Monday, June 18, 2007

Digg Report: Today's #1 Digg, at a healthy 6084 Diggs, is a good public service announcement. One shouldn't publish other people's private information, including that of suspected criminals. Suspected criminals. Or, maybe even convicted criminals.

We sort of have laws against vigilante justice in this country, and for good reason. Many Diggsters, judging from the comments, don't seem to recognize this. On the other hand, there are a fair number of reasonable comments, and so that's something of a positive.

Overall, a rather lame #1, and not a good return for the Digg Report after a few days' absence.
And does Boing Boing and the rest of the looney Left realize what this means about American justice? The very fact that a court can require the release of such information (rightly or wrongly), in the face of Bushitler and the Neocons, demonstrates that plenty of checks remain against legislation like the Patriot Act.

Looks like the conspiracy buffs will need to return to the days of tin hats and lizardroids.
More on Chavez's efforts to buy goodwill in Latin America through cheap PCs. This would bother me, if I weren't so sure it's bound to be a miserable failure.

Update: They're not even that cheap. This guy's a real wacko. That, or crazy like a fox: maybe he'll make PCs just good enough to drive out other private Latin American competition (to the extent that it exists), and then just nationalize the government-supported Chinese "partner."
Once again, a government is organizing (or offering, depending on one's point of view) a service that private companies would provide if they could make a profit doing so. In all likelihood, if even marginaly "successful" (by whatever bureaucratic definition of success used), municipal Wi-Fi will drive out future, better technologies by offering just enough service for the typical user at just low enough of a price. And, once in place, government will have a vested interest in making sure "its" service is successful, up to and including making it prohibitively expensive for competition.

Mark my words. Things like this will set back better technologies, like WiMAX, for years to come.
"Bush says he’ll veto excessive spending bills." When I first read that headline, I figured it must be from The Onion. There's simply no way that Bush can seriously be saying this so late in the game.

I know the American public has a short memory, but it's not that short. And this is just the sort of thing that the Left will go ballistic over. Bush has yet to veto a spending bill; what could possibly be the benefit of starting now except in a fruitless attempt to win back fiscal conservatives?

As I believe I've mentioned, I hate politics.
And so it starts, and when Israel responds, as it must, it will be blamed for "escalating" violence that has been raging for months. Probably, it will also be blamed for ending some truce that's been violently raging for weeks.
And, as expected, government causes dislocations in the economy. And, also as expected, this will inevitably be blamed on "Big Oil."
Frank Lloyd Wright is turning in his grave right about now. Is there any function in this form?
Cindy Sheehan had some powerful friends. Too bad they were among the enemy.
Those silly pranksters.
It's amazing how Boing Boing goes out of its way to show that terrorism is impossible and thus our guarding against terrorist acts must be the height of both stupidity and oppression. While I wrote just previously about the wrongness of a bunker mentality, I do believe (naturally) in using investigative efforts to locate those who might be inclined to commit acts of terror.

The fact that the particular folks mentioned in the linked story were fools (and, I don't necessarily take one "security guru"'s word on that) doesn't mean that they weren't ripe for the picking by someone with better knowledge on how to commit mass murder. Finding them and incarcerating them, thus removing them from the field of play, seems like a good enough objective on its own.

And as usual, Boing Boing attacks, but it provides no real alternatives.
To me, this is precisely what must happen when a nation assumes a bunker mentality to external threats, rather than removing those threats directly. The Left laments these sorts of things, while simultaneously refusing to allow us to go over those who are directly and indirectly responsible for the threats we face.

If we removed the state sponsors of terrorism, then the terrorists would be that much easier to find, capture, and execute. We haven't found bin Laden because we can't go into Pakistan to look for him, and that's just one example.
The twisted logic in this is impossible to unravel, which is why dealing rationally with the Islamic world is inherently impossible. Salman Rushdie receives Knighthood, which necessarily means that Muslims should commit attacks against... well, non-Muslims, obviously.

An insult can't go unpunished, right?