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Your absolutely-not-gay guide to the winter Olympics

Scott Bateman
© Scott Bateman

But don’t worry, Russia has assured the world that gays have nothing to fear at the upcoming Olympics. That is, as long as they don’t do anything to flaunt it. Uh oh!

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The Commercialization of Privacy

Tom Fishburne
© Tom Fishburne

I have to admit that I purchased a Nest thermostat a few months ago, before there was any hint that Google was about to purchase them. I didn’t get the smoke alarm option.

This comic might seem to have little to do with politics, but it is about privacy — a topic that is on everyone’s minds. Has the NSA already hacked into the Nest thermostat, so it knows when you’re home? What’s next? A microphone to eavesdrop on what you’re saying in your own home? That may sound paranoid, but an increasing number of things in your home are connected to the internet — not just my thermostat, but my TV, my telephone, not to mention all my computers (which have full video cameras, not just microphones).

So who should I be more worried about with this kind of information, the government, or companies like Google?

One way or another, I’m thinking that privacy is doomed.

UPDATE: In a vaguely related story, banking giant HSBC has started refusing to let people access their own money unless they can give a good reason why they want it. In some cases, they have asked for proof.

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A Moral For Our Time

I think this comic is absolutely brilliant.

Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
Zach Weinersmith
© Zach Weinersmith

The only thing I would add is the thing that in some ways scares me the most: that our spying agencies seem to actually believe their own PR. They believe that by breaking the law and spying on US citizens that they are protecting us. They believe that they are the “good guys” when they assassinate people. They think it is necessary to stage false flag operations in order to start wars to keep the oil flowing. They think Edward Snowden and people like him deserve to be killed without trial.

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Spying, American Style

Jon Stewart tears apart Obama’s speech on NSA reforms:

We already have plenty of evidence that without strict oversight, America’s spying agencies will always overstep their authority and violate the law. But we don’t seem to be able to learn from history, so I suppose we are doomed to repeat it.

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Technology!

A fascinating story unfolded this week, as Yale University went to war against a website that scraped the Yale University website. But first a quick history.

Years ago, some students at Yale built a website that presented information about Yale courses. It did this by scraping the University’s official course website, but presented this information in a way that was easier to use. They called the site “Yale Bluebook”. No, this is not the site with whom Yale went to war this week. Instead they rewarded it. In 2012 Yale purchased a license to the site and took it in-house.

Two different students had been working on what they thought was a better version of the site, which they called Yale Bluebook Plus (YBB+). It allowed users to sort courses by the average student ranking and workload. This information was available on the original website, but there was no easy way to directly compare it. But the university did not like giving the students the ability to directly compare courses by student ratings, so they blocked YBB+ on the university network.

Instead of the university giving the real reason they were blocking the website, they told the website’s creators that they objected to YBB+ using their trademarks. This was a bit silly, since the original YBB was started by other students who did exactly the same thing. But the students dutifully removed the the Yale name from the site and rebranded the site as CourseTable.

Yale then blocked the new site, accusing the site of “malicious activity” and threatened the students with disciplinary action if they did not take down the site. So the students took it down. But by then the story had hit the innertubes and everybody was talking about it. Yale did respond, stating:

[Yale’s course] evaluations… became available to students only in recent years and with the understanding that the information they made available to students would appear only as it currently appears on Yale’s sites — in its entirety.

Questions of whether Yale has the right to control information they have released is interesting, but that’s not why I’m posting this. The ironic part is what happened next. Another student built a Chrome browser plugin that performed the same function as YBB+. His blog post about this is definitely worth a read, but here’s an excerpt:

I built a Chrome Extension called Banned Bluebook. It modifies the Chrome browser to add CourseTable’s functionality to Yale’s official course selection website, showing the course’s average rating and workload next to each search result. It also allows students to sort these courses by rating and workload. This is the original site, and this is the site with Banned Bluebook enabled (this demo uses randomly generated rating values).

Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It’s 100% kosher.

Making a copy of data from one website and making it available on another site in a different form is one thing. Never mind that it is incredibly common on the web (heck, that’s basically what Political Irony does). But implementing it as a browser extension, so that all the work is done in the user’s browser, is another.

