National Preparedness Month is this September. According to the Department of Homeland Security, it is an effort to “encourage Americans to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools.”
And you won’t believe the sorts of activities they have planned.
The United Nations issued a damning report Friday decrying the human rights record of the United States. The report urges the U.S. to close its secret detention centers, reduce its usage of the death penalty, ensure that minorities are adequately aided in relief efforts such as those after Katrina, and more.
Your government is slow, inefficient and stupid. It’s a miracle it ever manages to get anything done.
I like it that way.
An updated internal policy on news media contacts may require every National Security Agency employee to stop working on their core missions and spend time on looking instead for employees who might be talking to the press.
The Ask A Working Woman Survey asks six questions about concerns affecting working women and twelve background/demographic questions. Interestingly, the choices offered all call for more laws and increased regulation to ensure that the labor market “addresses the concerns” of working women.
A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., investigating leaks of classified intelligence information to the press, has subpoenaed national security whistleblower Russell Tice, who has previously acknowledged being a source for the New York Times story on President Bush’s terrorist surveillance program.
Over the past several years, Columbus Public Schools have lost 7,000 students to charter schools. More students are expected to leave this fall with the implemenation of school vouchers. This may prove to be a serious issue for Columbus Public Schools. According to a survey by KidsOhio, only 49% of CPS parents with preschool-aged children plan on sending their children to CPS when they reach school age.
“President Bush’s electronic surveillance program has been a festering sore on our body politic since it was publicly disclosed last December,” wrote Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). His solution? Sweep the whole mess under the rug of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and out of the public eye.
On Thursday at 1:34 p.m., a message appeared on Milwaukee Craigslist asking “For Mein Fraulein” to “Call me.” It is at least the seventh of a long line of such messages, each of which appear in a different city, over the last three months. Only in the last week, the pace has picked up considerably, with the last three messages appearing in the last eight days.
However, one source says that there may be nothing to see here after all.
I really hate minimum wage laws. What I hate more, however, is when government not only gets it completely wrong, but does so in trite, populist terms; exactly what Chicago’s City Council has done this week, passing on Wednesday an ordinance that enforces a “living wage” for the city’s employees.
Would you like to start your own army, or perhaps terrorist organization, but can’t quite get hold of all the materials you need? Looking to build weapons of mass destruction but the parts for your chemical factory are too hard to find? Not to worry, for now you can buy just about everything you need.
From the U.S. Department of Defense.
At pennies on the dollar.
On Wednesday, a person unknown posted a mysterious message “For Mein Fraulein” on the popular Craigslist web site, asking “her” to call, and including a telephone number. This message follows five other such messages that, when the telephone number is called, play back a recording of music, followed by groups of numbers, reminiscent of shortwave numbers stations used during the Cold War and even today by governments to communicate with intelligence agents in the field.
Some federal air marshals are fabricating reports of suspicious activity on innocent people in order to meet a quota, causing them to be listed on terrorist watch lists, according to several marshals.
Hacking is the process of discovery. It’s unrestrained curiosity channeled to self-directed learning. As I prepare to leave New York City after attending my first hacker conference, the thing foremost on my mind is this: Why do so many people consider learning a bad thing?
Last summer, Abraham Cherrix, 16, was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system. In the fall, he underwent three months of intense chemotherapy which left him nauseated, weak and debilitated. Abraham turned down further conventional treatment, opting for an alternative treatment known as the Hoxsey therapy. Abraham’s parents supported him in his decision. But Social Services asked the court to order Abraham to conventional cancer treatment for his own well-being.
In 1971, Michael Hart invented the eBook and founded Project Gutenberg in one stroke. Now he wants to give away 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 eBooks. That’s one quintillion eBooks. And he’s sure it can actually be done.
The government said that a court case challenging the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program could not proceed because of state secrets. The federal judge looked at the secret government data which they said would support its claim of the state secrets privilege. And then he said they were full of crap and denied the state secrets privilege.
Republican Rep. Bob Bishop has asked lawmakers and education officials in his home state of Utah for input on the No Child Left Behind Act in preparation for debating its reauthorization.
But most of those officials want the law repealed entirely.
Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1984 to create an operating system and utilities and make it possible for people to use computers in freedom, that is, free from the power and control proprietary software vendors exert over their users.
Stallman spoke Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York City on free software and the hacker community, explaining how free software arose from hacking and how computer users benefit from hackers hacking free software. He also surprised many in the audience with a number of distinctly libertarian statements.
The Craigslist spy has struck again.
On Wednesday night, a message appeared on Ottawa Craigslist Missed Connections “For Mein Fraulein,” asking her to call. When one calls the number, a recording plays which is reminiscent of Cold War-era shortwave numbers stations. Only these stations are set up on Voice over Internet Protocol telephone numbers.
