Edward Snowden and this fine mess we are in.

( I apologize for the disorganization, I'm not very good at this.)

I was amazed and felt a little thrilled when Edward Snowden outed himself as the source of the communication spying leaks. In my view he is a hero and I can't remember the last hero this country had. Few and far between. I thought, 'who's not gonna like this guy'? The left is going to love him, the right is going to love him, everyone is going to love him except for all the elected officials. And what are they going to do when the populous loves him and they hate him? What a story to come!

But I live in a vacuum. The vacuum of my own mind. My own private Idaho. I don't have cable TV so for all know all the pundits and talking heads are calling him a traitor and want his head on a platter. I wonder. It's almost enough to get me to watch usatvnow.com and see. But not quite. So I don't know what is going on on TV.

I read little snippets about politicians calling him a traitor. It strikes me as funny because I am hoping that the people that voted for that particular politician are taking note what they are saying now and will remember that the next time it comes to cast vote. It would be a clean sweep of the bozos if everyone took notice and voted on this issue alone.

I mean, who's going to vote for a guy that sez, "I think we should spy on our own people and we should do in in secret because we know what's good for you and you shouldn't have knowledge of what we are doing for you". Nobody, right? I'm living in my own private Idaho.

The only people I can imagine taking that approach would be someone who thinks, "I don't really understand what is going on and these people have been elected so they must be smart and I'm going to trust them to do what's right for me because they have been elected by the people". Ok. I understand that position. When I'm faced with difficult material that is above my level of intelligence, I look to people I respect and what to know their opinion on the subject because I trust and respect them and I've decided I can't figure it out for myself. I think that's a reasonable thing to do at times.

But consider this: Is it the actual data collection or is it the secrecy about the data collection? There's the data collection itself, that's one thing, and then there's the secrecy about the data collection. That's a whole other thing. So there's more than one issue here. I personally don't like either but it's the secrecy that I really have a problem with.

When the leaks came out there were politicians that were quick to point out: "It's all legal! It's all legal! It's all been approved by congress. Nothing illegal here.". Well, just because it's legal doesn't make it right. I don't care if it's legal or not. They are making decisions for me and not telling me about the laws they are creating to legalize spying. This all started under Chaney's gang and probably wasn't all legal at the time but now apparently Obama has 1: continued it, 2: expanded it and 3: made it legal. So I don't like any of them. They are all filthy garbage in my eyes.

I've always had an aversion to being kept in the dark. I want to know what is going on and why. My government believes I don't have the right to know what is going on. My government believes it knows better than I what is good for me. What is government?

Government is made up of two things: inertia and people. Inertia is what the founding fathers intended and everything that's happened since then. The inertia for the spying has deep roots in our government but most recently in the Patriot Act brought forth by Bush's regime right after 9/11. Recently there has been some folks in the news saying something like, "I wish I hadn't been so unquestioning about the Patriot Act when I supported it". Yep. This is what happens when you give the government permission to do things in secret. One secret leads to another. And another. And eventually there are so many secrets that congress ( if they have been let in on this particular secret ) must constantly ask themselves, "remind me again what the people know what they don't know". Is that anyway to run a government?

Oh yeah. Want to make me mad? Do something related to me and then tell me, "it's not in your best interest for you to know about this, so we are not going to tell you."

Let's talk about data and metadata for a moment. For telephone calls the explanations are simple: data is the content of the call, the voices, and the metadata is the information about the call, not the conversation itself. For a single phone call, the metadata is very simple and very small. It contains 4 numbers: the calling phone number, the called phone number, the date/time of the call, and the duration of the call. That's it. 4 numbers per call. That's not a lot of data. The data of the call, the actual content, now that's a lot of data. I'll get to that in a moment. ( metadata size appendix?)

Companies like amazon, google and microsoft have huge warehouses stuffed to the gills with computers and hard drives. They are called server farms, and disk farms. This is the data of the web. This is content. This is a huge amount of data. The NSA is building a couple of huge data farms for themselves. These are projects that alarm Edward Snowden. And they should alarm you too. The NSA doesn't need these disk farms to hold metadata. The metadata just isn't that large. So what does the NSA need these server and disk farms for? Content.

The content of a phone call depends on the length of the call. And these files are quite big. Think about your MP3 audio files. They take up a lot of space. It's an audio recording, it takes a lot of numbers to represent sound. In fact, if you wanted to keep digital files of a lot of phone calls you would need way more than your computer. You would need a disk farm. Coincidence?

