NSA

The Telegraph-- NSA 'tracked 60 million phone calls in Spain in a month'

Adding to Edward Snowden's intelligence reports, El Mundo published an article about widespread telephone surveillance in Spain. Data seems cloudy at this point, published from sources in question, but America's NSA is receiving a lot of accusations.

The Huffington Post-- NSA Phone Records Lawsuit Filed By Parents Of Killed Navy SEAL

Rand Paul is trying to take a lawsuit agains privacy infringements to the Supreme Court, and "get 10 million Americans saying we don’t want our phone records looked at, [so that] maybe someone will wake up and something will change in Washington."

The National Review-- NSA Privacy Breaches: The Bad and the Good

Apparently our new surveillance skills come with a potential technological security against accidental and intentional illegal disclosure of information. But the NSA is still covering up. It's hard to know the intentions, especially when the important legal infringements are buried under infringements based on "typos". Still, there is "the bad and the good", certainly.

Annually, the College Board renews its threats on cancelling exams. Students must suffer the fear that their scores may be cancelled because of suspicious activity. There have been a lot of news stories about AP cheating scandals, or surrogate test-taking. But what about those who did not cheat and have to suffer along with those who did?

Aspiring lawyers at the University of Tasmania suffered that penalty this year. In these few efforts to stop the advance of cheating, we often delay a majority of honest people. This is another side to the cheating problem. Not only does its ubiquity cause our leaders to be dishonest, it also discourages the honest aspirations of many.

I would say that any meddling might worsen the problem, that allowing both the cheaters and the hard-workers to prosper would allow things to balance out a bit, but that is an extreme and a too hopeful view. I don't actually think that the re-take exams that students must sometimes take discourages our ambitious youths so completely. It is a rare enough thing, and the true leaders would certainly persevere. Additionally, if the cheaters prosper in school, what will stop them from continuing to prosper through the same methods as leaders?

Why Should We Complain?

I believe the unwillingness to dispel our dissatisfaction comes not only from a fear of authority, but from an unwillingness to disturb ourselves. Certainly, if one were sitting and sweating in a room, and all he had to do was rise and turn down the heater, even if the sole entity in the room, he may not take it upon himself to move. It isn't just fear that arrests us, but a heightened laziness. There have been times, for instance, in which I was too warm by a bit and had complete control over my predicament-- all I had to do was take off a sweatshirt-- but some mysterious unwillingness to move implored me to exchange the annoyance of an hour for of a moment's inconvenience. Similarly, if I needed to hydrate or relieve myself, I may hold off until I finish this chapter or this episode or whatever, rather than do so immediately. To do so would be an inconvenient exertion the lack of which brings about a perturbation I would rather suffer.

Along with the laziness is an element of apathy. Perhaps the specific annoyance isn't a big deal, so you don't deal with it. If we were to comb ourselves for every minor dissatisfaction, we would be relentlessly adjusting our corporeal position, or constantly itching our shins, or undergoing whatever other satisfactions. Such a procedure would be more annoying than any cottonmouth.

So, we put off or ignore things that don't matter much. It's a from of apathy, but not a necessarily bad one. I'm sure a lot of Buckley's buddies in the movie theatre either didn't care or didn't think it mattered much that the focus was a little bit off. Buckley doesn't have the only sound attitude concerning the "Why Don't We Complain?" idea. It isn't just about hoping someone else will do the job. I mean, what about Buckley's newspaper-reading seatmate, who did not seem at all disturbed with the temperature, but rather was annoyed by Buckley's "sibilant intrusion". Perhaps most of our apathy goes too far, but it remains as a deterrent to our complaints.

Prompt Frustration

I've written one of my essay prompts for the UC system, but the other is still pending... instead of writing a real response for the second essay, this is the only thing I've come up with so far, and I'd be an idiot to send it in.

Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Aren't sweaty essays just awful? 

This topic is incredibly stupid. You couldn't sound worse when asking about our surroundings and backgrounds than calling it "the world [we] come from". Aren't we all from the same world? You make it sound like we are all floating around on our own planets, watching each other apathetically across the expanding void. 

And why would you ask about our "dreams and aspirations"? You're just bound to receive all kinds of sappy and affected essays from kids who really don't know what their plans are but feel they need to say they have them. Honestly, don't the admissions readers suffer enough? Are you trying to heighten suicide rates this quarter (or semester, as the case may be)? I don't think you want to know about the kid who wants to "heighten his already acute sense of interpersonal skills in order to reform ineffective world systems" or the psychology major who's "just so ready to go to the school and learn and help people!" or the idiot who tries to analyze the prompt and write something clever, ultimately off topic, and dangerous enough to piss a lot of people off. 

