obfuscated.org

Does anybody else find it ironic that these North Korean propaganda wallpapers are available for sale priced in US dollars? I’d buy the one of The Decider as a panting dog wearing a tie — because come on: panting dog, wearing a tie — if I wasn’t pretty sure that the money would somehow go towards hooking a car battery up to an unlucky dissident’s nuts.

(Propaganda wallpaper page two is equally priceless, featuring two doves spelling out the word “peace” next to a GIANT FIST CRUSHING THE WHITE HOUSECAPITOL BUILDING. What will KJI think of next?)

If they need help figuring out who to name the Ministry of Love building after, this list would be a good place to start.

Assholes.

Alexander (R-TN), Yea
Allard (R-CO), Yea
Allen (R-VA), Yea
Bennett (R-UT), Yea
Bond (R-MO), Yea
Brownback (R-KS), Yea
Bunning (R-KY), Yea
Burns (R-MT), Yea
Burr (R-NC), Yea
Carper (D-DE), Yea
Chambliss (R-GA), Yea
Coburn (R-OK), Yea
Cochran (R-MS), Yea
Coleman (R-MN), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea
Cornyn (R-TX), Yea
Craig (R-ID), Yea
Crapo (R-ID), Yea
DeMint (R-SC), Yea
DeWine (R-OH), Yea
Dole (R-NC), Yea
Domenici (R-NM), Yea
Ensign (R-NV), Yea
Enzi (R-WY), Yea
Frist (R-TN), Yea
Graham (R-SC), Yea
Grassley (R-IA), Yea
Gregg (R-NH), Yea
Hagel (R-NE), Yea
Hatch (R-UT), Yea
Hutchison (R-TX), Yea
Inhofe (R-OK), Yea
Isakson (R-GA), Yea
Johnson (D-SD), Yea
Kyl (R-AZ), Yea
Landrieu (D-LA), Yea
Lautenberg (D-NJ), Yea
Lieberman (D-CT), Yea
Lott (R-MS), Yea
Lugar (R-IN), Yea
Martinez (R-FL), Yea
McCain (R-AZ), Yea
McConnell (R-KY), Yea
Menendez (D-NJ), Yea
Murkowski (R-AK), Yea
Nelson (D-FL), Yea
Nelson (D-NE), Yea
Pryor (D-AR), Yea
Roberts (R-KS), Yea
Rockefeller (D-WV), Yea
Salazar (D-CO), Yea
Santorum (R-PA), Yea
Sessions (R-AL), Yea
Shelby (R-AL), Yea
Smith (R-OR), Yea
Snowe (R-ME), Not Voting
Specter (R-PA), Yea
Stabenow (D-MI), Yea
Stevens (R-AK), Yea
Sununu (R-NH), Yea
Talent (R-MO), Yea
Thomas (R-WY), Yea
Thune (R-SD), Yea
Vitter (R-LA), Yea
Voinovich (R-OH), Yea
Warner (R-VA), Yea

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, and I believe that Stephanie and I came up with the answer the other night. I’ll rot13 our results to avoid spoiling it for everybody. I encourage you all to ponder this in your spare time. Draw your own conclusions, and don’t believe the hype.

Q: Who killed Al Gore’s inconvienent electric truth about Guantanamo?

A: Evpxl Obool

While not the most terse way to make this particular point, I think it’s pretty effective.

From information aesthetics

Note that this infographic is (hopefully) dated by now, as “US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for an urgent ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, conditional on both sides addressing the root cause of the conflict.”

Wired has a pretty grim analysis of Specter’s “compromise” bill. Could somebody explain to me why giving the executive branch secret powers to spy on the citizenry without being accountable to anybody isn’t a bad thing?

So, under Specter’s bill, the Attorney General could order AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to send a copy of every instant message to the government, every credit card company to send a copy of every transaction of every one of its customers, and every email provider to siphon off to the FBI a copy of every email sent by and to Americans — all WITHOUT ever seeing a judge. And none of these companies or organizations could say anything publicly or contest the order in court (though they would get paid for the service).

