Wonder When They’ll get Round To Making Blogging Illegal?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

While he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the former Speaker, Dennis Hastert, used his political power and connections to enrich himself. No shocks there. He is just one among many politicians who routinely do likewise.

But unlike most of the others, Hastert was charged by the Feds with five felonies, each of them carrying a minimum of five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

But, before you get the wrong idea and start to cheer, Hastert’s use of political leverage for personal gain has nothing to do with the charges against him.

What he did when in office was merely corruption and we live in a corrupt political system that those in charge like to call ‘democracy’.

No, Hastert has apparently committed a far worse crime than political graft. And it wasn’t anything to do with the leaks doing the rounds that he had been paying off a high school student for alleged sexual abuse decades ago. He hasn’t been charged with anything related to that either.

Instead, he has been pursued and indicted for the heinous crime of

…wait for it…

“structuring” cash withdrawals from his bank accounts so as to avoid federal bank reporting requirements, and lying to the FBI about what he was doing with his money.

Now, I could care less what they do to a corrupt politician like Hastert. There is a certain irony that he has been caught by a law that he probably helped to create.

But the problem is that many of us could be similarly indicted simply because most of us don’t even know we are committing a crime in the first place.

Stupid bureaucrats have enacted so many laws in recent years, using misleading cover titles such as ‘money laundering’, ‘terrorist threats’, or ‘national security’, that they have turned millions of law-abiding people into de facto criminals, without them even knowing it.

The piece of invasive and unnecessary legislation that Hastert has been caught breaking is the ‘Bank Secrecy Act of 1970’, which makes it compulsory for U.S. banks to file a “currency transaction report” for deposits or withdrawals of more than $10,000 in currency. Banks suspicious of specific transactions are further required to file a “suspicious activity report.”

If the banks don’t capitulate to this government nonsense then they face penalties. This means that the banks comply, over-zealously so as not to ever infringe the regulations – which many of them don’t even understand. Now as a matter of routine they report ALL large cash transactions as suspicious, whether they really are or not.

Hastert didn’t intend or commit any money laundering, fraud or tax evasion. But the authorities don’t care about that. He had a legal and legitimate agreement in place with another individual and he withdrew his money in smaller amounts because he didn’t want this private arrangement to become public knowledge. The Justice Department even admits as much. But the authorities don’t care about that either.

So why have they charged Hastert when they know he really did nothing wrong apart from infringe on a stupid law that was never intended to catch the likes of him?

They did it to terrorize the rest of us.

What most western governments are about nowadays is control. The type of control that used to pervade communist states in the Soviet era. They want to criminalize ordinary people by making trivial and harmless acts into major felonies.

Woe betide you now if you want to spend you own money or transfer it to someone else. It’s your money, you earned it, you saved it up, but touch it in a way not specified by the government and you’re in Federal Court, you criminal bad person you!

All these spurious and unnecessary laws give government law enforcement agencies the ability to punish anyone at any time because there are so many regulations that everyone is in breach of something.

Wonder when they’ll get round to making blogging illegal?

Think I’m joking???

.

==========================

.

The Warning Signs Are Warning Signs!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Strange as it may seem Warning Signs are warning signs that society is in BIG trouble. They indicate that we have regressed to the level where we are allowing the stupidest people in society to dictate how the rest of us behave.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms with this trend. It is unnecessary and it is irritating for anyone with an IQ above 40.

If some dumb ass who knows they are allergic to nuts, buys a bag of nuts, then let them suffer the consequences of their stupidity if they eat them. Or if someone is in McDonalds or a similar establishment and buys a cup of hot coffee they should have the wit to realize that hot coffees is ‘hot’ and will burn them if they pour it all over themselves.

Harsh? Perhaps, but necessary.

Sadly the whole thing has deteriorated so far that, not only are there unnecessary warning labels on almost everything, but the morons for whom they are there now actually seem to be writing them too!

I could rant on, but better (and funnier) to show you some examples that make me shake my head in despair.

.

“Do not use if you cannot

see clearly to read the information

in the information booklet.”

— In the information booklet.

.

.

“Caution:

The contents of this bottle

should not be fed to fish.”

— On a bottle of shampoo for dogs.

.

.

“For external use only!”

— On a curling iron.

.

“Warning: This product can burn eyes.”

— Also on a curling iron.

.

.

“Do not use in shower.”

— On a hair dryer.

.

“Do not use while sleeping.”

— Also on a hair dryer.