After all, the UC system is a big deal. If you have that much power, who wants to be told that their essay prompts suck? Who would even send an essay like that? They'd be screaming, "don't accept me to any of your schools!" The officers would be annoyed and say, "this tells us nothing about his background and is completely off topic". But seriously, personal statement prompts are the worst. They're always doomed too fail. Goofy prompts like "tell us about the relationship between you and your arch-nemesis" beget goofy essays. And if you want some on-track, good essays (along with a dumpster-load of terrible ones); you write a prompt like the one I'm not following. And-- well, I've never seen a good personal statement prompt before, but I'm guessing if one was written, the universe would explode and be replaced with something more complex.

I suppose, no matter the prompt, no one can really reveal themselves completely through an essay. So, from a certain perspective, it doesn't matter what prompt is written. The reciprocation will be flawed and often terrible, regardless. It is the applicant's job to make do, defy probability and write something good, instead of wasting everyone's time and disregarding his duty.

Deep Throat?

Yes, mistrust is a "protective mechanism". I like this description-- it connotes the sort of automatic response that mistrust is. It is mechanized, automatic. And although it protects us and can help us, like all machines, it will malfunction.
Too much mistrust eats away at us, makes our cogs rust and corrode, and ends up hurting us more than it would have helped. We can get caught, and feel the infinite pain from a disappointed brother or mother; or we can strain under the heaviness of mistrust, the inability to relax and just trust.
But mistrust isn't wholly bad. There is an accepted amount of cynicism (we know from our own actions that human beings cannot be completely trusted at all times). There are reasons to mistrust-- it is that protective mechanism, an assurance against harm.
But can we trust ourselves even? If we trust no one else, don't we fail as well? Trust is something that we dispense carefully and sparingly. We need to find more occasion to trust in the things that immediately require it-- relationships, the workplace, the school system--, and to change those institutions which we cannot trust (government).
However, I don't think we will ever reach the wanted level of trust. Humans cannot all collectively decide to trust in themselves with such a predisposition to mistrust. It is instead an individual decision, made with individual discretion, to trust.




There is a certain attraction to those characters who trust no one. Whether it is the lone ranger with a hood over his oily hair, sitting alone, in the corner of a bar; or the government agent who works in the x-files department; we enjoy these characters...
But they each have those they trusted: Mulder has Scully, and Strider has Gandalf.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

"An often trivial, diplomatic or well-intentioned untruth."-- definition of a white lie

Not all lies must be bad. Consider the interrogated patriot or the polite man. The measure of a bad lie is by how much harm is done by its deception. In distorting another's reality, do we eventually hurt them or ourselves? Does all our good intent culminate into something terrible? Examine for example someone who lies and says their check is in the mail. Might they, by withholding the check, contributed to some larger bureaucratic mess? And won't the postmark prove that they have only delayed an inevitable late fee? The positive intent doesn't matter if the effect is still destructive. If we cultivate discord unintentionally, we are still the cultivator. It grows into a disease. The chaotic yield would be far more relevant than the untraceable white lies which fertilized the field; no one would look to stop the virus but would cure the symptoms instead.

But this might stray into the realm of karma or the butterfly effect. It seems ridiculous to think that white lies might eventually confuse our lives significantly. But too many small distortions will eventually warp a thing out of shape. We need to give reality occasional relief so it can be itself, or we would be mislead into oblivion. We bend truth for ourselves as well. Lies are the immediate relief from reality, which must be often maintained by truth. Too many lies, and everything disintegrates. 

"Faith, here's an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake yet could not equivocate to heaven."-- a Porter

Doublespeak and oath-breaking are the types of lies which seem most harmful and unjustifiable. They immediately occur to mind as a direct offense against the neighbor.

I'm unsure if we should measure a lie's poison by its immediate effects. I don't know if I should always trust a white lie's purity, especially if I don't know what exactly a black lie is. I would say we should avoid lying altogether, but this would be impossible and tedious. We cannot rid ourselves of the lie as long as everything else is so bad.

This is a 1950's ad. It is a rare case of conscious opposition to cooking stereotypes. Here, however, it is not switching the roles, saying men can cook and women can't. It is saying women should cook but this one can't. Although the man seems to be comforting the woman, she is portrayed as overly emotional and he as condescending. It's a joke, but it purports the worthlessness of this woman. She didn't burn the beer, because it was the only thing she didn't cook. The intent is primarily to stick the brand, Schlitz, in the consumers mind; it seems not to be marketed to a specific gender (perhaps it was intended to be for women). Though it seems at first a light-hearted twist on gender roles, the tone toward women is destructive.

We are unsure of the man's intentions. Is his action sarcasm, or is he graciously turning the situation with humor? Either way, his comment takes away her power.