Saturday, at Paris’ Orly Airport, a man attacked a soldier, tried wrestle her rifle away from her, and was shot and killed. Earlier, he had exchanged fire with police in another incident when he was pulled over for speeding. In the earlier incident, he fled in his car; he had a record of robbery and drug offenses. That’s a summary of some of the facts in the case. [mcdc] [cnbc]
Venezuela has just implemented a pre-revolutionary French doctrine. One which got Marie Antoinette unfairly attributed with the original “tumbril remark”…
Eventually you get to a point where reasoning with someone doesn’t work, and then you’ve got this weird situation where you either realize the other person is not being honest, or they’re so incredibly far from you in terms of world-view that it’s impossible to reconcile their reality with yours.
Continuation at a tangent to [stderr]
Tools like Palantir are the tip of an iceberg: a gigantic iceberg of data. In case you don’t know, when organizations like the NSA are talking “big data” they are talking “yottabytes.” i.e.:
The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) [wired]
I’m usually surprised by the coverage regarding NSA/CIA/FBI spying: there’s some stuff we definitely should be scared of, and there’s other stuff that I file under “so, what?”
For example, the fact that the US government has consistently ignored its own laws regarding wiretapping: nobody who has observed any government in action should be surprised by that.
I suspect that there is an optimal and a peak conspiracy size, beyond which it becomes nearly impossible to keep a secret.
US Troops in ground war in Syria.
Voltaire by Houdon
We know of no religion without prayers; even the Jews have them – even though they had no published formulas back in the days when they chanted their canticles in their synagogues, those arrived much later.
During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
As the police and intelligence agencies continue to collect more and more information, it’s all OK because they’re good custodians of that information: they keep it secure where hackers can’t get at it and publish it, and you need clearances to get at it.
Yeah, right.