Obama Administration: DHS Proposal for National License Plate Tracking

If you're like millions of other people, you probably woke up this morning, had breakfast, and performed the usual toiletries that clean, psychologically normal and healthy people perform. You then bustled yourself off to yet another exciting day of work, school, raising your children, enjoying your retirement or any other number of productive or leisurely activities. One thing you probably didn't do is stop by your local police station or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office and provide those kind men and women a detailed, hour by hour itinerary of your plans for the day, how long you thought these things would take, who you'd be seeing and where you'd be for most of the day. I know that you're probably pretty busy. Perhaps the critical importance of letting the government and its running dog corporate lackeys know where you were slipped your mind. Never fear. DHS has got you covered.

In a sad reminder of just how far government has sunken and how contemptuous many governmental bureaucratic or law-enforcement types are of a citizen's right to privacy and to be left alone, the DHS confirmed that it is seeking a private agency to assist it in building a database of every US license plate and its real time location.

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

The agency said the length of time the data is retained would be up to the winning vendor. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, one of the leading providers of tag-reader data, keeps its records indefinitely. Nationwide, local police as well as commercial companies are gathering license-plate data using various means. One common method involves drivers for repossession companies methodically driving up and down streets with cameras mounted on their cars snapping photos of vehicles. Some police forces have cameras mounted on patrol cars. Other images may be retrieved from border crossings, interstate highway on-ramps and toll plazas.

Customs and Border Protection, another DHS agency, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the Justice Department, also have deployed cameras along the country’s borders. But DHS’s effort appears to be the first time a federal law enforcement agency is seeking such extensive access to a broad repository of data capturing the movements and images of American motorists from metropolitan ­areas...

Read the full article here. It's even worse than it sounds. 

DHS Solicitation of bids

If you've read this blog for more than a month or so you know where I stand on civil liberties and privacy. So you can probably guess what I think of this idea. Very simply this is bovine excrement. Wet stinky greasy foul bovine excrement. This is precisely the sort of thing that we read about states like Communist China or the former East Germany doing. A government that tries to know what its citizens are reading, with whom the citizens are communicating via phone, email, letter, and where the citizens are traveling and why is not a government that I have any respect for. It's a government that needs a radical haircut in its powers and so-called authority. If someone from the government wants to know what I did today they could ask me. And I could tell them to go  attempt airborne copulation with a rapidly revolving pastry. Unless I am under formal government control via imprisonment, parole or probation, who I talk to, why I talk to them, who I sleep with, where and why I travel, who my friends are and so forth and so on are none of the government's business. If the government REALLY needs to know, get a warrant. This is most definitely not a partisan issue. The great problem as I see it is that these increasing attacks on civil liberties and stepped up surveillance of citizen movements are sort of a Nixon to China moment. It took a right wing politician to attempt to woo China into the capitalist marketplace and make diplomatic concessions to the Chinese. This neutralized and isolated the rabid right-wing base that would have otherwise fiercely opposed such an action by a centrist or left leaning politician. Similarly if it had been widely reported under a Republican Administration that the FBI/DHS etc were seeking to maintain records of individual travel by all Americans, I suspect that many more left leaning activist groups and politicians might have slightly more than a few mild concerns to express. But because Obama is behind it you won't hear more than a few mumbles from most progressive people. This is wrong. Everyone should oppose these steps.

There are some fair minded people of goodwill who nevertheless still wonder why civil libertarians were so angered by warrantless wiretapping, metadata gathering, email and social network monitoring. They claim that as long as the government keeps us safe what's the big deal. To those people I would say that the big deal is exactly that giving the government a pass on the above activities, as we have largely done, just emboldens the government to take other bites out of our freedom. This really is a slippery slope.  People who come up with these sorts of ideas never ever have enough information. There's always someone out there who may have some fig leaf of privacy left. That bothers control freaks. There are many people who were alleged to have said this but it really is true that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  If you're still not convinced that this expansion is problematic I'm not sure what to say to you. The opportunities for abuse are endless in such a system. We know that the government already targets people with political views that it doesn't like. Is it such a leap to believe that armed with a real time database of people's travels that further abuses would proliferate?  Let's imagine for a moment that there is that is a pugnaciously righteous attorney general or governor of a large east coast state. This man has numerous bitter rivals and enemies among the political and financial establishment. So his detractors monitor his movements until they realize this pompous populist gadfly is spending quality time at a brothel or house of a woman not his wife. So the politician's rivals then try to blackmail this man into softening his stances or failing that charge him with a crime thus destroying his ability to seek higher office or threaten established financial power. Of course nothing like that would ever happen would it? I'm just being paranoid...

