In the Headlines

Netanyahu seems determined to prove he is not qualified to even run a bowling alley and is going on and on about the immense threat in Iran and again he is saying the sanctions should not be lifted.  The fact remains that the Cold War was the biggest threat facing the planet but it was resolved by making China and Russia trading partners with the result that, what do you know, they became happy little capitalists.

Some news media still refer to Communist Red China but recent purchases by China include Volvo, the London Taxi Company, a European luxury yacht manufacturer, and, get this, a French company that makes high-end designer clothes for women.

If Iran is such a terrorist threat, why don't Peugeot and Renault automobiles explode.  They are, in large part, built in Iran.  These vehicles aren't so popular in the U.S. but they're all over the place in Europe.  People in U.S. think Renault is kind of a joke but it was Renault motors that came in 1-2-3 in the Grand Prix of Japan.

A major Indonesian financial clearinghouse has moved its servers to Russia to avoid probing by the NSA.  Apparently they think there is no analog to the NSA in Russia.

Germany and Brazil have the stated intention of cutting NSA accessibility by running all domestic Internet traffic on internal servers.  Apparently they think the NSA has not got the cooperation of hardware manufacturers to embed logic in their servers to permit NSA intrusion.

Brazil has embarked on a plan to encrypt email traffic but that won't accomplish anything unless it's at least 256-bit encryption and NSA computers are so powerful now that maybe they can even crack that by now.  You may remember what happened to PGP (Pretty Good Protection) which was a freeware encryption system for personal use and it provided such good encryption that federal systems at the time could not crack it.  The result:  make it illegal.

And, hot damn, Earl, there's a new terror word.  The word was meant to describe human-caused damage to the Earth and the word invented for that is 'anthropogenic.'  However, if you look to the roots of the word you'll see it means 'causes humans' in the same way as carcinogenic means 'causes cancer.'

Keep the fear alive, baby.  The right does it, the left does it.  Be afraid, damn it.  It doesn't matter what, just be afraid of something.  Ja, ja, ja.