Interesting Daily Kos article from a data miner on the NSAs database of phone numbers. -via pedro.

All of this brings us to ask who the real targets of all of this spying is . . . In order to identify them [terrorists], you need to know an awful lot about those who are not terrorists. This helps to eliminate false positives. However, the data for terrorists is so sparse, that even if a possible terrorist is identified, the algorithms used will rarely generate a high probability and a high confidence . . . On the other hand, if you want to predict how a person will vote in a given election, you can get an amazingly accurate prediction from the high-quality data from Joe and Jane Sixpack.

These days the news makes me feel as if I am two bit character in a badly made, futuristic movie with an overtly Orwellian bent:

Voice Over:

I crouch in a corner of my living room that is not in the line of sight of the telephone. I scrawl this diary on squares of self rationed toilet paper with a sliver of wood and my own blood as ink. I have a box hidden under a floor board that contains french fries, a small bottle of french wine and a few outlawed texts and pamphlets. Each night I eat one fry, take a small pull from the bottle and read a ragged photocopy of a document titled the United States Constitution. I can't remember the first time I read this document, or what its significance is. I just know it's important somehow, and I read it over and over.

Christian Student Sues For Right To Hate Speech

"If we don't protect freedom of speech, how will we know who the assholes are?" -Louis Neprud, Systems Analyst, The Onion

"I'm Proud to be an American." I saw quite a few of these bumper stickers while driving around Long Island yesterday. I wondered to myself, what motivates people to place these stickers on their cars. What need does this declaration fulfill? Are people so proud that they need to shout it from the mountain top, and in leu of no mountains in their particular region they opt for a bumper sticker. Is it a message to all the non believers, a not so subtle message that America is a country of whom its worth being proud.

Then I wonder, why aren't people proud to be inhabitants of the planet earth. Maybe they are, but they just don't have an overwhelming need to declare it. Maybe there is a geographical limit to the breadth of proudness. Can people only be proud within a particular region. Maybe human beings are incapable of being proud if a land mass is greater than three thousand miles wide, or their affinity for a particular region is unable to span large seas or oceans. This proudness also seems incapable of moving too far north or south, and tends to limit itself to a east west directional movement.

In Germany there were no "I'm Proud to be German" bumper stickers or "God Bless Germany" tinted rear truck windows with a mountain goat proudly clutching the German flag between its teeth. They seemed to have a much different perspective on the concept of nationalism.