Game of Thrones Complete Season Three Offer

Greetings!
We have four copies of HBO's Game of Thrones Complete Season Three. There are two Blu Ray/DVD copies and two DVD copies. Some special features include deleted/extended scenes, introductions to new characters, backgrounds on Westeros/Essos groups, cast/crew reactions to The Red Wedding and interviews with and commentaries by actors, producers, directors and Martin. We'd prefer to give these discs away to regular contributors to thank them for reading our blog. You must have commented on this blog at least twice during the past 120 days. These items will be given away to the first four people (non blog moderators) to send the correct answers to the below questions, along with their blog id, mailing address/name*, and their preferred version (DVD or Blu-Ray) to our email address.  Please use subject line "GAME OF THRONES GIVEAWAY". Answers must be received today before 5 PM EST. Answers should be as specific as possible. Proper names are preferred. A correct answer is "X is so-and-so's brother", not "His brother is that guy with the big nose who dresses in black". Ties will be resolved by blog management. 

If no one is interested or can answer the questions correctly then perhaps we'll just keep these items for ourselves. Otherwise winners will receive their copy within seven to ten business days. Comments are/will be disabled for this post so please don't place your answers here, the contact page or anywhere else on the blog. Doing so may lead to executions bannings. I'm sure as an upright honest person you'd be fine with the Stark honor system. But it might be a tragic mistake to remain honorable and spend precious time searching your fading memory while your more pragmatic Littlefinger type competitors search Google (or posts on this blog) and thus win "your" prize. Well winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. You saw what happened to Ned when he tried to be righteous. Good luck, whichever road you choose. Snicker.
*If you really prefer not to use your government name because the Mob is looking for you that's perfectly ok as long as you can provide us a valid mailing address. PO Boxes are fine.

QUIZ QUESTIONS

1. Including Jon Snow, match each Stark child (living or deceased) to his or her direwolf (living or deceased).
2. Which character is derisively called "halfman" by his allies and routinely threatened with having his manhood chopped off and fed to the goats?
3. Which house uses the song "The Rains of Castamere" as a warning to its enemies?
4. Who was Renly Barratheon's lover (not his betrothed)?
5. Who constantly says "You know nothing, Jon Snow!"
6. Who is the Hound's big brother? Nickname or partial name is acceptable.
7. Which house has the words "We do not sow".
8. Bonus Question: If you get this correct you can get some other questions wrong and still win (if you are among the first four respondents). What is Littlefinger's sigil?

HBO Game of Thrones Season Four Trailer: Vengeance

Payback is a mother...... or so some people say. Other people say that you set out for revenge you had better dig two graves. Still others were known to say that when winter comes and the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies but the pack, the pack survives. Robb and Catelyn Stark are dead and gone but the Stark wolfpack, while scattered and young, is a long way from destroyed. Is this the season of their vengeance? Time will tell. And what's Danerys up to? Is she going to get back to Westeros and take what is hers with fire and blood? We shall see. 
Enjoy clip below but as usual if you know what some of these scenes entail or book derived answers to the above questions, please keep them to yourself. Thanks! 

Season 4 Trailer 2

Tom Perkins: Return to Aristocracy

There has been a lot written of late about inequality. Unsurprisingly people on the Right tend to defend inequality in general and the massively increased inequality of the past 40-50 years as a good thing. People on the Left tend to consider increased inequality a bad thing while some go so far as to consider virtually any inequality as problematic. The Right, or at least corporations and the monied class have been winning this argument for a very long time. To the extent there is increased energy on the Left about this it's a last ditch stand or cynical media posturing by politicians who'd like to change the subject from their own complicity in the workings of the machine while keeping those campaign contributions rolling in. But there are some people of the Right who are not content with being wealthy, not content with paying relatively low taxes by historical American standards or by the standards of other First World industrialized nations, and not content with having money treated as speech and having political bribery virtually legalized. Some people, aristocrats in all but name, are starting to wonder why those damned peasants have the right to vote at all.

