WOUNDED BIRD

Monday, July 1, 2013

HAPPY CANADA DAY! - BONNE FÊTE CANADA!

May God bless all my dear Canadian friends. Have a lovely day!

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY FROM PAUL (A.)

It's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things
literally.

Cheers,

Paul (A.)

Sunday, June 30, 2013

HAPPY GAY PRIDE DAY!

Empire State Building in New York City

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS:

Murdoch Matthew

We've never seen such a turnout in New York City -- crowds from 40th Street to the end of Christopher Street three-deep at least, often filling sidewalks. We were in the first of the march when people were fresh, and it was three miles of screaming. We doubled back to watch the rest of the march across Tenth Street from the Church of the Ascension (which served water with lemon to Marchers), and it was quieter. Sprinkles began at 3pm, not enough to dampen anyone seriously, but it thinned the crowd a bit by 5pm. The march began at noon and ended at six. A celebratory day.

The Episcopal Church was in the last section, with the bishop on the float. The Riverside Church brought up the rear, just in front of the police cars and street sweepers.

MY FAVORITES FROM THE COMICS IN THE NEWSPAPER

Zits

Pickles

UPDATE: A list of the comics I read on Sunday besides the two above:

Peanuts
For Better or For Worse
Garfield
Curtis
Snuffy Smith
Dustin
Doonesbury
Dilbert
Sally Forth

I thought you'd like to know. :-)

"THE CASE FOR PRIVACY ALWAYS COMES TOO LATE"

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late. The horse is out of the barn. The post office has opened your mail. Your photograph is on Facebook. Google already knows that, notwithstanding your demographic, you hate kale.

Jill Lepore, in her article in The New Yorker titled "The Annals of Surveillance," delves into the history of spying. Though the ease and scope of surveillance grew enormously with the development of new technologies, spying has long been part of human history. With the advent of literacy and mail delivery in one form or another, came the opportunity for outside scrutiny of letters that were intended to be private correspondence between sender and the person to whom the letter was addressed. So it went, and so it goes, as communication technology expands and offers ever greater opportunities for spying.

Google, Facebook, email servers, internet service providers, and other sites on the internet know a great deal about me, as do government agencies whose services I use. As I became part of online social networks, I gradually gave up any notion that what I wrote on the internet or spoke on a phone was private. Thus, I was not surprised to learn that government spy agencies may be spying on me. The technology is there, and it will be used, for good or for ill. One reason Osama bin Laden managed to avoid capture for so many years was that he stopped communicating by phone and switched to couriers.

Since I subscribe to The New Yorker, I'm not certain Lepore's article is accessible to non-subscribers, but I recommend the piece to those of you who can read it, which I hope is everyone who so chooses.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

WHERE LOUISIANA'S VOUCHER MONEY GOES, OR IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?

Brilliant post by CenLamar exposing the lack of responsibility and oversight of the school voucher program, a pet project of Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent of Education, John White, part of a plan to destroy public education in Louisiana.

Yesterday, after more than a year of sustained criticism in the state, national, and even international media, Louisiana Superintendent John White (no relation) announced the Department of Education was banning the New Living Word School in Ruston, Louisiana from participating in the so-called Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program (the SSEEP), more commonly known as the school voucher program. Under the direction of Governor Bobby Jindal and the majority Republican state legislature, Superintendent White is responsible for rolling out and implementing the most expansive school voucher program in the nation’s history, a program that potentially qualifies as many as 56% of Louisiana students.

Read it all, and weep for the children of Louisiana. Note especially the leaked email from White to "muddy up the narrative," rather than deal with the revelations about the inadequacies of New Living Word School long before now.

Since the Louisiana State Legislature is responsible for enabling this type of scam, I blame them for supinely bowing before the governor to pass legislation allowing the mad voucher scheme to go forward.