End the War on Freedom

# The Onion - U.S. Troops Draw Up Own Exit Strategy - Operation Screw This. Satire. Wish it were true. [root]

"My marines are the best-trained, best-equipped, most homesick fighting force in the world," said Staff Sgt. Cornelius Woods. "Just give us the order, and we will commandeer every available vehicle to execute a flanking maneuver on the airstrips of Mosul. By this time tomorrow, we will have retaken our positions at our families' dinner tables in full force."

# Claire Wolfe - A good citizen reports a terrorist threat - A couple of links to Gestapo web pages where you can report terr'ist threats, like Bushnev, Cheney, their cabinet, and numerous senators. And a link to a page of free anonymous proxies to protect your identity while you do it. Hehe. [claire]

# John C. Whitehead at Opinion Journal - Scary - Mr. Whitehead wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed last April titled "Mr. Spitzer Has Gone Too Far", in which he berated New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for accusing Hank Greenberg, on television, of fraud. What Mr. Spitzer did next is unbelievable.

Since there have been rumors in the media as to what happened next, I feel I must now set the record straight. After reading my op-ed piece, Mr. Spitzer tried to phone me. I was traveling in Texas but he reached me early in the afternoon. After asking me one or two questions about where I got my facts, he came right to the point. I was so shocked that I wrote it all down right away so I would be sure to remember it exactly as he said it. This is what he said:

"Mr. Whitehead, it's now a war between us and you've fired the first shot. I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done. You will wish you had never written that letter."

Atek128 has a copy of this short essay, which he appropriately titled Fuck Eliot Spitzer. Indeed. [policestateusa]

# Reuters via The Boston Globe - Greenberg defender accuses Spitzer of making threats - Spitzer has denied the threat. More stories here. From a Reuters article: [google]

But Spitzer spokesman Darren Dopp said, "This account is not accurate. It is embellished and false. (Whitehead) is simply not telling the truth." Dopp also said Greenberg asked Whitehead to write a letter attacking the attorney general.

Whitehead could not be reached for comment. Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for Greenberg, said Whitehead wasn't pushed into writing the op-ed by anyone.

Whitehead's charge comes at a critical time for Spitzer, a Democrat who has announced plans to seek election as New York governor next fall.

# Samizdata.net - Watching over you... - lots of discussion on the British plan to record all automobile traffic in a massive database. This comment by "J. Random Engineer" shows how massive that database will be: [samizdata]

Some idle back-of-the-envelope calculations for the ANPR total surveillance scheme, not necessarily accurate, just for fun, don't bite me:
# assume the average car does 10,000 miles a year = 30 miles a day,
# cameras every 400 yds,
# so the average car triggers 120 ish recording events per day,
# assume 30 million vehicles on the roads,
# giving roughly 3600 million events per day,
# at that transaction rate and data rate the system must recognise plates locally before transmission to the database,
# assume 10 bytes for the plate ID and 10 bytes for a timestamp,
# yields 72 Gigabytes per day to transmit & store,
# equals 52,560 Gigabytes over 2 years.

That's some pretty hefty & expensive system! Assume there's 100 million credit card events per day in the UK and you're talking many times larger than the VISA network.

(And the government is going to make this work? The same government that ballses up every big computer project it attempts? The government that chucked away a billion plus on postoffice computerisation, Pathway, NIRS2, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam.)

Even with a 99.99% accuracy rate of recognition that's a lot of dirty data. And the whole billion pound setup is defeated by a strategically placed 1p strip of black duct tape.

You would have thought the crims had learned to clone their numberplates by now, or use foreign plates.

Amelia also posted a good idea:

I suggest camera smashing, a la the Dutch. I further suggest that the camera smashers do so while wearing burkas. After all, why pass up such an excellent identity concealment method?

# Charley Reese at Prison Planet - The Purple Finger - think Bushnev's war has improved Iraq. Think again. [root]

So, it looks like, despite all the naïve gushing about purple fingers from voting, whatever government emerges is not going to be a friend of the United States. We will have spent more than 2,100 lives and $221 billion to end up with a government that says, "Get the hell out of our country."

...

I'm convinced that the Bush administration is hands down the most incompetent administration in history. According to Escobar, a British Broadcasting Corp. poll found that one-half of the Iraqis wish we had never come, 60 percent believe they are worse off than under Saddam, half want a strong leader and only 28 percent say democracy is a priority. It's hard to believe that after all the billions of dollars spent, all the time since March 2003, we still cannot produce as much electricity or oil as Saddam, and there is still sewage in the streets of Baghdad.

# Douglas Herman at Strike the Root - Bumper Stickers I'd Love to See - some good ones. [root]

"Bushed Yet?" Pretty much says it all. Pithy yet powerful, and liberals and conservatives can agree on the answer to the question. Yup, we are.

...

"The War on Terror . . . Or Just Terror?" What is terror? Isn't it murder and mayhem and bombings and arson and unlawful arrests and tortures? If you answered Yes, then WE are the terrorists in the Middle East.

Add comment Edit post Add post