I mean if you're so awesome and so intelligent that you've built or expanded multinational corporations, discovered new medicines, increased the limits of knowledge about the universe, or at the very least made yourself and your family more money than could be spent in one lifetime, is it really fair that some sap who hasn't even made a million dollars gets the same vote as you do? Some rich people think that they should have more say in society while more of us peasants should have no say. Venture capitalist Tom Perkins, last heard from comparing the wealthiest 1% Americans to Jews hunted and exterminated during the Holocaust, is such a man.

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes," Perkins said. "But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?" 

The audience at the Commonwealth Club reacted with laughter. But Perkins offered no immediate indication that he was joking. Asked offstage if the proposal was serious, Perkins said: "I intended to be outrageous, and it was."

It is hard to overestimate how profoundly undemocratic and unAmerican this proposal is. There is always a tension between the private sector in which the boss can more or less operate as he sees fit (especially without unions) and the public sphere of democracy and a republican form of government in which everyone has a say and both private power and public power are limited by constitution and law. Evidently Perkins doesn't like our system any more. Perhaps he should consider leaving the country and resettling in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia where whatever the local Big Man says, goes. He might be much happier. The entire swath of American political history has tended towards expanding the franchise, not limiting it.

Perkins offers no reason as to why it would be a better thing if only rich people voted or had even more of an outsize impact on elections than they already do. I guess to him it's self-evident. But I think he's going to have to come up with a better argument than "I'm rich and dislike the current President."

An aristocratic system tends not to last if you have other elements like an educated middle class, social safety nets, unions and other non-government support groups, etc. Because sooner or later people without the vote or with limited political say realize that they greatly outnumber the rich and have no need to bow and scrape before them. But to be an American is not to bow and scrape before anyone NOR to want anyone to do that before you. Perkins should learn how to be an American. I think he was apparently born in the wrong country and wrong century. If nothing else, Perkins should realize that a society that moves too far towards plutocracy and autocracy eventually gets balanced out by a Robespierre...

Book Reviews: Black House, Ricochet

Black House
by Stephen King and Peter Straub

This is a sequel to the book, The Talisman, penned all those years ago by the same two authors and good friends. It is not necessary to have read The Talisman in order to enjoy Black House. The Talisman was, briefly, a story of a 12 year old boy who has to travel to an alternate reality in order to obtain the titular object, a source of immense magical power, and also save his dying mother. This reality, which the boy, Jack Sawyer, calls The Territories is similar to our own except that magic works and the world is smaller. Time and distance are also somewhat warped so that travel in The Territories doesn't match up exactly with travel in our world. Most people in our world have an alternate self or "twinner" in The Territories. These alternate selves are not necessarily aware of each other but usually have the same desires and goals. They are also linked. What happens good or bad to one version of a person usually happens, albeit in a different way to the other version. Jack is unique or at least rare in that he doesn't have a twinner. He survived his twinner's murder. He can thus physically flip between the two worlds (most people can't do that). Ultimately Jack is able, after much heartache and loss of life, to save his mother, prevent his murdered father's partner Morgan and Morgan's twinner from obtaining The Talisman or stealing his father's company, and save the life of the Queen of The Territories (his mother's twinner).

But similar to how C.S. Lewis detailed the Narnia series, children grow up and unlearn the wisdom of their youth. A little over two decades after the events in The Talisman, Jack is a thirty something retired LAPD officer who had been on the fast track to Chief of Detectives and likely even Chief of Police. He has no memory of The Territories, the heroic role he played there or friends and enemies made in that realm. The only qualities he's retained from his time there are a very reliable intuition, an ability to quickly read people and an ever so slight foresight. These, along with a rock-solid moral sense and disdain for bullies help his meteoric rise in his chosen profession. But when a case in LA unknowingly reminded Jack of things he had forgotten, he abruptly decided to walk away from his career and retire to French Landing, Wisconsin. He assisted on a case there once and immediately made a friend for life in the decent but overwhelmed Police Chief, Dale Gilbertson. 