Edward Snowden told us about the phone calls being monitored. He also told us about Prism. This is actually the bigger of the two nuggets of information. Prism is government monitoring of the internet. At some level. At what level is not known. What is known is that the NSA has in place some method of getting the information flowing between known individuals on the internet. There's a of conjecture about what Prism is and isn't. One ominous chart has the names of all the big internet companies and the date they signed onto Prism. Whatever that means. Names like google, yahoo, microsoft and apple. All these companies adamantly denied allowing the NSA internal access to their data. All those denials were carefully worded. The government is spying on the internet. In what way remains to be seen. Edward Snowden has given us the tip of the iceberg. We should thank him.

Not yet revealed but hinted at a few times over the past 8 years is NSA's direct access to the main fiber optic wires of the internet.  The end points of the optic wires are controlled by the companies named above, the wires themselves are under control of the telecommunication companies. Companies like ATT, Verizon and Sprint. It is with these companies that the NSA has secret agreements and physical tie in points. There have been reports of rooms inside the fiber optics connection points where only NSA cleared personell are allowed. Now, why would that be? And wouldn't Prism be a fine name for a project that diverts light from fiber optic cable to the NSA? That's what a Prism does it; redirects light. Light is what the fiber optic cables use to carry their data.


Well, I need to wrap this up and ship it off. Couple of things first: 1. The way to stop terrorism is by changing our behavior overseas, not spying on everyone and trying to predict future events. 2. There needs to be way more transparency and way less secrecy in our government. 3.Edward Snowden gave two members of the press a 41 slide NSA power point presentation. Less than a half dozen of those slides have been made public. 

In the coming weeks and months, as you watch our government prosecute Edward and destroy his life, ask yourself if that's the kind of government you want representing you.

Whew. Enough. Don't get me started.

And when the NSA google for "Edward Snowden hero" I'll be on their list. No secret sauce
needed for that. And that's the way it should be.

They say the first million is the hardest.

While researching money laundering sites I came upon this banner ad:

433% after two hours. Wow. That's not bad. I wonder how long it would take make a million dollars given a small investment of, say, $1. Let's see.... multiply by 4.33, reinvest, carry the two divide by one hundred and there, that's it:

2 hours	$4.33
4 hours	$18.75
6 hours	$81.18
8 hours	$351.52
10 hours	$1522.09
12 hours	$6590.64
14 hours	$28537.46
16 hours	$123567.19
18 hours	$535045.93
20 hours	$2316748.89

Wow. 2.3 million dollars in 20 hours! I have a dollar to spend and 20 hours to spare, what could possibly go wrong? So I click the ad:

I guess they went out of business already. Sigh. I wish I had a better ending for you. Next time for sure.

Chimping out.

Chimping out.

My friend Rowan introduced me to this expression.

Scientists and engineers reach a point, usually in their late 20's where they fail to learn anything more above a certain complexity. The expression comes from chimpanzees, apparently they can learn up to a certain point and then they hit a wall and can't learn anymore. Scientists and engineers that aspire to greatness but will never reach it have chimped out.

To me, chimping out is not about not being able to learn anything new, it's about not being able learn anything new above a certain complexity. Try as I may, whenever I hit something that is more complex than my ability to understand complexity, I simply can't get past it. It's a very frustrating feeling. I'd like to understand this, I'd like to be able to move forward past this but I simply cannot. It's past my chimped out point.

I hit it in mathematics all the time. I chimp out when it gets above simple algebra, geometry and trigonometry. I can handle all of those in simple forms but when it starts to get complex, I chimp out. Sometimes I can put in an extra effort and make a little progress but the end result of that is always more complexity that I can't get beyond.

Everyone has some kind of hobby. Something they like to do that brings them pleasure. Some people do crossword puzzles. I write software. I enjoy it, it passes the time and gives me a sense of pleasure while I am doing it. A strange hobby, I know, but it's not really that much different than doing crossword puzzles. The trouble is it constantly reminds me of my chimp out point. Sometimes I finish writing a program. Other times I abandon it for simple lack of interest. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like I don't have any choice but to give it up and move on to something else because I've chimped out. Finishing a difficult crossword puzzle must give the author a great sense of accomplishment. Not being able to finish one brings frustration. Or am I missing the point?

