Hardware Hardly

Yipee! Friday! Overcast and gloomy again this morning on California’s north coast, but like yesterday and the day before and the day before that, the sun will come and all will be happy. Still high in the news cycle, the NSA spying bullshit continues to plague the Obama White House and has turned the DC…

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Group suck

Americans’ view of Congress would be laughable if the national situation didn’t suck so bad. And Americans know it: Americans’ confidence in Congress as an institution is down to 10 percent, ranking the legislative body last on a list of 16 societal institutions for the fourth straight year. This is the lowest level of confidence Gallup…

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Beset the blowback

Another overcast early morning here on California’s north coast, this the mid-week edition of life as society goes semi-berserk, or something. Blowback: An intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. During the…

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Keystone Kops in charge

High overcast with a slightly-chilled wind this way-early Monday as we carrom into another new work week, leaving behind the rat-tailed dump of private-first-class droppings — or what’s now called, ‘Boundless Informant.’ Apparently, there’s no bottom to the data suck. On Saturday, the UK’s Guardian revealed the NSA whistleblower as American citizen Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old…

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Dress warmly

Crystal-clear and really, really warm this Saturday afternoon on California’s north coast, and with a temperature right now of 74-degrees, this is the ultimate in summer — yet with summer still a couple of weeks away. So warm, I worked a couple of hours in my little back patio/yard area — cleared some weeks, dug-up…

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What, me worry?

“Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You’re talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word ‘bomb,’ ‘president,’ ‘Allah,’ any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.” — Former CIA Agent Brill, ‘Enemy of the State‘…

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