It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

So I don't know if anyone here read about the Barry Bonds Congressional fiasco; if not, I'll give a brief rundown. In 2003, Congress, apparently not having any national business whatsoever to attend to, decided to get involved in a private sports debate, and forced Barry Bonds to give testimony before a grand jury about steroid use. During that testimony, Bonds said as little as possible (as anyone would under the circumstances), answering only direct questions and not offering additional detail. They then had a trail to try to convict him of lying, which ended with a hung jury. Frustrated in their initial witch-hunt, Congress instead decided to try Bonds for lying to the grand jury, which of course they couldn't prove, because it didn't happen. Instead, they prosecuted him for "being evasive" and "not saying enough to incriminate himself", which would seem like an equally far-fetched theory. Here's the obscene part, though: they convicted him ! ...

I was reading the highlights from Obama's recent address to the nation to push his agenda ( http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/06/politics/obama-speech/?hpt=hp_t1 ), and it nearly hurt to read. Not, of course, because the speech wasn't eloquent; I'm confident Obama's writers crafted something with all the bells and whistles. Also not because it wasn't well-read off a teleprompter; I didn't see the actual speech, but I'm wager Obama did a good job of delivering the carefully-crafted message. No, the hurt was more of a visceral reaction to the dishonesty, the half-truths, the creative spin... all the things which just aggravate those of us who desperately wish the voting populace was more well-informed and intelligent, so we wouldn't ever risk having leaders like Obama. All in all, though, it was just another standard Obama speech... so why does it deserve a blog post? Well, you can think of this as another public service post, to enumerate some of the distortions...

There's a movement going on in the country right now; small at the moment, but persistent, and getting lots of media attention currently (due in not small part, I'm sure, to the fairly significant alignment of positions between the protesters and the liberal media). This protest movement started as Occupy Wall Street, a sit-in protest against the profits of investment corporations despite the economic downturn, but has grown to be nation-wide to some extend, and into a protest against corporations in general, in addition to a few other things. It has received backing and support from some big-name organizations (namely and primarily, the Socialist party, the Nazi party, several large labor unions, and several well-known Democrats), and although the numbers of people involved are relatively small, there is a solid basis for frustration. America is in a recession, jobs in many fields are scarce, the housing market continues to stagnate and impede possible recovery, and some corpo...

I was struggling a bit to come up with the right word to describe how the EU is handling the whole Greece/Euro situation. It's not really 'dumb' in the intellectual sense, since a certain amount of dancing around issues and obfuscation seems somewhat necessary to try to get public buy-in to their policies (that is, the only way their people are going to support what they are doing is if they don't really understand it). It's also not dumb in the end-goal sense: if you want to preserve the nominal stability of the monetary union, and prolong Greece's national default by stealing wealth from the other countries in the EU, this is a good way to do it. No, what I mean by 'dumb' is that this whole process exemplifies most of what I find distasteful about politics in general. First you have a political system which is very popular among the people, but doomed to economic failure like every other attempt before it. Then you have this effort to prolong the probl...

As you should know, OnStar is a telematics system which is installed by default on every Government Motors car (and several other makes); it's one of several systems now in use, but probably the most widely known and deployed. This system is used for providing real-time updates to your vehicle, getting assistance, uploading your car's diagnostic information to OnStar's servers, allowing remote control of your vehicle by police, OnStar, or anyone else in control of their network, and surreptitiously monitoring in-car conversations without a warrant. There are other uses as well, but these are the major ones, I believe. Recently, though, OnStar changed their terms of service to allow the company to use your telemetry information for its own private use, regardless of if you have the service currently "active" (the monitoring and surveillance capabilities are always active, you cannot modify these through any means, for obvious reasons). They have always been colle...

A US Court of Appeals ruled that the health care mandate specified in the Obamacare legislation was unconstitutional. This makes one appellate court which has ruled the legislation valid, one which has ruled it [partially] invalid, and two which are still pending; all of which are a waste of time, of course, since eventually the Supreme Court will obviously need to consider and rule on it, making all the other deliberations and rulings a colossal waste of time, money, effort, and attention. I could take issue with the procedure, I suppose, and complain about how absurd the process is which takes years to resolve anything, and serves no valid societal purpose aside from enriching lawyers (which has questionable social value). I could also of course address just how ridiculously overreaching the government's position is: that everyone indirectly affect inner-state commerce by their existence, and thus the government is entitled to dictate every part of their life. There's cer...