I’m really curious how the university can respond to this. Technology changes everything.

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Innovation, Telco Style

5RrWm

Internet network neutrality was dealt a severe blow last week by a federal court. This means that internet providers are now free to charge whatever they want to provide you with individual content, just like cable companies do. Verizon, who brought the suit, claims that killing network neutrality is required in order to allow “innovation”. Yeah, right. We’ve already seen what that kind of innovation looks like — purposely slowing down or even blocking services (like Netflix) that compete with their own higher priced offerings.

There is a solution, but will the FCC have the guts to implement it and piss off the powerful companies that stand to gain from the loss?

Otherwise, companies like Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast and others will be allowed to control what you can see and say over the internet. I think that is intolerable.

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The Job Interview

You’ve come a long way baby, but the Daily Show is going to take you even further.

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Born to Run

Jimmy Fallon and friend make fun of Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate”:

Christie may think he was Born to Run, but how is he going to run from this?

UPDATE: Fox News defends Christie, leading to a response from Jon Stewart.

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Fugetaboutit!

Found on the blog of Ruben Bolling:

Ruben Bolling
© Ruben Bolling

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Good-bye

You may have noticed that the site has been having problems for a few days. I don’t know if someone hacked into the site (again), or if it is the victim of a denial of service attack, or whatever. I’ve spent a few days trying to fix it but so far have failed.

The biggest problem is that I’m starting a new company, and I don’t have enough time to fix the blog right now (the last time this happened, it took weeks of hard work). Sorry, but I’m giving up.

It has been a great run. I started this blog in May 2008 and expected to do this maybe up until the election. But then you happened. I’ve made new friends, and have reconnected with old friends who found the blog. I’ve gone to parties and had people come up to me and tell me that they discovered this cool new blog, not knowing it was me who ran it (how crazy is that?). I have gotten so much out of this. Thank you all.

If you need a political humor fix, I recommend looking at Matt Bors’ new site The Nib at https://medium.com/the-nib.

I’ll take the site down in a few days, but I’ll put up a list of other sources of political humor. Meanwhile, try the links.

If I ever decide to do something similar, I’ll post information in the Political Irony facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Political-Irony/329374495445, and on twitter at https://twitter.com/politicalirony.

thanks again,

Wm Leler AKA Iron Knee

UPDATE: Just posted something to the blog and it worked (mostly). So I may continue to post things on and off.

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Pot v. Booze

Jon Stewart nails it:

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Dee-Nye-All

Pat Bagley
© Pat Bagley

Is Dee Nye the evil twin sister of Bill Nye, the science guy?

The eastern half of the US is having a massive cold snap, and that can only mean that it is time for the climate deniers to come out of the woodwork. It doesn’t matter how many times that you explain to them that “climate” is not the same as “weather”. A side effect of climate change is that temperatures will become more extreme. So while the eastern US is freezing to death, even more other locations on earth will be feeling the burn instead. Indeed, we don’t have final numbers yet, but it looks like 2013 will have been the seventh hottest year on record.

Leading the climate deniers is Republican Senator James Inhofe, who on Monday called climate change science “laughable” and rigged. Ironically, his own home state of Oklahoma has recently been suffering through repeated severe droughts, and in 2011 had the hottest summer ever recorded in US history (hotter than 1934, the infamous “Dust Bowl” that led to the Great Depression).

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Short Attention Span Politics

OMG! Six Million People who previously had insurance losing their health care coverage in a single day! Reports of massive screwups in the launch! Rates skyrocketing! Computer glitches! Overloaded telephone lines! Confusion! Government working around the clock to clean up the mess!

You would be excused if you thought those are today’s headlines about Obamacare, but they aren’t. They are from almost exactly eight years ago, when the Republicans rolled out Medicare Part D.

How bad was it? Here’s a newspaper account from back then:

Two weeks into the new Medicare prescription drug program, many of the nation’s sickest and poorest elderly and disabled people are being turned away or overcharged at pharmacies, prompting more than a dozen states to declare health emergencies and pay for their life-saving medicines.