.

.

“Do not use while sleeping or unconscious.”

— On a hand-held massaging device.

.

.

“Recycled flush water unsafe for drinking.”

— On a toilet at a public sports facility

in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

.

.

“Shin pads cannot protect any part

of the body they do not cover.”

— On a pair of shin guards made for bicyclists.

.

.

“This product not intended

for use as a dental drill.”

— On an electric rotary tool.

.

.

“Caution:

Do not spray in eyes.”

— On a container of underarm deodorant.

.

.

“Do not drive with sunshield in place.”

— On a cardboard sunshield that keeps

the sun off the dashboard.

.

==================================

.

I Spy With Your Little ‘i’ – A Free And Open Internet?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

When the internet was born it was a tool of the military establishment.

Then it broke out of that stranglehold and escaped into a world of freedom of expression and communication for everyone.

Never before had a system like this been available to the general public. Never before had it been so easy to find information, search for friends, communicate with groups with similar interests, etc. Its popularity was assured.

The world wide web developed at break neck speed, much too quick for the people who hate and detest freedom. They were confounded.

It was a free and open internet.

So how could it ever go wrong?

Well, as with the financial crisis, when you dig down a bit you find the Clinton administration again as the culprit.

During the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was first being woven into social and cultural life, internet companies and corporate advertisers lobbied the Clinton administration to minimize privacy restrictions, so that they could re-engineer the Web to enable commercial surveillance of internet users.

The warnings of public interest groups were ignored as social networks, search engines, service providers and advertisers lobbied hard against even the smallest of efforts at data protection. Motivated by greed, they ensured that commercial surveillance would be pervasively integrated online. They are still at it today, that’s really what cloud computing services are all about.

A few thousand giant corporations, like Google, have become able to capture information every minute, of every hour, of every day, from everyone who uses the internet. And they can’t stop because their profit strategies totally rely on accumulating user data.

Thus began the surveillance society. The government saw how easy this could now be done and began to catch up fast. If there was snooping to be done, they were not to be left out in the cold.

Until Edward Snowden, who had been a computer consultant working for a subcontractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA), copied several hundred thousand classified documents relating to surveillance programs being conducted by the US and its allies in the name of the war on terror, and sent them to journalists, nobody really understood the level of snooping that was going on.

Most of it was unnecessary, intrusive, unproductive and immoral, and after Snowden’s revelations nobody believed the United States government was totally innocent of any wrongdoing.

Further revelations published since have helped to reveal a surveillance system that intrudes into almost every facet of our private lives. Privacy in fact is a thing of the past, unless you have the time, resources and knowledge to try to circumvent it.

If the government was only spying on the communications of foreign countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, and if it was confined to what could be termed ‘unfriendly’ nations and their agents throughout the world, then I don’t think anyone would mind so much. It’s a necessary evil in today’s world.

But unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Friendly nations and heads of state, European institutions, the UN headquarters, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to name but a few, have all also come under the snooper’s gaze.

This has not only shown up the irresponsibility and arrogance of those in charge of the snoopers, and their lack of common sense and ethics, but it has also created even more ill will against the United States.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, an ally of the United States, was a victim of the snoopers. As a result of that revelation, the German government protested publicly its outrage. It also terminated its longstanding telecommunications service contract with Verizon, directing its business to Deutsche Telekom instead. Two weeks after that it expelled the head of US intelligence in Germany.

The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, also took public stands against US privacy invasions. He, like Merkel, had also personally been a victim of the US snoopers.

Then the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to affirm online privacy as a human right, and in June 2014, responding to the EU, the US Justice Department had to promise to send legislation to Congress that would grant European citizens many of the (inadequate) privacy protections accorded to US citizens.

Bad enough not trusting your supposed ‘allies’, but US intelligence agencies have gone even further. Now they don’t even trust the decent, honest, hard-working citizens of America who have never broken any laws, nor have any intention of doing so.

The Prism program, for example, allows the NSA to collect data from your emails, telephone conversations, contacts, videos, etc., from major US digital companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

The XKeyscore program uses several hundred servers distributed across the world to store information on the activities of every Internet user, including your emails, internet searches, the websites you visit, what you post on social networks, and blogs like this. (Whoops!)

The list goes on and on.

After Snowden’s revelations, commercial firms like Google, Facebook and others scrambled to distance themselves by professing outrage. Their protestations had little to do with political principle but a lot to do with ensuring they continued to make fortunes by collecting data on us.