I work in the computer security industry (more or less). I recently had the occasion to attend the Black Hat and DEFCON conferences, both of which focus on computer security (more or less, with different perspectives). When I got back, I came across this article , which references one of the conferences and points out an ongoing problem in the US: there are not enough skilled computer security experts going to work for (and/or continuing to work for) the US government, specifically in the area of cyber-defense. This is a rather large problem, but presents a rather interesting quandary for the US government. One of the side-themes of a few of the talks at DEFCON was that if you really wanted to hack things, you needed to be based outside the US, for a number of reasons. First, and probably the most obvious, is that the US has some of the harshest penalties for computer crimes in the world, and just the accusation of such can ruin your life. You don't have to look hard to find num...

File this story under the category of "it would be funny, if it wasn't the people making the laws where I live". Apparently, two Democrats in the California legislature are at odds about releasing financial information about office budgets and spending projections. The complaining assemblyman asserts that his budget was cut as a retaliatory measure for voting against the caucus on the budget bill. The speaker of the assembly counters that he has budgetary problems because he consistently over-spends, rather than the arbitrary adjustments which he doesn't deny making. Wait, though; it's gets more ridiculous. The assemblyman who got his budget allocation slashed in retaliation for having the audacity to try to represent the people (instead of the political establishment), along with various media organizations, requested the budget information, under a free-information request. This was denied, by the rules branch controlled by the speaker, under the grounds that i...

So apparently, over the weekend, the leaders of both major political parties finally reached a "compromise" to raise the debt ceiling. To call it a compromise is disingenuous, though; essentially, both parties caved to the administration demand for a blank check through 2012, then added enough smoke and mirrors and other bullshit to try to deflect criticism that it's just another blank check. Honestly, I'm more upset about the clearly bogus rhetoric about having a serious discussion or fixing any of the real problems than the fact that our government ended up doing neither: if you were going to capitulate and write the check in the end, why create all the drama and uncertainly leading up to it? Let's look at some of the facts for the "compromise", just to be clear: - $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling limit - No spending cuts of any significance during this term of Congress; all spending cuts are non-binding to next term of Congress and easily r...

I've been listening, as most of the people in America who are at all cognizant of the political happenings in the country, to the partisan debate about raising the debt ceiling. I have voiced my own thoughts and opinions, of course, but this post isn't going to be able what I think should or should not be done, nor is it going to address any particular statement. Rather, I'd like to criticize the approach to "resolving" the problem taken by both sides. I realize that typically I find myself more angry with Democrats than Republicans, however in this instance, I think the approach coming out of both sides stinks. First, let me address the Republicans. It's true that the country had a huge spending problem, and your party would seem poised to capitalize on the growing realization of such among the slow-witted populace, and the rising sentiment that something needs to be done to stop the slow bleeding to death. You started out well, opposing the increase without ...

Obama recently told Congress that, with respect to making a deal to raise the debt ceiling, they needed to suck it up, "rip the bandaid off" , and deal with making the hard choices which were beneficial for the country in the long run. Personally, I tend to agree with the sentiment, even as I take issue with the specifics: although I'm not at all convinced that writing another blank check we can't possibly afford to the spend-happy democrats is either "right" or "necessary", it does seem to me that it would be the job of Congress, and the President, to do what's best for the country overall, rather than what's most politically expedient and popular at the time. However, to see if Obama is serious about the sentiment, and is not just using it in this case to push his political agenda (and the title might have some foreshadowing as to which it is), it's important to look at some other instances where Obama and/or his party in Congress had...

Obama infuriates me; this is probably not a surprise to regular readers here. However, in this case it's not his policies, his socialist ideology, or his dictatorial approach which is currently most aggravating. The thing which is currently bugging me is his approach to the debt ceiling debate, and the complacency of the main stream media not calling him out on it. Now granted, it's a good strategy, and as a shrewd political move I can find no particular fault. Essentially, what he has done is frame the discussion as one where raising the debt ceiling is an inevitability, a fundamental job of Congress, and everything else is partisan politics. From the beginning of his involvement, there was no mention of the "right" or "wrong" of spending without limit, or any mention of deficit reduction, or taxes, or anything else; it was just "this obviously must be done", and nothing else. Only later did he introduce the other issues into the rhetoric, but bei...