But there's no rest for the weary. There is a killer loose in French Landing. The worst kind of killer is roaming free, one who kills children. This man models himself after the serial killer Albert Fish and is thus known as The Fisherman. Dale begs for Jack's help, recognizing that whatever is going on is beyond his ability to prevent or solve. Jack initially refuses. But Jack is having dreams, both when he's asleep and when he's awake. He can't understand them or explain them. Ultimately the man who first summoned Jack to the Territories, Speedy Parker (a blues musician in our world and a relentless gunslinger/marshal in The Territories) is able to break the wall in Jack's mind and restore his memory and ability to flip between the two worlds. And Jack finally learns what King/Straub reveal almost immediately to the reader, that these killings are not the work of a human, or at least not something that is completely human. There has been some slippage between our world and The Territories. Battle is joined.

This is very hardcore horror so if that is not your thing ordinarily I'd advise those not so inclined to pass on this book. But the writing is so sublime that even if you're not into horror it would be a mistake for you to skip this book. Of course I am a fan of horror and King and Straub so take that recommendation with a rock of salt. It is interesting to read this and try to pick out which parts were written by King and which were written by Straub. They usually have pretty distinct voices but here they seem to have melded into one super-writer. There aren't any jarring discontinuities. Straub is from Wisconsin. I think he provided a lot of the descriptions of that area. I would also bet that Straub wrote most of the jazz stuff (much of the action takes place in a senior home where blind DJ Henry Leydeen plays jazz and pop music for the residents) as Straub is known to be a jazz aficionado but other than that it's anybody's guess. The book is seamless and quite rewarding. The story has been retrofitted to include references to King's Dark Tower series. As is usual in most of King's work, the everyday and prosaic is so very well depicted that when the supernatural appears you are so invested in the tale that you have no choice but to believe it.





Ricochet
by Ovid Demaris

Some gangsters like Carlo Gambino, Meyer Lansky, and Sidney Korshak generally stayed in the shadows. These men were either lucky enough or smart enough to avoid imprisonment or murder and die of natural causes as free men. Other gangsters like John Gotti, Albert Anastasia or Bugsy Siegel disdained living quietly and so aroused the ire of law enforcement or their fellow mobsters. These men often died in prison or were removed from the planet in a much more abrupt manner.

Nicky Scarfo, former boss of the Philadelphia Mafia Family, belonged in the second category. He became boss after a period of internal and external strife in and around the Philadelphia organization. Philadelphia mobsters hoped that Scarfo would return the group to its days of quiet profit under the late Angelo Bruno. Well that didn't happen. Scarfo was, like Gotti, a loud brash man who loved killing and public recognition. He even ordered the murder of a judge who had doublecrossed him. Ultimately Scarfo's violent reckless nature -- he enjoyed being present at actual murders ---a no no for a boss, caught up with him. Scarfo's preferred solution to problems was to kill people. People inside the family started worrying they would be next, especially after, (shades of The Red Wedding) Scarfo murdered the Family's putative heir because the man backed out of an arranged wedding with the daughter of a Scarfo ally. Informants proliferated. Scarfo received multiple sentences for murder, extortion and RICO.

Ricochet fictionalized Scarfo as Tony Allio. Tony Allio is a short quick tempered patricidal mob boss who is good with a knife. He's a bully and a thug. He's got his little fingers in prostitution, narcotics, extortion, and everything else that goes on in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area. Tony seeks revenge on the book's protagonist, one Frank Conti. Frank and Tony have known each other since childhood and never liked each other. In high school, Tony already had a dangerous reputation and his own group of budding mafia wannabees. Frank stepped in to protect his girlfriend when Tony's friends attempted to molest her. Tony and company beat him to within an inch of his life. Frank ignored his policeman's father's pleas to either let it go or let the police handle it. Frank recovered and bided his time until he got Tony alone and returned the favor in spades, afterwards fleeing into the Army and the Vietnam War. 

Now Frank is back in South Philly, a decorated vet and former Green Beret who's a rising corporate banker. But Tony Allio didn't mind waiting decades for payback. He has plans for Frank. He intends to hurt Frank and his family thru Frank's wife Nancy. Nancy has a gambling problem. And Tony is all too happy to indulge her. But Tony forgets that pushing the buttons of a Green Beret isn't smart. There is an interesting subplot with Joey Bucci and his girlfriend Joyce. They are mob hangers on who get close to Allio and find themselves getting in too deep. You won't feel sorry for Joey although you might empathize with Joyce. Joey is a walking example of how one bad decision leads to many more until you're at a kill or be killed crossroads. Demaris was a detective novelist and reporter who had written multiple investigative exposes on organized crime. So he knew his stuff. His storytelling skills were not to the level of King or Straub. This book was a little less than 300 pages but was a very quick read. 

