Snippets from Jerry Pournelle’s blog, Chaos Manor, 6-10-13

… On the data collection scandal:

SUBJ: Six lines . . .

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”

– Cardinal Richelieu

And now your every email and every board posting are available for the amusement of the Richelieus.

Like many others, I believe the Republic perished last November. We are now merely being presented the conqueror’s terms.

“An intelligent victor will, when possible, present his demands to the

vanquished in installments.” – Adolf Hitler

With public outrage, the “Overton Window” now moves a fraction back to the left. But its architects are relentless.

I pray good men will rebel while they still can.

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An afterthought: How did they really discover Petraeus’ and Broadwell’s emails? The story given at the time seemed wildly unlikely.

IE, does the political operation *already* have access to this database?

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald is claiming NSA types have already used it to listen in on personal enemies. Which also tends to support my guess that they are archiving call content as well as metadata.

I’m beginning to think I haven’t been nearly paranoid enough…

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For me, Peggy Noonan’s best line in that piece about the IRS was this one: “But why did all the incompetent workers misunderstand their jobs and their mission in exactly the same way?”

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Assuming that the US believed that Japan had a nuclear weapons program, there would have been a strong motivation to force Japan to surrender before they could employ it. Japan could not have delivered a nuke by aircraft, but mounting a bomb on a submarine then sailing it into a US harbor such as San Francisco or Seattle was very plausible.

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Atmospheric temperature:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/ (June 4th post)

Sharp cooling continues this spring.

Arctic Sea Ice

Currently trending at the highest level for early June in the past 6 years, …

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