The speech people didn't hear from Obama to kick off his 2012 re-election campaign. I'm sure the original was something like this, and the final version was just edited for time, and to appeal more to his base and stuff. My fellow Americans, Today I'm pleased to announce my candidacy for President of the United States in 2012. We have done more to advance the progressive agenda in the last few years than any administration since FDR, but there is still much to do. Our country still faces many grave challenges, from curmudgeons in Congress who wish to keep us from borrowing infinite money, to the remaining industries which are not being run by our government, there is much we can still do to improve the country, and I intend to be there to help complete my vision for the United States. Now, before I get into specifics for what I intend to accomplish in the next four years, I'd like to address some of the concerns that people have expressed about my presidency so far, fro...

So, in case you don't follow sports, there's an ongoing labor dispute between the NFL and its players. It's a fairly standard dispute: the union wants more money, and the business says it can't afford to pay more. This lead to a lockout, which led to the union decertifying (in name only), which led to a lawsuit by the players, which led to a court order to lift the lockout (presumably along the argument that players should be allowed to work, although clearly influenced by the current pro-union federal executive administration). All of this, though, leads me to wonder: what's the big downside for the NFL? The NFL has a television contract, from which it derives most of its revenue. Previously, this was contractually guaranteed to be partially distributed to the players, in a fixed ratio set forth in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. However, with the union dissolved, doesn't this leave the league free to distribute the revenue however they see fit (assuming t...

I was reading a story recently about a guy who basically got railroaded by the FBI after someone used his unsecured wireless connection to download child porn. Now, child porn is pretty horrible, but so was the abuse this poor guy had to endure at the hands of the FBI, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't care about respecting people's rights at all . Between this, the various recent privacy abuse stories , and the ongoing controversy over recording police activity (which, btw, should absolutely be unequivocally protected), I got to thinking: our current system is pretty bad at protecting peoples' rights, especially against abuse from law enforcement. It's no surprise why this is so, of course. The police (and I use this term generally, to be inclusive of local, state, federal, and other government enforcers and thugs) are required to respect the laws, but commonly do not. I mean, are we even surprised when we see police routinely disregard traffic laws whenever they fee...

I realize this is a couple days late to be super-timely, but it still needs to be commented on, in my opinion... So Obama paid a visit to the US Chamber of Commerce, to give a rosy speech about being pro-business. Wait, what? Obama's about as pro-business as I am a bleeding-heart liberal; it would be like me giving a speech about the value of public funding for NPR. I mean, I get the reasoning, from a political perspective: people are sorta figuring out that all the wealth redistribution in the world doesn't help people when there aren't any jobs because the socialist regime has obliterated industry, so perhaps it's a good idea to at least give lip-service to the engine which generated virtually all the prosperity the Democrats are now dismantling. Seriously, though, when you're so far removed from what you're saying that it comes off as comedy night, you might want to rethink the strategy. Let's just look at a few highlights. For example, Obama said: I unde...

So this is an interesting idea I've been pondering, which I figured I'd share; hopefully it's at least thought-provoking, if not amusing. Consider this: what if there was a cheap, readily-available (as in globally) "contraceptive" pill that men could take which would deterministically set the gender of any children they would father while on said medication? For the sake of argument, we'll assume that you could get either type: male or female children. What would the effects on populations and political dynamics be, both short and long term? For example, in areas where population is limited (either by law or by resources), and males are given better opportunity and/or status in the society, you could assume that most people would choose to have exclusively male children (especially if it would be the father who was making the choice, presumably at least sometimes without consent of the mother). Over a generation or so, this could shift the population balance s...

Let me begin by stating that I'm not anti-liberal, at least generally speaking. There are a few liberal ideals which I ascribe to, and I think generally speaking, liberal politicians have good intentions (if not good long-term vision, or appreciation of consequences). In fact, I would go as far as to say that if some of the most pervasive flaws in liberal political actions could be corrected for (say, in the framework of the government itself), I might be fairly comfortable with liberal politicians. The problems for me mainly stem from fiscal issues; I tend to side with liberals on social issues, and I think many of the ideals are good (eg: equal rights, taking care of people who are unable to care for themselves, etc.). That being said, here are what I view as the top "problem areas" with typical liberal political agendas: - Too much taxation - Too much deficit spending, borrowing against future generations - Focus on wealth redistribution, in various forms - Trying to b...