The Stoning of John Edwards

First off, probably a quarter to half of the people currently wringing their hands over Edwards’ extramarital affair have cheated, are cheating, or will cheat on their own spouse.

It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to talk about in polite company and it runs contrary to a lot of romantic/religious notions that people have, but monogamy is a fairly recent invention and is by no means natural. I’m just saying, keep in mind the ridiculous level of hypocrisy at work here.

Yes, he lied. Yes, it could have hurt his party’s chances, although it’s probably better that this distraction didn’t surface during the primaries. I do understand the disappointment of the people who defended him in good faith. You could even argue that people expect better-than-average behavior from their politicians, although the current gang of thugs and robber barons in power certainly speaks against that.

However, most of the sanctimonious commentators criticizing him would not have done any differently in his situation, and quite a few of them are in his situation.

Statistically, there is a significant portion of high-ranking politics/news people that have stories of infidelity of their own, so I’m assuming that we’ll soon see hundreds of these people come out and admit their own affairs in the name of honesty. Come on, who wants to go first?

*chirp!* *chirp!*

A disaster of Olympic proportions

So, despite the fact that they get to host the Olympics, the Chinese government apparently still doesn’t give a damn about little things like human rights, dignity, or freedom. How strange! Who could have ever predicted such a bizarre twist?

In addition to the abuse inflicted on the locals, for example destroying their houses, executing roughly 374 Chinese citizens during the Olympics, and deploying ridiculous amounts of surveillance and military strength, it looks like they’re also arresting foreign protesters, assaulting journalists, blocking Internet access even for foreign reporters, and just generally giving everyone a hard time.

Oh, this is a good one :

“We have laws regarding assembly and demonstrations, and we hope that foreigners will respect the laws of China.”

While we are aware of your laws, sir, there are reasons why we don’t respect them. It is because they are brutal and inhuman, in the image of the thugs, tyrants and monsters that create and enforce them.

We foreigners just happen to have a little more power to defy the crimes against humanity you call “laws” without getting murdered, that’s all.

Don’t worry, there will be more defiance and disrespect coming from foreigners, and soon.

Through the looking glass: surreal campaign ads

First, this laugably bad ad. It appears that the McCain campaign’s latest attack is “Obama wants to Photoshop his face onto Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty”. Incredibly juvenile, but it would work if your average McCain voter knew what a Photoshop was.

Secondly, there’s this video, “The One”.

Twist ending : “Paid for by John McCain 2008″. Really? Are… are you sure, official McCain Youtube channel and JohnMcCain.com?

I see two possible messages McCain could be trying to get out here.

He might be trying to say “Vote for Obama”, which is bizarre and likely not a winning strategy for McCain. Then again, his campaign, his party, and a good portion of the news media appear to be under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.

At this point I wouldn’t be that surprised if Bush went on a puppy-kicking spree only to have McCain come out and defend him, blame it on Obama and the Liberal Media, and say that this type of situation shows he’s “ready to lead” and his opponent is “naïve”. Somehow, it would probably even work, and the media would spend the next two days asking questions like “Voting for McCain : good idea, or great idea?” and “The Liberal Media’s biased reporting: should we stop favoring Obama?”.

Anyways. The other message, the one McCain is more likely trying to push with the world-leader imagery and the glorification of his opponent, is something along the lines of “Obama is the Antichrist”. That might make sense in the mind of Americans who consider reading forwarded emails to be ‘research’, but those people already have lists of contradictory reasons why they’re afraid of him.

In any case, I’m pretty sure the Antichrist is actually supposed to get elected. If McCain was a good Christian and he really believed what he’s trying to scare people into believing, he’d have to make sure the Antichrist won the election or he’d be standing in the way of Prophecy.

On the other hand, if he was a good Christian he probably wouldn’t be ridiculing Moses to make a political attack.

No secret software for public voting or security!

Another blogger has an article up about Christine Peterson’s talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. She argues that privacy and security are compatible, and she’s right.

She predicts that Washington’s technologically clueless will use top-down, individual-surveillance methods when they have access to next-generation technology like high-precision chemical detectors, and that they will do it using secret procedures and secret software just as they have done with electronic voting.

Unlike what happened with electronic voting, she says, we need to see this coming, head it off, and make it clear that software secrecy and individual surveillance are bad security measures. It can’t be framed as a debate around open source software. It needs to be a security issue, and those of us who understand that the Internet isn’t a series of tubes need to explain it clearly.

Here’s my shot at it:

There is only one way of proving that a program is secure : getting as many people as possible to test it and examine the code. Anything short of this is a half-measure.

Any idiot can design a security system that he can’t figure out how to break. Diebold, the makers of the American electronic voting machines, may claim that their system is secure. All this means is that they haven’t spotted any flaws.

Their are a lot of smart hackers out there. Few, if any, work for Diebold. Many of them may be hostile to your country’s government or people.

Don’t assume you have the best hackers, or that secrecy will protect you. The Germans tried that in World War II, and their supposedly unbreakable Enigma cipher machine was defeated. Their secret communications were intercepted.