Department of Homeland Security employees who were issued purchase cards to make small purchases, generally of $2,500 or less, for immediate needs while working in the field, abused the cards, making inappropriate purchases of, among other things, a 63 inch plasma television set, a beer brewing kit, and golf and tennis training.
In addition, much of the material purchased with the cards has been lost or misappropriated, such as 100 laptops FEMA purchased for use during Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
When someone says “federal government paperwork,” do you immediately get writer’s cramp? You’re not alone. Last year, Americans had to spend 8.4 billion hours filling out federal government paperwork, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Within the next five years, the federal government will implode, losing up to half its workforce, and up to 70 percent of its most senior staff, to retirement, creating a significant “brain drain” all across the government.
This is easily the best news I’ve heard all week.
An efficient market depends on the consumer being both informed and rational in his choices. This obviously requires familiarity with the performance of the product (success rate, side effects, etc.) as well as an understanding of how the drug works. This is a bit much to ask of your average consumer, considering all of the education and training required to make a doctor or a pharmacologist. It would be a textbook case of a highly inefficient market with a great degree of misallocation of resources. In other words, patients would go broke as they died while pursuing ineffective treatments.
The National Center for Education Statistics released a study Friday comparing private and public schools and factoring for socio-economic differences between the two populations. The study measured fourth grade and eighth grade reading and math achievement using the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing children for more than thirty years to provide information to policy makers. In summary, the report concludes that after factoring for population differences, there is little difference in achievement for students in public vs. private education settings.
Since I haven’t done this in a while, and a few things are piling up, here are some updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.
And what better to start with than Boston’s biggest boondoggle, the Big Dig.
“It was terrible. . . . It was the most frightening experience of my life. . . . I thought it was a terrorist attack.”
Those were the words of Leona Goldberg, of Brooklyn, N.Y., 82 at the time, describing the March 31, 2004, “terrorist attack” on her apartment. It wasn’t al-Qaeda, though. These terrorists were from the New York Police Department.
In September 1999, painter and decorator Harry Stanley was shot to death by armed police in London. Challenged by Metropolitan Police officers who thought the table leg he was carrying was a gun, but given no chance to respond or display the fact that he was unarmed, Stanley’s death was a chilling precursor to the July 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, equally unarmed, equally harmless and killed in an equally barbaric way, shot eleven times at close range in a London station when police mistook him for a suicide bomber.
Perhaps best known as the “guy with the baseball cap,” former Silicon Valley heavyweight and current U.S. General Consul to Bermuda Gregory Slayton, who spent years in Asia and Africa studying how to improve the economic situation of the poor in the Third World, has taken a stand on education.
The federal government agency responsible for automobile safety is forcing Toyota to make some of its pickup trucks less safe for infants and small children.
You read that correctly. Less safe. More dangerous. This is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hard at work, endangering your children.
In most countries throughout the world, prostitution is illegal. Punishments vary tremendously, from those in countries such as the United Kingdom and most of the United States, in which prostitution is typically classed as a misdemeanour, to more extreme examples such as those in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries in which prostitution carries the death penalty. Other countries — such as the Netherlands, Germany, Greece and New Zealand — have chosen to legalise prostitution. There is one thing all these countries have in common, regardless of their legislative policy: they all have a thriving sex trade, be it legal or illegal.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to spend $305 million to replace its aging mainframe-based case management computer system with a more modern system known as Sentinel. But Congressional leaders and others believe that the new system may meet the same fate as the FBI’s last attempt to modernize its case-handling computer systems.
In 2032 I will, God willing, turn 69. The data used to determine which states need special monitoring for racial discrimination in voting will turn 68 — making it more than old enough to collect social security if that program still exists.
That is why today’s knee-jerk renewal of certain provisions of that law is an absurd act of political cowardice by the House of Representatives.
“A civil authority has issued a civil emergency message for the following counties/areas: Fairfield CT, Nassau NY, Suffolk NY, Suffolk NY, New Haven CT, Middlesex CT, New London CT, Suffolk NY, Suffolk NY, Fairfield CT, New Haven CT, Middlesex CT, and New London CT at 8:45 AM on Jul 12, 2006 effective until 2:45 PM.”
This is your federal government’s Emergency Alert System in action.
The Department of Homeland Security is revamping a little-used, decades-old system for alerting the public to emergencies so that it can push alerts to Web sites, e-mail boxes and wireless phones, and customize alerts based on location, assuming anything other than “This is a test” gets sent at all.
The U.S. State Department said Tuesday that hackers from China and other areas of Southeast Asia broke into the department’s computer network in June and stole files, resulting in the department shutting off Internet connectivity for several days.
The Department of Homeland Security is building a massive database of critical national infrastructure to be used to determine what sites most need protection from terrorist attacks.