Is the point of a hobby the process or the end result? Is the point to finish or to just pass the time away doing it? I seem to want both. Those happy people I see walking around, the ones that confound me, do they just toss their unfinished puzzle aside and move on to the next one? Is that why they are happy? Do they not care? Do they not base their self worth on being able to finish that puzzle?

Judging by the amount of free software on the internet, I'm not the only one who likes to write code just for the fun of it. People write code and post it on the web for all to see. There's a lot of effort in all that code. Some of it's pretty impressive. Some of it's horrendous. When I chimp out, I can go find some other piece of code that tried to do the same thing. Maybe I can learn from how they did it. Or maybe I just won't feel so bad about myself when I discover they couldn't do it either. I wonder if they knew it was wrong and didn't even know it was wrong. So now maybe I'll feel just a little better about myself at the expense of some poor sap who posted his code for all the world to see on the web. His chimp out point is lower than mine. He did this all wrong. Of course, I feel worse about myself for feeling better about myself for such childish reasons. But is it a net gain?

So I digress. And will continue to do so. Chimping out. Trigonometry. I get the basic functions and the unit circle and all that but when they get combined in strange complex formulas I get lost. I had a better understanding of this when I was in my early 20s. I suppose I could go take an online trigonometry class I relearn it all. But that would be a stranger hobby than the one I already have. 'What do you do for fun?' I take online math classes so I can write more complex programs.

Maybe I should collect stamps. I wonder if I'd chimp out while collecting stamps.

I know what I know, and I know that I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong about this; can you help me see this from an entirely different point view?

It's interesting how beliefs come and go. A long time ago everyone believed the earth was the center of the universe and then some smart guy comes along with another idea. Kepler or Copernicus, I always get those guys mixed up. Of course, everyone thinks this guy is crazy and full of shit but eventually, somehow, these new ideas get rolled into "what is known to be true". Evolution is the same way, there are two sides jumping up and down claiming their side to be true, pointing fingers at each claiming, 'those idiots are full of crap'. That one's not sorted out yet. There's still a lot of believers on either side. I have my belief, which I am afraid to state because I know I am ignorant about almost everything. But a story that has some girl getting knocked up without having sex makes my head hurt. WTF? Awhile back I was wondering whatever happened to Jesus's father. It struck me a funny. Some guy wandering around in the desert who got out of child support.

I guess these things take a long time to resolve. Some longer than others.

Look at racism. Not too long ago we had an inferior race running around, 'yeah those guys'll make good slaves for us' but that seems to be sorting itself out. Gays are the new blacks of course and a bunch of people are jumping up and down about that. These types of things seem to a take a few generations to weed out. My father was a staunch supporter when it came to equality for minorities. But gays? No way. Those people are sick. He's gone and with these generations the views fade away. Even whats-his-name, that cubby little idiot who so forcefully went after Clinton for getting hummers in the oval office was banging someone other than his wife while spouting off all these ideal family values. He recently said his side needed to reconsider the same sex marriage issue.

Here's a good one: the genetically modified food issue. I've read compelling arguments from both sides. I can't figure it out. I'm not smart enough to figure it out. And I suspect most of the people trying to convince me one way or the other aren't really that much smarter than me. They have their strongly held beliefs. Can they look at the other side anymore?

What started me thinking about all this, other than Jesus's dad roaming around in the desert, is this new Coke commercial. I don't have a tv or cable so I would have missed it except for some news articles on the web. Apparently Coke has a new ad campaign addressing obesity, what a great country we are and if we all pull together we can all be healthy. And of course Coca Cola is there for us to help us find our way. Of course we'd all be a lot more healthy if we didn't drink their products at all, but I doubt they mentioned that. Then it occurred to me: Coke is the new Marlboro. People have apparently figured out that this stuff is real bad for you and Coke sees it coming and starts an ad campaign to save their hide from the fate suffered by the tobacco companies. 50 years from now maybe we'll be looking back and thinking, 'jheez, can you believe we used to drink all that coke? What idiots we were' and coke will be highly taxed and come with all sorts of deadly warning labels on it.

Coke and cigarettes brings to mind an entirely different issue. Who's job is it to protect us from ourselves? Maybe health is just overrated right now. I guess that will all be sorted in time. Not in my lifetime. But these idiots, how can they think that? Or am I the idiot? The one thing I do know is that I will never know.