If we want to assure our physical security, we need to make our security systems open to inspection to make sure that they actually work.

We also need to use the tools we have to go after the threats that exist. As far as I know, there is no machine that detects terrorists. There are, or will be soon, machines that allow us to test for individual particles of specific substances. The obvious use that almost every politician will find for this? Drug testing. Cracking down a little bit more on what you get to do with your body. Taking away your freedom.

A sensible and effective security policy would be to use these detectors to find things like anthrax and plutonium. Something tells me that if you find the guys smuggling WMDs, you’ll find the terrorists.

Unless we do something about it, we will instead get a security policy based on wiretapping citizens and drug testing, using secret systems.

Telephone conversations are not a threat. Marijuana is not a threat. The real threats are natural and economic disasters, WMDs, private companies with exclusive control over the democratic process, and politicians who don’t understand security or technology.

Fire Katie Couric (hire a journalist instead)

Someone should lose their job over this, anyways. Here’s a brief timeline for those of us who are temporal-perception-impaired.

September 2006 : The Anbar Salvation Council is formed. This is known as the beginning of the Sunni Awakening, in which a majority of Anbari tribes aligned themselves with the American and Iraqi government forces and began fighting against Al-Quaeda.

January 2007 : Bush announces an increase in US troop levels in Iraq. This increase becomes known as the surge. Notice that this happens after the Awakening.

“So I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq,” says Bush, while US troop levels are slightly over 130,000.

March 2007 : US troop levels pass the 140,000 mark.

April 2007 : US troop levels pass the 150,000 mark. The surge troops Bush announced in January have mostly arrived.

July 21, 2008 : Barack Obama claims that the troop surge is not the only factor contributing to reduced violence in Iraq, saying it’s also because of “political factors inside Iraq that came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops.”

July 22, 2008 : Katie Couric interviews John McCain. She asks him for his response to Obama’s statement on the surge and reduced violence.

McCain claims (this is from the CBS transcript) that “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.” That’s right, he’s claiming that the 2007 troop surge caused a 2006 event.

Katie Couric, apparently as unaware as McCain that in this universe cause generally comes before effect, fails to call him on it. She follows up this complete fabrication, and the rest of his rambling Abe Simpson response, with the question “A commentary on what?”

You see, the last word in McCain’s answer was ‘commentary’, so she just asked him to explain that word. Hard-hitting journalism!

CBS news sensed that they were on to a big story about a presidential candidate’s lack of foreign policy knowledge and problems understanding how time works. They did the only thing they could as responsible journalists : they replaced McCain’s ridiculous answer with the answer to a completely different question.

McCain’s explanation of imaginary history was replaced by one of his canned slogans. And they aired it that way. CBS’s response?

“The report was edited under extreme time constraints and one piece of tape was put in the wrong order. Fortunately, this did not in any way distort what Senator McCain was saying.”

Bullshit. They didn’t just distort what he said, they replaced it with a fictional response that meant something completely different, in order to make him look better.

At best, it’s some incredibly lousy journalism.

Sixty-nine fascists : there’s still one place where the majority will defend Bush.

Tuesday night on Countdown, Rachel Maddow talked to Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law. The professor had this to say about the Democrats’ capitulation on the FISA bill :

“So, what the Democrats are doing here with the White House is they‘re trying to conceal a crime that is hiding in plain view, that everyone can see it.  And so, the argument for it is quite sill simple, nobody wants to have a confrontation over the fact that the president committed a felony, not once, but at least 30 times.  That‘s a very inconvenient fact right now in Washington.”

“I think that the founders would have found this incomprehensible.  The expanse of power to the point of including what is now defined as a federal crime.  And not only that, but the Democrats have learned well from Bush.

Because the telecoms are losing in court, because the administration is losing in court, they‘re just going to change the rules, so that these public interest organizations that have brought these cases will all lose by a vote to fiat by the Democrats.  It‘s otherworldly.”

MADDOW:  “Senator Obama says he does not like this bill, but he says he‘s supporting it as a compromise.  Is this a compromise?  Is that the right term for it?  Is he right?”

TURLEY:  “Yes.  I got to tell you, I am completely astonished by Senator Obama‘s position and obviously disappointed.  You know, all of these senators need to respect us enough, not to call it a compromise.  It‘s a cave-in.”

TURLEY:  “And, you know what‘s terrible is like one of those stories where someone is assaulted on a street and a hundred witnesses do nothing.  And in this case, the Fourth Amendment is going to be eviscerated tomorrow.  And 100 people are going to watch it happen because it‘s just not their problem.

But you talk about expanding the president‘s power, it‘s coming out of the marrow of the Fourth Amendment.  It‘s coming out of the bone.  And it‘s going to hurt.  And it‘s being done for political convenience.  There‘s not an ounce of principle, not an ounce of public interest in this legislation.

So, at least show us respect of not calling it a compromise.”

Amen. Calling it a compromise is an insult to Americans on top of the injury to the Constitution. Yesterday was a terrible day for freedom and justice, and the cowards that let this happen in a Democrat-controlled Senate need to be called out.

One more reason to use encryption wherever we can. If only Tor was faster.