Among the critical assets in the database are Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, a Kangaroo Conservation Center, Jay’s Sporting Goods, several Wal-Mart stores, Amish Country Popcorn, and the Sweetwater Flea Market.
The “Big Dig” highway tunnel under Boston, Mass., claimed the life of one person and injured one other Tuesday when several sections of ceiling panels fell on their car, crushing it.
Welcome to the 53rd Carnival of Liberty, where we celebrate the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
If those are the choices, as indeed they appear to be in Farmington, N.M., then I say smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
And if you don’t smoke, too bad, it’s my property. There’s some clean air somewhere else.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to expand wiretapping law to cover your Internet connection and force ISPs and other providers to build in back door wiretapping capability into their networks.
With No Child Left Behind, there is an increasing focus on standardized testing as a means of assessment. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to the public school system. At every turn, there is a test waiting to be taken, whether for school, college or the workplace.
But actual performance is routinely overlooked in favor of test scores in attempting to predict a student’s subject mastery, readiness for higher education or ability to perform in the workforce.
The United Nations Small Arms Review Conference, which was derided by the National Rifle Association and other groups as an attempt to seize Americans’ guns, ended Friday in failure, with some member states complaining that others blocked a consensus on control of illegal trade in small arms.
Research overwhelmingly shows that parental involvement in education leads to greater student achievement. In fact, in his 1984 review of 29 studies of school-parent programs, Herbert J. Walberg found that the family’s involvement in education was “twice as predictive of students’ academic success as family socioeconomic status.” More intensive programs lead to effects ten times greater than other factors.
Minarchism, sometimes known as “minimal statism”, is a governmental framework that aims to keep government as small as possible and places an emphasis on constrained government power, minimal spending and minimal levels of intervention. Minarchism is in keeping with liberal tradition and has won particular favour amongst libertarians.
The U.S. Navy is launching a probe to determine how the names and social security numbers of 100,000 Navy and Marine Corps aviators and air crew wound up on a public Web site for six months.
While the information had been on the site since December, it was not discovered until Thursday.
Do you have a weblog? And do you have something to say about the constant erosion of liberty these days?
The 53rd Carnival of Liberty, dedicated to webloggers’ writings on the principles of life, liberty and property, will return to Homeland Stupidity on Tuesday.
The U.S. Air Force, completely bogged down with information overload trying to read every blog in the world, will pay $450,000 to Versatile Information Systems Inc. to have the company develop a means of sorting out the most important new information being posted to weblogs.
The National Education Association approved a plan Monday to aggressively lobby Congress to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. Only three of the 9,000 members argued against the lobbying effort, saying the act was too flawed to reform.
America’s largest education union, the NEA has been critical of the act but this will be “the most organized effort to date.”
The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security has released its report on the three most commonly purchased voting systems. It conducted a systematic threat analysis of the systems to determine how they could be subverted.
A National Security Agency program to provide advanced cryptography for use by the Department of Defense and other government agencies, begun in 1999, has been delayed to at least 2012, with most of the substantive security improvements being delayed as far as 2018, according to a Baltimore Sun report Sunday.
Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore,” John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3rd, 1776.
Instead of celebrating, I worry, because American freedom is under attack. And those who swore to be “eternally vigilant” have failed.
For almost two months, someone has been sending secret messages by a rather unusual method: setting up Voice over IP telephone numbers which, when called, play back a recording of long strings of numbers. The recordings evoke memories of shortwave numbers stations, which have been used for decades by intelligence agencies to communicate with agents under deep cover.
On Monday, a fourth such telephone number and message appeared.
A little known provision buried within the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools receiving federal funding to provide military recruiters with student information, including names, telephone numbers and addresses.
The Pentagon’s database includes birthdates, Social Security numbers, courses and majors, grade point averages, email addresses and ethnicity for high school and college students.
Following on from the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday that Bush’s proposed military tribunals were not currently legal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has issued a response detailing his opinion.
Not surprisingly, he condemns the ruling.
The United Nations Small Arms Review Conference began Monday and will go through July 7. The National Rifle Association has said that the UN intends to eliminate private ownership of firearms. But, responding to over 100,000 letters of complaint, secretary-general Kofi Annan said: “Let me also note that this Review Conference is not negotiating a ‘global gun ban,’ nor do we wish to deny law-abiding citizens their right to bear arms in accordance with their national laws.”
What’s really going on?
While the National Security Agency has collected a massive database of domestic telephone calls, BellSouth and Verizon do not appear to have participated in the program, according to a new USA TODAY report Friday.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military tribunals held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba were not legal, and that the Bush administration was overstepping its legal boundaries in allowing them. In a 5-3 ruling, Justice Stevens wrote the majority opinion with Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter, and ultimately decided that the tribunals violated military justice law, the Geneva convention and 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act.
