Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Your irony overload for the day.

Palantír?

The company that sells their supercharged eavesnooping analytics system to the Feds (never to be used against us, of course, what are ya, an extremist?) is called Palantír?

What is this, some secret psy-op designed to get students of irony to have spontaneous aneurysms?

Or hell, maybe the reference just naturally draws the tyrants like flies to a blacklight.  Hey, that's it:  someone should develop a total-surveillance system (all your brainwaves are belong to us) and market it under the straightforward name Eye of Sauron.  Anyone wanna bet that the Beltway set would so much as bat an eye before spending your money on it?

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Hat tip to Mike Vanderboegh.

'What if,' indeed.

Yes, the following came from the Faux News folks.  You're a thinking human;  ignore that and consider the content on its own merits.



I admit, even I have to willfully filter out all the gratuitous production paeans to the Founders' minarchy, but again, that's just applying a proper noise filter to get better signal.  You're doing that all the time anyway, right?

The power of this piece isn't in any one thing that Napolitano says;  hell, sadly, nothing there is new.  What works about this, instead, is the breadth of the listing in a single delivery.  Even for those of us whose faith in the political process is slightly dimmer than that of the late Frank Chodorov, it's still all too easy to get mired just in one or two fronts in the State's war on all of us, and forget just how breathtakingly comprehensive the overall assault is.

Consider sharing with those who need to know.  Hell, I could envision this being aired at parties, where contestants would tally up a count of the things mentioned in this segment that started happening within their lifetimes...



Quotes.

Radley Balko:
Joel Simon:
"I've been waiting for years for the staff of The Onion to just throw up their hands and give up trying to keep up with reality. In a world with such absurd people in it, what use is satire?"
Voltaire:
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Personally, I still think the Voltaire quote may need to be updated to:
Those who want you to believe absurdities, have already committed the atrocities.