So the funny web meme going around over the weekend was The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation, which breaks down Bush’s domestic spying program in terms of its statistical usefulness. I don’t think it comes as a great shock to anybody that the program isn’t really designed to accomplish anything. Bush learned well from Clinton that it’s not the steak, it’s the sizzle. So police state be damned, let’s make it seem like we want to try to catch terrorists. Or something.

Anyway, it’s a funny article, in that staring-at-the-NSA-while-its-pants-are-around-its-ankles kind of way.

Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge. So, why does NSA spy on Americans knowing it’s not possible to find terrorists that way? Mass surveillance of the entire population is logically sensible only if there is a higher base-rate. Higher base-rates arise from two lines of thought, neither of them very nice:

1. McCarthy-type national paranoia;
2. political espionage.

The whole NSA domestic spying program will seem to work well, will seem logical and possible, if you are paranoid. Instead of presuming there are 1,000 terrorists in the USA, presume there are 1 million terrorists. Americans have gone paranoid before, for example, during the McCarthyism era of the 1950s. Imagining a million terrorists in America puts the base-rate at .00333, and now the probability that a person is a terrorist given that NSA’s system identifies them is p=.99, which is near certainty. But only if you are paranoid. If NSA’s surveillance requires a presumption of a million terrorists, and if in fact there are only 100 or only 10, then a lot of innocent people are going to be misidentified and confidently mislabeled as terrorists.

Suck it, Feinstein!. OK, so sixty six of you have gotten the message that you hate America out there. Will you all please shut the fuck up now?

Our lovely senate (co-led gleefully by asshat California senator Diane Feinstein — keep this in mind next time she claims to have a clue) is voting today on a constitutional amendment to allow congress to place arbitrary limits on the first amendment. Yeah, it’s the flag burning amendment.

I’ve got a certain cognitive dissonance about this whole thing. I mean, they can’t really be doin this, can they? They aren’t really valuing a symbol above what that symbol represents, are they? Seriously.

Anyway, instead of the usual hand-wringing about how stupid our congress is — because I think we all already know by now — I propose a game: Who can make the best claim about how flag burning is destroying America, handing the nation over to the terrorists, killing the baby jesus or whatever the flag burning people will have you believe the problem is?

My favorite so far comes from Erich:

Lack of respect for the flag is what causes “disgraceful” newspapers to release details of our covert surveillance plans.

Which is at least as good as anything I’ve heard out of the pro-first-amendment-killing crowd.

The ACLU has a handy lookup application that will let you call your senator and let them know how you feel.

Our lovely senate (co-led gleefully by asshat California senator Diane Feinstein — keep this in mind next time she claims to have a clue) is voting today on a constitutional amendment to allow congress to place arbitrary limits on the first amendment. Yeah, it’s the flag burning amendment.

I’ve got a certain cognitive dissonance about this whole thing. I mean, they can’t really be doin this, can they? They aren’t really valuing a symbol above what that symbol represents, are they? Seriously.

Anyway, instead of the usual hand-wringing about how stupid our congress is — because I think we all already know by now — I propose a game: Who can make the best claim about how flag burning is destroying America, handing the nation over to the terrorists, killing the baby jesus or whatever the flag burning people will have you believe the problem is?

My favorite so far comes from Erich:

Lack of respect for the flag is what causes “disgraceful” newspapers to release details of our covert surveillance plans.

Which is at least as good as anything I’ve heard out of the pro-first-amendment-killing crowd.

The ACLU has a handy lookup application that will let you call your senator and let them know how you feel.

In a report to congress, the National Academy of Sciences had the gall to contradict well-established science fiction and suggest that the earth is hotter than it should be and it’s that way because of human activity.

The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”

A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.

Obviously this is some sort of conspiracy on the part of those data-loving academics to keep corporate-sponsored research down. It’s a gross limitation of our freedom of expression and I don’t understand why we as Americans stand for it. And what about that name: National Academy of Sciences. Why, it might as well be “The People’s Academy of Sciences” for its clearly anti-corporate stances. Damn those scientists and their method! Damn their data! Damn them all!