The US Internet companies went on a public relations offensive, and also raced to reorganize their overseas operations, to reassure worried foreign customers that they were complying with local data protection measures.

IBM, for example, committed over a billion dollars to building additional data centers overseas, hoping to ease customer fears that their data was not safe from the US government’s surveillance. But then the US authorities demanded that Microsoft, which deploys more than a million computers in over 40 countries, hand over emails stored on its servers in Ireland. Data is not safe and private anywhere it seems.

Last week I wrote a post about the Facebook/US Army experiment in trying (successfully) influence how people thought. (Click here if you want to read it.)

And so it continues.

Personally I think it is a pity that the powers that be are able to devote time, energy and money against people who have done nothing wrong, yet seem unwilling to remove child pornography and other evils from the world wide web. But the latter would require a decree of decency and morals that is sadly lacking in those who direct such matters for the government.

The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open Internet, because that free and open internet has already been destroyed.

No doubt there is worse to come.

.

==============================

.

 

Fasab Talks Techno – Part One, “Hello there!”

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Today I’m talking techo, well sort of.

As time moves on – and it’s moving on far too fast – more and more things tend to irritate me.

The stupidity and bureaucracy we have to endure is the thing that inspired this blog in the first place and that remains a huge thorn in my side. I have made many comments on that subject and given the opportunity will no doubt make many more.

But another thing that pisses me off more and more is almost the opposite of stupidity – it is people trying to be too damn smart.

Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the technology that we use today.

Now, I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination. I love my computers and the advent of the internet was one of the greatest things ever, as far as I was concerned. Indeed I have blogged in the past about my long love affair with computers  click here to read it.

Maybe it’s because of that long love affair, because I have been involved with computers for so many years, that what is happening now irritates me so much.

What I’m talking about is the fact that today’s personal computers and tablets and telephones and all the other periphery of techo gadgets try to do far too much for their owners. Everyone who has one of these machines is apparently a moron, or at least that’s how the manufacturers seem to treat us.

In the good old days you actually had to work at making your computer do things. Your telephone in those days made telephone calls and that was about it. And tablets were the things the doctor prescribed when you were feeling poorly.

To cut what could well turn into a very long list of current irritations into a manageable size, let me concentrate on just a few of the most horrible things that we now have to face.

In fact, rather than go on and on I’ll split this post over a few days.

Today it’s telephones.

Like I just said, I remember the days when phones were used to make phone calls – seemed logical enough to us at the time. Now they do all sorts of things. You can still phone people when you figure out how, but now you can also text, surf the internet, send and receive video messages and calls, play games, buy stuff – in fact almost everything you can do on your computer you can now do on a smart phone. And most of them have reasonable quality cameras too.

For a while those who could afford a cell phone were lumbered with a thing the size of a brick and it weighed almost as much too!

You can see one of those in the photo below (far left!). You can still get them, or rather a modern version if you want to draw a bit of attention to yourself – and there are always people who do.

As the years went on the phones kept getting smaller and smaller. That was good for a while. They became light and pocket sized. But miniaturization became the trend, and cell phones got really really really small to the extent that unless you had the fingers of a five year old child instead of chubby man paws it was a struggle to find the right numbers to make a call and a nightmare to send a text.

Then, mainly because of the advance of wifi and 3G and 4G and so forth, cell phones started to get bigger again to the extent that they are nearly back to the size of that brick again, albeit a lot thinner and lighter. Glasses are the next step, with a heads up view just like on the helmet visors of those jet fighters you see in the movies. And sometime in the not too distant future you will just need a silicone chip embedded at the back of your ear-hole. Not sure I’ll go for that last one though.

That’s a potted history of the cell phone, but now for the really irritating part.

When texting really took off and became the most popular form of communication when using a cell phone, someone – they won’t tell me his name probably for his own safety – decided that we needed help writing a text. Not what I call a “speel chekkar” that is available on your computer – which would have been acceptable – but a much more sinister and annoying invention.

Guessed what it is yet?

Yes, it’s “auto-correct” or as it likes to call itself “anal cortex”.

I hate this thing with a passion. I disconnect it on every device I can because it doesn’t work!

Auto-correct has not the slightest idea what you are trying to say. It is unnecessary, frustrating, irritating and useless.

It has only one saving grace that I have found.

Sometimes it’s funny.

If you are not likely to be offended by strong language, have a look at some of the examples below and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Enjoy.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

================================================

.