What do morals have to do with it?
Edit: A few days later… I thought it couldn’t get any worse. It did (pics of the discussion).
no third solution
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Category Archives: Rants
Mark Zuckerberg: Person of the Year?
“Person of the Year”. It sounds so awesome. So noteworthy.
The name of this distinction seems that it might carry some worth, honorees previously included notables like Martin Luther King Jr. and Lech Walesa and Ghandi… but on closer inspection the distinction has been granted to war criminals like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Henry Kissinger, and the two most recent recipients (Obama and Ben Bernanke) are even more of an abortion than Zuckerberg so I probably shouldn’t complain too much.
But I will, anyways.
I don’t wanna say that this distinction is “overdue” for Zuckerberg, because that would imply that he deserved such recognition at some point in time and I don’t think he did. But in any event, relative to the contributions to improve the plight of humanity (made by millions of other mortal earthlings), Zuckerberg is a practical nobody.
Seriously, Time Magazine… There was nobody else in the world more worthy of the distinction “Person of the Year”?
If Bernanke’s nomination last year didn’t fill you with rage, and if there was any doubt in your mind that Time Magazine is completely and totally irrelevant, this should erase that doubt.
Aside from creating the most widely used social media sharing site which connects friends allows advertisers to subtly but more accurately target the herd in order to push more mass-marketed shit down their throats while continually gutting whatever vestiges of personal privacy control its users once knew, just what in the hell has he done other than Facebook which would warrant such recognition?
I guess he donated a bunch of his ill-gotten gains to prop up another failing public school district.
Kudos, you fucking idiot. Kudos.
Does the TSA Really Keep Us Safe?
Do you really believe that the threat level is “elevated” or that there are imminent threats from all sides at all times and only the grace of god and the high-school dropouts in the royal blue TSA clown suits at the airports have been able to keep us safe? If so, hopefully you have more faith in the grace of god than you do the TSA.
The last time I flew, I arrived in my hotel only to discover that I hadn’t remembered to separate my toiletries (cologne, toothpaste, deodorant, shaving cream) from the rest of my luggage for the security screening at DTW. I wasn’t pulled aside, so either the TSA goons were asleep at the wheel, or they didn’t care, or it doesn’t matter that you bring a 3oz bottle of cologne on an airplane. I think it’s probably a combination of all three.
Proponents of the new porno scanners and aggressive grope searches like to point out examples like the underpants bomber at Detroit last year. But he was thwarted by more or less conventional techniques: the porno scanners and dick-fondling didn’t exist as a matter of procedure last year. These procedures didn’t exist last month. And the historical record is pretty much the same: nobody has successfully smuggled a bomb on to a flight originating in the US in over 50 years.
I’ve maintained all along that the threat of terrorism is — to be quite frank — not unlike the bogeyman or any other folklore monster, contrived to keep people frightened, timid, and complacent. I’ll admit that the theatric value of blowing up an airplane mid-flight is unrivaled by pretty much anything a would-be group of bad guys could possibly hope to accomplish. In actuality, the only means less discriminate and more extravagantly destructive are available only to state militaries.
The fact of the matter is, as I’ve said previously, if these threats are real, then mathematically speaking there should have been many more successful terrorist acts on US soil.Maybe “many” is three, maybe it’s a dozen, maybe it’s 20 or 100. That’s for some actuary to work out.
Not just airports — although those are certainly soft enough that a coordinated attack could raise serious hell, like a dozen dudes with suitcases packed full of C4 or something in a dozen airports across the country — but shopping malls, sporting venues, etc., where any organization with the will and a relatively minimal amount of firepower, could kill hundreds of people in a few minutes. And comparatively easier (than bombing an airplane) to pull off successfully.
The smart money says that there is no credible threat, because soft targets haven’t been hit, and they’re as ripe for the picking today as they have ever been.
So all this extra “security” isn’t making us any safer. It might make you feel safer, they’re “protecting” you from a threat that doesn’t really exist.
