My talking alarm is speaking in a Slavic language.
It does do talking alarms, but normally it speaks ……… Well ……… English.
(on edit)
My bad, I tracked it down to a setting in my alarm app, AlarmDroid, and it wasn’t Russian, it was Polish.
FWIW, it’s actually a pretty good app.
Seen on Facebook.
He has said something on the issue of race that is both profound and a truly original framing:
Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
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So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.
He’s right.
What we call racial progress is a really a reduction (NOT an elimination) of the “crazy” of white America.
We now have a report of a person who had a job interview with Uber, and was granted the ability to view the complete travel history of any Uber Customer:
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Now add that all this location data was not held by a battle-hardened company with tons of lawyers and security experts, such as Google. Instead, this data was held by a start-up that was growing with viral exuberance – and with so few privacy protections that it created a “God View” to display the movements of riders in real-time and at least once projected such information on a screen for entertainment at a company party.
And let’s not forget that individual employees could access historical data on the movements of particular people without their permission, as an Uber executive in New York City reportedly did when he pulled the travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter who was working on a story about the company.
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Then there are the personal travels of government officials and their families. A person who had a job interview in Uber’s Washington office in 2013 said he got the kind of access enjoyed by actual employees for an entire day, even for several hours after the job interview ended. He happily crawled through the database looking up the records of people he knew – including a family member of a prominent politician – before the seemingly magical power disappeared.
“What an Uber employee would have is everything, complete,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company.
I can see how the employee would fear retribution.
The CEO is an Ayn Rand loving sociopath, and he, almost any employee at the central office, or an enterprising hacker, can pull up your travel history.
How do you know that some tabloid reporter doesn’t have an Uber employee on their payroll?
Ian Welsh makes a number of cogent suggestions, including eliminating forfeiture laws, drug criminalization, RICO laws, etc., but there is one suggestion that stands out and shines like the sun:
If you really want to make the system work, make all private lawyers for criminal charges illegal, and use only public defenders, chosen by lot. I guarantee that the pay and competence of public defenders would soar and their case load would drop as soon as rich people realized that they could be the one being defended by an overworked and underpaid lawyer.
This is f%$#ing brilliant.
Read the rest.
Unfortunately, it’s the New Statesman, a respected but obscure publication, founded by Fabian Socialists and generally affiliated with the Labour Party, which has finally observed that Riyadh is the font from which Islamic terrorism springs:
Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.
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As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.
Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.
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The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.
It provides a lot of insights into forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and makes it clear that the House of Saud, and that regime’s use of religion as a way to exert control and to promulgate a millennia long conflict between Arabs and Persians.
Saudi Arabia cannot be a part of any solution until they are forced to face the fact that they are the source of the problem.
Author H.A. Goodman is suggesting that black men should avail themselves of the right to open carry wherever possible. He gives 2 highly convincing reasons:
I never thought I’d be an open-carry advocate.
However, I’m a firm believer in working within the American political system in order to change the status quo. If the Second Amendment is cherished by millions of Americans, then why not use it to further certain liberal ideals? Protecting African-American lives and alleviating tensions between the black community and law enforcement should be a top priority of all Americans and especially Congress; however, this is not the case. It speaks volumes that African-Americans vote over 90 percent Democrat during national elections, yet our future nominee in 2016 still hasn’t addressed an issue the whole nation is talking about, even after Darren Wilson’s acquittal and the flames that engulfed Ferguson.
He goes on to state that, “I’m not advocating armed insurrection. My name isn’t Cliven Bundy.”
He then gives three very good reasons for blacks to open carry:
1. Openly carrying a gun legally (in an open-carry state) is a public display indicating that an individual does not have a criminal record. This alone undermines the basis behind racial profiling.He’s right, of course.
If you have been convicted of a felony, the federally mandated background check will catch you.
Well it will if you don’t exploit the gun show loophole.
2. The epidemic of disproportionate force utilized against black men in America warrants an alternative, and legal, solution to this problem.
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There are so many more instances of unarmed black males shot by police that there simply isn’t enough room in this article to continue. Therefore, regardless of your view of gun ownership, the predicament faced by African-Americans warrants a serious look at whether or not openly carrying a weapon will save black lives.
Anything that deflates the sense of impunity that many in law enforcement (aka the Thin Blue Line) will improve the quality of policing int he country.
3. The vast majority of African-American men will never commit a crime, so it’s time America realizes this fact. If openly carrying a gun will help our country overcome centuries of prejudice pertaining to skin color, then it’s an option that should be pursued.
This whole “Carry a gun, and show that you are not a criminal,” thing is trolling.
It’s trolling when the (almost completely caucasian) open carry ammosexuals do it, and it’s trolling when people of color do it.
But the right to troll is fundamental, and it should be available without regard to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or national origin.
BTW, if anyone wants to organize a gay black open carry parade in Houston or Dallas, TX, I will do what I can to help.