This website does not track you.
It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.
Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.
I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.
Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).
I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.
August 12, 2013 at 5:59 pm
I have hard time understanding why more people don’t just laugh out loud at the national security business. After 20 years of being mired in it, if you had any wits about you, ya know various people just lie and make up stories indiscriminately. And they’re so detached from reality, so divorced from day-to-day life in America, that the stories they come up with are ridiculous. A central point here is that the “marijuana truck” story, even if real in some way, is ludicrous. Who gives a —- about a “marijuana truck”? A marijuana truck, even if the biggest marijuana truck in the world, isn’t a security threat, so they’ve lost an argument already. They’ve turned the technology of the war on terror loose on the country because it’s big business and there’s nothing else left to do with it. Marijuana truck, exploding clothes made from dipping in unspecified chemicals of magic, the idea that American idiots can make ricin from pounding a few dozen castor seeds, it’s just all rubbish. Even when there is a nugget of truth buried deep inside, the subsequent stories are always pooched and pooched and pooched. This mega structure devoted yo making this national security commodity has completely the thinking of Americans, so much that I’ve developed a rule, like Godwin’s Law, or something. And here it is — The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news. Or, the probability that something bad, as predicted by experts, will happen asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin bomb, etc. Too many bad movies and bad television advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry and everything they touch is tainted by an intrinsic badness that will not be supported by the real world but must be maintained by American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
August 12, 2013 at 9:11 pm
I can’t get over the venal, laughable badness stupidity of using major national security assets on a “marijuana truck.” Use my test — type it in all CAPS or say it out loud — MARIJUANA TRUCK. Does it sound ludicrous, elicit a smirk? Then it’s crap — something for a late Seventies or an early Eighties movie with Bill & Ted or some SNL comedians. That’s the fundamental rot underlying this nationally — the loss of all sense of proportion and what is sensible. It’s impossible to engage with any concept defined by words like -MARIJUANA TRUCK-. A truckload of marijuana, my my. You might have known someone in college you suspected of smoking such a truck load.
http://www.marijuana.com/threads/is-the-dea-a-rogue-agency-fed-by-the-nsa-americas-privacy-is-under-attack.308049/
And here’s what it comes from … this construct bull– about what may have happened but nobody really knows. It’s just something ludicrous — not because of why such a stop happened or how it was repackaged — but that one would refocus a war on terror asset to do it at all. I get enraged by the misuse of language and one of the main reasons is that the corporate fascist state that’s America routinely screws with clear language and you wind up with a polity that doesn’t know what to do, it knows something is wrong, but it doesn’t know how to combat all the badness that went into the idea of using a global surveillance network to intercept an alleged MARIJUANA TRUCK. One doesn’t even know where to begin. Was such a MARIJUANA TRUCK real, ever, even a little? Or not? What can one believe from a news agency that claims to have uncovered such a thing, even in a purpose of trying to correct something out of control?
August 12, 2013 at 10:19 pm
It’s big business, bureaucracy, and inertia fueled by a multi-decade campaign to instill and fuel fear.
One reason I’m not up in arms about Greenwald and Snowden (in addition to Greenwald’s relentless self-promotion and misrepresentation of facts) is that it is Old News.
The bureaucracy was set in motion long ago and would have churned on doing its thing regardless of who the President was. Anyone who has ever worked in large organizations knows that the most powerful force in them in inertia. And anyone who has been paying even the least attention to security news has known for years that this stuff was going on.
And don’t get me started on the stupidity of media types who had to see illicit Powerpoint presentations to realize what was going on.