The twittering pustules who pass for our foreign policy elite are horrified, just horrified that the rooskies would spook us with such a device. As if this were somehow a morally inferior form of megadeath to lobbing a couple thousand half megaton nuclear missile warheads at your least favorite country. Apparently this is how civilized countries who do not possess enemies with a plurality of coastal cities exterminate their foes. I don’t understand such people. Nuclear war is bad in general, m’kay? Mass slaughter with a nuclear torpedo is not morally inferior to mass slaughter with an ICBM. More to the point, getting along with Russians is easy and vodka is cheaper and more effective than ABM (and doomsday torpedo) defenses. If we hired actual diplomats and people who study history, instead of narcissistic toadies and sinister neocon apparatchiks to labor in our foreign services … maybe the Russians wouldn’t troll us with giant nuke torpedoes.
In the past couple years, however, I have noticed a new phenomenon. Remarkably - madly, in my view - there are webpages, webpages that should be simple, webpages by all appearances that consist of nothing more than a photo (maybe more than one), a byline, and a few hundred words of text, that require Javascript to load. As in, you will get a a blank page or an error message if you don't have their scripts enabled.
I don't understand it. I don't want to understand it. I just want it to stop.
The tinfoil side of me notes that ianmurdock.com redirected to google.com last night. I saw some archived/pastebin stuff supposedly captured from his twitter about blogging his repeated harrasment, extortion and beatings received at the hands of police thuggery on twitter shortly before his demise (see news for this day), but his twitter was already deactivated/deleted by then, so who knows if even that stuff is legit. Most news I've seen posted on his death seems rather mum about that stuff, but commenters brought it up on reddit, slashdot, etc.
In any event, it is likely yet another example of a man driven to desperation by the crime gangs that call themselves the government. I suppose the government has been lucky so far that the people they've ruined in tech so far have usually chosen suicide (like Aaron Swartz) or been incompetent at striking back (like Joe Stack).
If history is any guide, the script the government is writing for itself eventually creates monsters like Zawahiri and Bin Laden out of educated men with resources. This time, of course, it will be on the homefront, and it will no doubt be used as an excuse to further accelerate police state measures. Indeed, the FBI, etc. all now say their greatest threat they are watching for is "domestic extremists", as if they know that the tyranny they rub in our faces 24/7 is bound to piss *somebody* off.
Living in the USSA is like watching a slow motion train wreck daily for me.
