A movie challenge for my readers

I read this over at Popular Mechanics and thought about how invasive, intrusive, and frightening this is.

So here is my challenge :

What movie has the worst possible, the scariest possible, and the downright most un-Constitutional, privacy invasive, citizen monitoring apparatus in use by a company, by agencies, or by governments?

Is it 1984? Or will it be this:

 The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day—a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it’s a duel threat—seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cybercriminals.

Or will it be this:

 ”They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Okay, so what movie exceeds and supercedes all others in its depiction of citizen monitoring networks?

Republican quits! Goes Independent!

I will keep telling you and one day you will see the light. Both mainstream parties are jerking you around.

Republican Jeff Wood of Chippewa Falls has just quit the Republican Party.

Jeff Wood has declared his independence. The three-term 67th District Assemblyman from rural Chetek announced this morning that he is seeking a fourth term in November, but not under the banner of the Republican Party.

Snip:

“I’m fed up with the Republican Party,” said Wood. “I don’t think Ronald Reagan would recognize the party anymore. It seems the party has left me and a lot of others behind.”

Wood cited an abandonment of principles like limited government and fiscal responsibility as reasons for dissatisfaction with the party. He also cited some specific examples of the abandonment of principles on a national scale:

- Never committing troops without a defined mission and exit strategy;

- Excessive borrowing, endangering our kids’ future;

- Mandating a national ID card;

- Limiting rights to due process with the suspension of habeas corpus;

- The promotion of torture.

- Retroactive immunity for telecom corporations that eavesdrop on private conversations without a warrant or just cause.

“The party continues to try to prove Benjamin Franklin wrong by trying to buy security by sacrificing liberty,” Wood said.

Regarding the national ID card, Wood stated, “Ronald Reagan opposed that; he considered it fascism.”

Save America and Vote Responsibly in 2008

Delta’s Email about Oil Speculation

Reader Cari forwarded to me an email that her husband received from Delta Airlines.

Under Fair Use, I am providing a snippet of its contents:

“Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.”

The point of the email was that Congress once regulated the oil market and that those regulations have been eroded over the past two decades. The email asks the reader to help reinstate those regulations. It asks everyone to go to www.stopoilspeculationnow.com  and receive more information and take action by contacting Congress.

There are three remarkable things about this email:

1. It is signed by 12 airlines companies including United, Alaska, Northwest, Southwest, Midwest, Jet Blue, Us Airways, American Airlines

2. It points out that the price of oil is only partially dependent upon supply and demand and that oil contracts are often sold back and forth before oil is actually purchased. This means that a small increase in supply is unlikely to have a major impact on prices. It also means that Iran testing missiles in the Straits of Hormuz is not the underhanded plan of Ahmadinejad to destroy the US through higher oil prices. (Contrary to what the right wing pundits impugn tonight). 

3. An unregulated industry is calling upon government regulation to obviate their pain.

Where are those free market cheerleaders now? Why don’t I hear them wailing about how bad it will be to regulate the oil markets? Maybe its because the oil companies have failed to provide more refineries for gasoline. Maybe its because the oil companies sit on those oil leases instead of drilling them. Maybe its because the oil companies love the speculation because they can charge higher prices for gasoline without any increase in actual costs. The last I checked, all the oil companies were vertical. That means they buy and sell to themselves.  Production sells to refineries and the oil is transported on tankers that the oil companies own. Then after it is gasoline,  they transport it to regional dealers and then to local gas stations. All of it owned and operated by the oil company. The local dealer is a private owner but until it gets to him, it is all owned and operated  by Big Oil.    

So let’s go ahead and regulate the oil market and then let’s also go back to regulating the airlines again. It seems both industries performed better when that occurred.

Black Day in America: Senate Passes Telecom Immunity Bill

From the AP via Yahoo News:

The relatively one-sided vote, 69-28, came only after a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks. It ended almost a year of wrangling over surveillance rules and the president’s warrantless wiretapping program that was initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Snip:

Beyond immunity, the new surveillance bill also sets new rules for government eavesdropping. Some of them would tighten the reins on current government surveillance activities, but others would loosen them compared with a law passed 30 years ago.

For example, it would require the government to get FISA court approval before it eavesdrops on an American overseas. Currently, the attorney general approves that electronic surveillance on his own.

The bill also would allow the government to obtain broad, yearlong intercept orders from the FISA court that target foreign groups and people, raising the prospect that communications with innocent Americans would be swept in. The court would approve how the government chooses the targets and how the intercepted American communications would be protected. (RC: Note that “groups” and “yearlong intercepts” means that ‘probable cause’ is not necessary. )

The original FISA law required the government to get wiretapping warrants for each individual targeted from inside the United States, on the rationale that most communications inside the U.S. would involve Americans whose civil liberties must be protected. But technology has changed. Purely foreign communications increasingly pass through U.S. wires and sit on American computer servers, and the law has required court orders to be obtained to access those as well.

The bill would give the government a week to conduct a wiretap in an emergency before it must apply for a court order. The original law said three days.

Democrats are surrender monkeys. The Republicans, Limbaugh, and the right wing scream machine are right on that point.

Vote responsibly and vote against Republican and Democrat candidates in 2008. Save America.

Fallacies of the semi-wealthy

1. If only people worked hard they could be wealthy.

2. If only people could invent a better mousetrap they could be wealthy.

3. If only people would take some risk they could be wealthy.

4. If only the poor were more like me, they could be wealthy.

Somewhere in the process people who write these things forget:

1. the mothers and fathers that work multiple jobs to make ends meet, who spend their money  sending their kids to private schools/college; who take low paying social work to help those less fortunate than themselves; those who have lower IQs and poor problem-solving skills cannot compete with others.

2. the fact that brilliant ideas without money and knowledge to develop them into enterprises are doomed to die on the dust heap of history. And that ideas that are not practical today cannot be accomplished today. (Think Michelangelo’s airplanes and tanks.)     

3. the fact that everyday people take risks. Poor people live and work in the most dangerous sections of town. They clearly understand risk taking.  Taking financial risks is different. When one is risking one’s bank account and earns minimum wage, then perhaps prudence is the better alternative if one has doubts about, or limitations upon, one’s own abilities or capacity.

4. the fact that people who are blessed with insight, intelligence, discipline, focused efforts, and a network of contacts for advice often confuse their working hard for propitious circumstances.  

5.  that people caught up in life wrecking behaviors cannot successfully compete with others.  

6. for many people, wealth is not a goal of life.  

7. rich people are often lonely, shallow, boring, and have excessive family problems. Chasing too much money, or money too often, neglects the other dimensions of your life. 

If you want to read a myopic piece comparing storks and babies to creating wealth, then read this.