Oh, What a Tangled Web They Weave, When Progressives Practice to Deceive . . .

. . . except that they’re not really practicing deception anymore; they’ve pretty much mastered it.

At any rate, hope my latest web wanderings find you in good spirits.  I’m just a tad twitchy, thanks to a spike in the usual number of tech glitches.  I’m about to switch over to my fourth  HTC One X “smartphone” – battery croaks in minutes, not hours — and since it’s integral, the only way to get a new battery is to get a new phone.   In the process of making sure my photos were backed up on my laptop, I updated my glitchy photo gallery software, which updated into not working at all.  Now I can see not one but two copies of every photo on my computer,  and I can edit them, but I can’t upload them to Facebook or anywhere else because my Windows Photo Gallery tells me that the photos I’m LOOKING AT belong to  files that don’t exist.  Charming.   Explain to me again how technology simplifies my life – or why it’s great to have a phone warranty that replaces one faulty device with a refurbished faulty device?

Anyway, since I can still read articles on this piece of junk, I’ve been wanting to share a few that struck me as interesting and off the mainstream radar.  This first piece, written by an intelligence analyst who studied communist propaganda, serves as a primer on political correctness, and explains how progressives have harnessed the latest research in social psychology to manipulate public opinion and behavior.  Not surprisingly, Obama’s pal Cass Sunstein shows up as one of the main “experts” in the field of “choice architecture.” The author’s analysis goes a long way toward explaining why The Great Uniter is always dividing.  His insults are not the result of frustration with his opposition– they’re part of the strategy of coercion.

It’s easy to observe these techniques in politics, universities, and journalism, but familiarity through repetition doesn’t make them any less foreign to my own mode of thinking, which is that Truth matters and that the business of persuasion is to help others see the truth about a particular issue.   If somewhere along the way I discover that my view is in error – i.e., out of alignment with reality, then my view ought to change to conform with reality.   At least, that’s my quaint Judeo-Christian way of looking at the world.  God is Truth, and if I’m His follower, then my allegiance is not just to Him, but to that which is true, to the extent that I can discern it.    These Sunstein disciples, on the other hand, seem to regard truth or reality as irrelevant– or,  to the extent that they have trouble concealing it, inconvenient.

I suppose the gist of the whole thing is that PC is about power-consolidation, NEVER about anything  so retro as mutual understanding or the free exchange of ideas.  If we miss that,  if we keep meekly defending ourselves against the constant accusations that we’re bigots or racists or hard-hearted,  . . . we’re toast.

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The next piece, by Andrew McCarthy, speaks to the unreality of democracy or religious plurality co-existing with Sharia.  The current persecution of Christians in Egypt is an ugly illustration of that incompatibility.  I’ve bookmarked a site that is keeping a daily tally on the persecution of Christians in Egypt, and it contained this gem from Mohamed Saad al-Azhary:   “I strongly condemn the burning of churches for two reasons. 1) Whoever does this ruins the image of the protesters.   2) Who in their right mind would burn waste?”  (Gives new meaning to the term “charm offensive.”)   In the all-is-not-lost dept., the site also notes instances in which local Muslims have sided with Christians to protect their churches against the Muslim Brotherhood-of-Hate-and-Destruction.

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Regarding the ongoing surveillance saga, there’s always more there there.  This tidbit from a story on the detention/interrogation of Glenn Greenwald’s partner at Heathrow for 9 hours — not to mention relieving him of all his electronics — caught my attention:

The Guardian disclosed Monday that British authorities have attempted to pressure the paper to turn over the material leaked by Snowden, or to destroy it. Rusbridger . . . said that at some point over the past month, security experts from the GCHQ intelligence agency oversaw the destruction of two hard drives in the Guardian’s basement, even though he pointed out to officials that the paper’s NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York.

As for MSM coverage, the NYT’s  in-depth, admiring portrait of Laura Poitras, who was the first journalist to make contact with Edward Snowden,  is the stuff of  intrigue flicks – and there’s no way one could read it without at least questioning the official line on Snowden.

This press release by Udall and Wyden on the NSA revelations caught my eye because they come awfully close, for two Democrats, to saying the executive branch cannot be trusted.  (And to be clear, I do think that intelligence organizations are supposed to have secrets.  I just think those secrets are supposed to be about our enemies, not about our law-abiding selves.)

It’s also been fun to watch President Bystander —  who never learns about anything unseemly going on in his administration until he opens his morning newspaper  (I mean really, can’t Eric-bug-‛em-Holder at least give him a 24-hour heads up?) — now in the awkward position of trying to convince us that he’s completely aware of whatever the NSA has been peeking into, and it doesn’t involve anything we might consider private . . . at least, not after the Sunstein crowd gets through with us.

This whole privacy issue has gotten utterly wacky.  I must get 3 or 4 privacy notices every week in the mail; multiply that across the land, and whole forests are being mowed down in the name of HIPAA  or other mandated disclosures that nobody reads.  At my doctor’s office, they have taken such extraordinary measures to make sure patients can’t overhear each other,  building a long curved desk divided by high partitions, that the marooned receptionists can’t see if any patients are in line, and we in the line can’t see how many desks feature actual receptionists.  To solve this problem,  pendant lamps were installed over each desk, and when a receptionist is ready to see a patient she turns the light on — except when she forgets to turn it on, or walks away and forgets to turn it off, or . . .  Meanwhile, with our medical records digitized, how long before some hacker and/or government hack has them?

Likewise, while Facebook continually tweaks its “privacy controls” and offers little tutorials on how to use them to “protect your privacy,”   we’re warned by tech gurus (and court precedents) that we should have NO expectation of privacy for anything we do on the internet, or anything we send to another person via a third party – e.g., a phone company or a piece of snail mail or an email or a Facebook message or a text or whatever.  Really?   Why keep “improving” our privacy settings if Google is scanning everything and the NSA is scooping it all up for storage in Utah?  And don’t even get me started on Google Glass . . .   For a great overview of recent surveillance revelations, check out John Fund’s column, in which he makes the case that conservatives need to rethink giving the NSA the benefit of the doubt:

So, I’ll close with a piece by Peggy Noonan, a conservative who’s been ahead of the skepticism curve.  Like me, she seems to believe that ferreting out terrorist plots and protecting law-abiding citizens from unlawful intrusion are not mutually exclusive endeavors.   Genuine oversight  is required – not just soothing reassurances for the dupes from the Prevaricator-in-Chief.

If you read Noonan, I think you’ll see the connection between the manufacturing of “availability cascades” to shift public policy, and the Obama campaign’s number crunchers who analyzed massive data sets in order to micro-target specific voter groups.    If the NSA is doing what Snowden and others claim it is – there’s no way they’ll be able to leave that ultimate data base unsifted when it comes to winning election campaigns or pushing controversial agendas.  The ends will justify the means – they always do with this crowd.

Of course, if the Utah storage computers were being built to the same specs as my current phone, I’d be far less worried . . .