Computer glitches, overloaded telephone lines and poorly trained pharmacists are being blamed for mix-ups that have resulted in the worst of unintended consequences: As many as 6.4 million low-income seniors, who until Dec. 31 received their medications free, suddenly find themselves navigating an insurance maze of large deductibles, co-payments and outright denial of coverage.

But here’s the big difference. Even though Democrats had opposed Medicare Part D because they claimed it was a giant giveaway to the drug companies, and was unfunded so it would run up the deficit, they worked with the Republicans to fix the problems. As then-Senator Hillary Clinton put it:

I voted against it, but once it passed I certainly determined that I would try to do everything I could to make sure that New Yorkers understood it, could access it, and make the best of it.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Aging asked his colleagues “to put aside any partisan thoughts to work together to get this program running.”

During its rollout, Medicare Part D was even more unpopular than Obamacare is during its launch.

To try to fix the problems president Bush ordered insurers to “aid the ailing Medicare drug plan” by providing emergency prescription coverage, even though he had no Congressional authorization to do so. But when Obama made changes to Obamacare to allow people to keep their old plans, he was threatened with lawsuits by eleven state Attorney Generals (need I say it, all Republicans), insisting that he get Congressional approval.

What makes this even more ironic is that Obama was making those changes to solve a problem that hardly existed. Republicans were claiming that millions of people were losing their insurance coverage. But in the end, that “millions” ended up being around 10,000 people.

In fact, 4.8 million people were left without insurance coverage, not because of Obamacare, but because 25 GOP controlled states have refused to expand Medicaid (even though it is almost completely paid for by the federal government).

Pure Partisan Politics. The Republicans will do anything to oppose Obama, even if it costs an estimated 27,000 lives. Pitiful.

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You have to Talk to remain Silent?

Last week, the Supreme Court made another bizarre and wrong decision, led by the conservative justices. Here’s the summary from SCOTUSblog:

When petitioner had not yet been placed in custody or received Miranda warnings, and voluntarily responded to some questions by police about a murder, the prosecution’s use of his silence in response to another question as evidence of his guilt at trial did not violate the Fifth Amendment because petitioner failed to expressly invoke his privilege not to incriminate himself in response to the officer’s question.

He did not assert his right to remain silent, but instead was just silent. In the majority opinion, Justice Alito claims that in order to be protected by the fifth amendment, you have to affirmatively “invoke” the right to not answer questions. Yup, in order to remain silent, you have to formally say that you are invoking your fifth amendment right. And this is true even if you haven’t been read the Miranda warnings.

What’s next? In order to have free speech, I have to formally announce that I am exercising my first amendment rights? Do churches have to formally invoke their religious rights before they can exercise them? If I want to own a gun, I have to formally invoke the right to bear arms? If I want to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, I have to formally invoke that right (even when the government is doing the searches without my knowledge)?

Silly me. I thought that rights were things that I am born with and which always apply to me, not things I have to request or announce. I must have been confused when I thought the bill of rights was not a list of nice things that the government gives to me if I ask for them, but are meant to protect me against the abuse of power by the government.

This is another example of how we are losing our right to privacy. Imagine the police are questioning you about a crime and they ask you where you were on a certain date. If you refuse to answer, can this be used against you as evidence of your guilt? Maybe you didn’t want to answer because you were cheating on your girlfriend. Or you called in sick to work but were really playing golf. Those things are not illegal, but they can get you into serious trouble. Or maybe you haven’t done anything wrong at all, but you are afraid to answer the question because the real guilty party has threatened you if you talk to the police.

In this case, the defendant’s silence was used against him in a court of law. And the Supreme Court said that was ok. What good is a right if it is used against you if you exercise it? Is it even a right anymore?

Well, just to be on the safe side, I am hereby formally announcing that I am exercising my first amendment rights to free speech and freedom of press in creating this blog. There. Am I safe now?

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Predicting the Future

Regular readers know how much I love Tom Tomorrow. So I was delighted to see a Tom Tomorrow comic from 1994 making the rounds of the innertubes because it was disturbingly visionary:

Tom Tomorrow
© Tom Tomorrow

Dan Perkins (TT’s real name) responds in true form:

But here’s the dirty secret about prognostication: publicize your hits, not your misses. If you only judge me by this one — and I don’t mind if you do! — I am clearly a prescient genius.

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