words at their convention?
>Anarachnophobia: an obsessive, morbid fear of the lack of spiders.
Not to be confused with “Anoraknophobia,” which is the title of some album. And/or the fear of anoraks.
>Atlas Shrugged Part One is on the playbill at theatres in Carmel and down on the South Side. Appears to have been picked up in Fort Wayne, too.
The thing about this film is not that I think Ayn Rand was the “it” girl or that I think Objectivism is The Answer and it is certainly not because I think Atlas Shrugged is a blueprint for the future; it’s that she’s a pretty good propagandist against the ills of big government and creeping socialism and for the benefits of genuinely free trade and a restrained, limited government.
That’s a message that needs to get out. There’s only one John Stossel, only one Reason magazine — and only one Ayn Rand. A lot of people are put off by a talky, thousand-page novel, but they’ll go to a movie. I’m hoping the filmmaker’s done a good job of giving us our money’s worth.
Rand’s proposed solutions can be poked full of holes from many angles but she certainly managed to identify the problem. And she makes Left-wing hippie’s heads explode, too.
>It’s precious far to go, but thanks to online booksearches (about which more later), I recently purchased a P. Schuyler Miller book (long out of print) from a delightful used bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland — the one on the other side of the Atlantic. Barter Books is located in a Victorian railway station and the photos on the little flyer that accompanied the book reveal something of a reader’s wonderland.
…Enchanting as all that is — and it is — another “little flyer” arrived in the envelope* with my book: Some Notes On Searching For Books. With all its hints, links and good advice, it is also presented on their website. Highly recommended!
________________________________________________
* Metered postage, alas, unless they’ve replaced the Queen with a black monolith without telling me.
>…So there’s a Democrat fundraiser in Orlando (F-L-A) with Vice-President Joseph P. Biden as the featured creature and the local papers send a pool reporter: pretty much the usual drill.
Then when Joe Workin’ Press shows up at the $500-a-head soiree, they stuff him in a closet. And post a guard to keep him in there. They let him out to hear Mr. Biden and the local pol he’s supporting speak and then — back in ’til all the nice people have have left!
…And he was pretty much okay with it.
Look, we’ve all wanted to have a reporter or two shut up in a closet but doing it in real life pretty much wipes out any claim a political party could make about “standing up for the little guy.” Stepping on him, maybe.
And if you’re the reporter who lets yourself gets stuffed uncomplaining into a closet at an event you were invited to cover, you probably ought to burn your Press card and consider a different career.
Though I would kinda like to see a photo of the fellow in question at the event in question — you don’t suppose he had the effrontery to show up at a black-tie event looking like an unmade bed, do you? Tsk, tsk.
>”Personally, I have my own views as to the relative value of the instruction of children in Scripture history within the walls of the Sunday-school, and the value of Nature study and the practice of religion in the open air, but I will not impose my personal views upon others.”
Lord Robert Baden-Powell, Chief Scout of the World, 1912 (in B.P.’s Outlook)
Elsewhere, he writes of the importance of being able to do the thing rather than pass the test — for example in first aid, he patiently explains being able to render it effectively counts more than tying neat bandages or knowing the proper Latin names.
He even briefly touches on his own politics (pinker than you’d think, at least in 1912) but proceeds to state that Scouting is to be apolitical, “Our aim is to be at peace with all and to do our best in our particular line,” helping to build character, and expresses the wish that, by encouraging young men to make the most of themselves, “each one of them may at least get a fair start.” And later, “We want our men to be men, not sheep.”
Common sense: some people have it.
The Adventures Of Roberta X 