Mary Barra Discriminatory Pay Hoax Story

Shortly after Mary Barra became the new GM CEO and the first person with two X chromosomes to hold that title the usual suspects promptly came out of the woodwork to charge GM with the crime of paying Ms. Barra less than her male predecessor and of doing so because she was a woman. This accusation was duly repeated as if it were fact, not just by bloggers but also by reporters for sites supposedly a fair bit more reputable than a run of the mill blog operated by unpaid people in their spare time.
There were numerous blog posts and news stories bemoaning the fact that Barra was making less money than the man she replaced. People's jowls were quivering in outrage that this particular millionaire CEO wasn't going to earn as much money as another millionaire CEO. As Nora Caplan-Bricker wrote in The New Republic  "In the past few days, Mary Barra, the new CEO of General Motors and the first ever female CEO of a major car company, has morphed from a symbol of success to an embodiment of the fact no amount of ambition and labor guarantees a woman equal treatment. It's hard to muster too much sympathy for a woman pulling in $4 million a year. But, in at least a general sense, Barra's problem is every American woman's problem—magnified by a larger sum."  
Strong stuff! From reading this purple prose I honestly expected that Barra would be opening her first leadership meeting by singing this song. I mean she's got it hard! The world is a ghetto! It's another attack in the War on Women! To the barricades comrades!!!!

Well not so fast. As it turns out all of the outraged news stories and blog posts were based on incomplete and thus fundamentally inaccurate information. Actually Ms. Barra stands to earn 60% more in her first year on the job than former CEO Daniel Akerson earned on his final year on the job. That's right, MORE.

Mary T. Barra, chief executive of General Motors, will earn as much as $14.4 million in compensation during her first year on the job, the company said on Monday. The amount of compensation revealed in January — $1.6 million in salary and $2.8 million as part of the company’s short-term incentive plan — will most likely be a small part of Ms. Barra’s earnings, but it was used by media outlets as a baseline comparison to the about $9 million Mr. Akerson earned in compensation last year. 
The total package Ms. Barra stands to receive in her first year as chief executive represents a 60 percent increase over what Mr. Akerson earned in his final year on the job. “As a new C.E.O., Mary’s total compensation is in line with her peer group and properly weighted so that most is at-risk,” G.M.’s chairman, Theodore M. Solso, said in a statement on Monday. “The company’s performance will ultimately determine how much she is paid.”
LINK

So I fully expect that the folks who were hooting and hollering about unfair gender bias against women because they thought that a woman wasn't making as much money as a man certainly now will start flapping their gums about unfair gender bias against men because a woman is making a lot more than a man. I mean we know that gender chauvinism fairness and equality is all such people are concerned about. That's what they constantly tell us and surely they are the best judges of their intentions. I know that the people who jumped the gun and made false claims, incorrect insinuations, and bad assumptions will all ruefully admit they were as wrong as two left shoes and publicly promise to do better next time. I have belief in the goodness of people. Yes I do. And if a sample size of one was enough to indicate unfairness towards women surely the reverse is true about unfairness towards men. Right? Right??? Ha! Or maybe, just maybe, there might have been non gender related reasons for Barra's and Akerson's compensation packages. Hmm. You know, reasons like that federal auto bailout, capped compensation and market share thingy. 

The purely ideological are rarely swayed by evidence and likely won't be in this case either. However this non-story should remind the rest of us living in the reality based community to at least try to take the time to find out what's going on first before we go off the deep end and start making assertions or jumping to conclusions. And the media failed in that job here. It makes you wonder what else they get wrong. After all, as Mark Twain may have said, " A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes".

HBO Game of Thrones Season Four: A Foreshadowing

Well, this looks like fun. It's always interesting to hear actors' interpretation of their characters or storylines. And I am happy to hear that unlike in previous seasons, the penultimate episode will not necessarily be the big WTF moment for the entire season. As usual if you have any spoilers to share..DON'T.

Season 4: A Foreshadowing