IRA'S STUPID STUFF AND ARETHA - MID SEPTEMBER 2016

1. Researchers looking in places with high incidences of traffic congestion have found magnetite in peoples' brains, not the natural type but the stuff that comes out of car exhausts. The natural type is found in the plaques in the brain that often accompany Alzheimer's Disease. So car exhausts may cause...

Shit!

2. My Granny could run the 100 yard dash in 9 seconds flat. Uber is a ride-sharing service. Which of these statements is true? Did you answer NOTA (None Of The Above)? Good for you. Because Nana might have been quick, but she wasn't fast. And every Uber driver travels from the mall to the grocery store to the burbs and back again and back again and back again every day and is just looking to share the cost...

3. Continuing on a car theme...Headline: Paris Police Thwart Car Bombing
A car parked in a No Parking Zone near Notre Dame Cathedral, hazard flashers flashing, without license plates, sat for two hours before the police investigated. They found that the car had seven gas canisters inside, one empty. There was no detonation device. If they'd only let the car alone for another day or two, maybe a meteorite would have hit the car and exploded the canisters.

4. Profs teaching a course entitled "Medical Humanities in the Digital Age" said that they were not going to debate the causes of global warming and that those who wished to do so should not take the course. Internet breaks. It's getting hotter. It's hotter this year than last and hotter last year than the year before. If you don't believe that the 'pause' in warming is a hoax, you don't believe math. The trend line is undeniable.

The course in question is about the effect of that undeniable heating and not its cause. Would it make sense for profs in a paleo-archeology class to suggest that persons who believe that Earth was created 6,000 years ago might not benefit from the course? You betcha! Every point of contention is not debatable in every context.

5. Apple paid an effective tax rate of 0.005% on its European profits. So, after a three-year investigation by the EU, Apple got hit with a 13,000,000,000 euro back tax bill. CEO Cook calls the ruling 'political crap'. IMHO, the definition of crap is the deal that Apple made with the Irish government. I couldn't make that deal. You couldn't make that deal. Nobody that we know could make that deal. Put on your Man Pants, Apple. Get taxed like the rest of us.

6. Geneticists have determined that human hands probably evolved from the tail fins of fish. Maybe not stupid, but interesting. Don't you think?

Carole King was honored at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She was blown away when Aretha sat at the piano to play and sing RESPECT. So were Barack and Michelle and everybody in the audience and everybody who has seen the video. Neat stuff.

UNLOCK THE DAMN PHONE

The internet loves John Oliver. He's smart. He tackles both highly visible and obscure subjects with ease and he seems to be having fun while he's doing it. He curses. Lots. He's British and, as Americans seem to have decided, Brits are always smarter. So when Oliver says that it's a bad idea for Apple to decrypt the phone of an honest to God, no question about it, shoot innocent people dead terrorist, the internet nods its head and agrees. Here's the whole bit.

Pfui. Oliver is wrong. Simply wrong.

Forget for the moment that the owner of the phone has given permission. (Remember, the phone in question was a work phone and not the personal phone of the terrorist.) Forget for the moment that there's a warrant and that the warrant does not ask for a permanent back door but simply assistance in the opening of a specific phone. Just think about this. As Apple has said, and Oliver himself repeats in his piece, it would take a few guys working on it a few days to decrypt the phone.

A few guys and a few days. And, according to more than one expert, those guys wouldn't even have to be working at Apple. So we're arguing over a work product that would take the same time to produce as it would take good coders to fill out their NCAA March Madness brackets.

I get it. There's a prosecutor in New York with over 100 phones belonging to murderers and pedophiles and rapists that he would like decrypted. If Apple did this once, they might be required to assist law enforcement in bringing down hundreds, maybe thousands of bad guys who use encrypted phones to hide their terrorist intents, their pedophilia, their stalking and their serial rapes.

Wait a minute. Thousands of terrorists, pedophiles, and rapists might be captured or successfully prosecuted if it were possible to decrypt their phones?

Who was it that said, "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

Thomas Jefferson.

Who was it that said, "[The insurrection] in nearly one-third of the States had subverted the whole of the laws . . . Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"

Abraham Lincoln

Who was it that said, "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Not as famous as the other two guys, but the actual source of the ubiquitous 'not a suicide pact' quote.

So we have to decide. Are we a nation of both public and private transparency, with enough flexibility in the law to protect ourselves? Or are we a nation of dark places and hidden, untouchable, safe and secure purveyors of evil? It seems to me to be disingenuous to hold the belief that Snowden and Assange are heroes, that our government doesn't have the right to keep secrets, and at the same time believe that those who plan to destroy our civil society have the right to keep their secrets completely protected from discovery, even when there is sufficient probable cause for a court to issue a warrant.

Unlock the damn phone.

APPLE, BREXIT & TRUMP

APPLE
Unlock the damn phone.

The phone's user was a terrorist. Undisputed. The owner of the phone, the terrorist's unwitting employer, has given permission for the phone to be unlocked. There's a court order that is specific to that one phone and does not require that phone-hacking software be provided to the FBI for their future use.

With a court order, the Feds can get into my bank account. With a court order, they can paw through my underwear drawer. And I'm this side of certain that, with or without a court order, there are a bunch of coders at Apple who already know how to unlock a phone.

Apple's argument seems to be that a search warrant should apply to all the rooms in a house except the loo because what goes on in the loo should remain private forever.

That dog won't hunt.

Unlock the damn phone.

BREXIT
Some time ago, the nervousness over the possibility that the Greeks would be forced out of the EU led to a 20% devaluation of the Euro against the US Dollar. The cost of one Euro went from 1.35 USD to 1.10 USD and has stayed in that neighborhood ever since. Oh, I know that there are other influences and that the devaluation probably cannot be ascribed solely to the problems with Greece...and Italy and Spain and Portugal. But Greece was certainly a convenient place on which to hang a commentator's hat.

Recently, the Euro enjoyed a bit of a comeback, reaching 1.13 USD or better. That may not seem like very much, but 2% or 3% is not an insignificant amount when applied to a fixed pension. No worries, though. We apparently had nothing to fear. The possibility of a Brexit continues in the news. And a big Thank You to Boris for coming down on the side of the Brexiters. We're back at 1.10 USD again.

At this point in time, European uncertainty is an American expat's best friend.

TRUMP

There is a misconception that American electoral politics have been governed by rules of engagement that are relatively benign until just recently. We think of the American Founding Fathers (and Mothers, to be fair) such as Thomas Jefferson as persons of intellect whose Declaration of Independence and Constitution created the framework for a new, progressive style of governance.

Wrong.

Well, they were persons of intellect. But the Founders were also rebels. Traitors to Mother England. It should come as no surprise that they were, in fact, the architects of partisanship. Some believed in a strong federal government. Some abhorred the idea of federalism. Thus were two political parties born. And thus, partisanship.


Broadsheets, the news outlets of the times, were often owned by partisan politicians and were used unashamedly to denigrate their rivals. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, all were savaged with venom that today only appears on the very fringes of the internet. Washington's Farewell Address, generally considered to be one of the most important speeches ever given by an American politician, was described at the time in the organ of a rival as the "loathings of a sick mind." Washington himself, Thomas Paine implied, was a traitor and perhaps a double agent in the pay of the British. The elder Adams was "old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled and toothless."

Enter Trump. There is no regard for truth. There is only hate combined with lust for power.

An American tradition...