(the writer, not the other guys)

The big news today is that Verizon Wireless has been turning over millions of records to the Obama administration, which requested them through a FISA warrant.

The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

In response to widespread outrage:

The Obama administration is defending the government’s secret seizure of millions of domestic telephone records from Verizon, saying the data collection program “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.”

And here’s Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Senate’s intelligence committee:

“I know that people are trying to get to us,” she said. “This is the reason why the FBI now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. This is the reason for the national counterterrorism center that’s been set up in the time we’ve been active. its to ferret this out before it happens. “It’s called protecting America.”

Really? Then, explain why Major Malik Hasan wasn’t prevented from mowing down dozens of Americans at Fort Hood in 2009 (via Wikipedia):

Hasan was investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and Anwar al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009.Even before the contents of the e-mails were revealed, terrorism expert Jarret Brachman said that Hasan’s contacts with al-Awlaki should have raised “huge red flags”. According to Brachman, al-Awlaki is a major influence on radical English-speaking jihadis internationally.

In one of the e-mails, Hasan wrote al-Awlaki: “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife. Hasan also asked al-Awlaki when jihad is appropriate, and whether it is permissible if innocents are killed in a suicide attack. In the months before the shooting, Hasan increased his contacts with al-Awlaki to discuss how to transfer funds abroad without coming to the attention of law authorities.

So in sum, the government is spying on everybody in order to find someone other than the people who are likely to carry out a terrorist attack.

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Taking the social out of socialism, Venezuela might solve this problem by emulating another oil-rich country, Saudi Arabia, where left-handed compliments are (literally) dirty words.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has backed plans to import 39 million rolls of toilet paper, in an effort to relieve a chronic shortage.

Lawmakers voted to approve a $79m credit for the country’s ministry of commerce, which will also be used to buy toothpaste and soap.

The products are currently in short supply in Venezuelan shops.

The oil-rich nation relies on imports, but currency controls have restricted its ability to pay for foreign goods.

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This letter to the Los Angeles Times about the move to make it legal for girls as young as 15 to buy the morning-after pill caught my attention.  See if you can spot the baby elephant in the letter writer’s room:

Re “Birth control ruling appealed,” May 2

It is fitting that the online version of this article on the Obama administration’s appeal of an order to remove the age limit on Plan B emergency contraception appears on The Times’ Science Now blog.

As a pediatrician who has done extensive research on emergency contraception and young women, we need science now. Science must be the basis for these decisions, not politics.

Medical opinion is solidly united that this medication is safe for women of all ages, and research shows women know when and how to take it. There is simply no scientific reason to fight Plan B going over-the-counter for all women, and the new age limit will create restrictions for all women in need of Plan B.

This is politics trumping science again, and it’s bad medicine.

Tracey Wilkinson, MD

San Marino

So, just like that, girls are now “women.”  And Dr. Wilkinson decries politics.  How about rhetoric?

Speaking of science over politics, does eugenics count? For that matter, how about nuclear energy, fracking, hormesis, DDT, biotech foods, etc?  One wonders whether Dr. Wilkinson, who a bit of googling reveals is associated with Physicians for Reproductive Health, is in favor of science trumping politics for those disciplines, too.

Oh, and what if science determines that higher breast cancer rates can be blamed, in part, on women having fewer children–and having them later in life?

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Small business owners, regardless of how ignorant they may be on the subject of economics, tend to understand that their success depends on attracting customers with money.

And then there’s the unnamed retailer who, in speaking to the Los Angeles Times about Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s penchant for buying up colossally expensive beach properties in Malibu, manages to put the moron in oxy:

Tremendous wealth “is something to fear,” said a local merchant who declined to give his name because wealthy landowners are among his clientele. “It don’t trickle down.”

It don’t, dude?  Then why worry about losing your wealthy clientele?

What a great country this is.  Even the irredeemably stupid can become entrepreneurs.

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At present, nearly 20,000 acres of Ventura County have burned in a terrible conflagration whose destruction has been confined largely, though not entirely, to Nature thanks to the incredibly heroic efforts of firefighters.  So far, the blaze is only 20 percent contained.

Gee, if only the state of California had access to some of those flying supertankers that can knock down flames in breathtakingly effective fashion.

Well, thanks to the Ventura County Star, I just learned that we do–and that the tankers have been grounded for the two days that the fire’s been raging.  Where?  Just a few miles from the flames.

Here are the latest developments:

6:50 p.m.: The state says it will provide two specialized firefighting C-130J aircraft and crews from the California Air National Guard’s 146th Airlift Wing to assist with wildfires across California.

The air tankers are based at the Channel Islands Air National Guard Station in Port Hueneme, 5 miles from the fire. Cal Fire members are working with the Air National Guard to get the tanker operations up and running, the state says.

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