HoodaThunk?

Rick Santorum has officially withdrawn from the GOP nomination race:

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Tuesday he is suspending his campaign.

He made the announcement at the Gettysburg Hotel in Gettysburg, Pa., talking about his young daughter’s illness and reflecting on the campaign.

I can attest to the fact that concern for the health of your child will make you re-assess your priorities and I certainly don’t begrudge Santorum the desire to focus his efforts. My best wishes and prayers go to the Santorum family and to his daughter for her recovery.

Rick Santorum was also the only serious contender in the GOP nomination race against front-runner Mitt Romney. Gingrich, frankly, has too much baggage and he’s, just as frankly, far too enamored of the inside-the-Beltway method of doing things. Ron Paul may have some interesting positions, even stances on the issues that I agree with 100%. But his continuous attitude that we can somehow turn back the clock and become an isolationist nation just smacks of someone willing to stick his head in the sand and think that the world will just stop or go away. Our economy, our defense…. everything… is connected to the world at large. There are places where we’re far, far too enmeshed in things and there are actions we take that we’d be better off avoiding, yes. But to take up his general viewpoint that we should basically avoid any “entanglements” with any foreign power is just not a quality I can abide in the President of the United States.

Nomination races are characteristically bruising and this one’s been no exception. It’s gone on long enough and we need to start putting the spotlight on the real problem and that’s the man currently in the White House. He needs to go and we need to start explaining to our fellow citizens the myriad of reasons why he needs to go.

Rick Santorum fought a good fight and he did so with a minimum of mudslinging. He held onto his own values and stayed pretty steadfast to his positions on the issues. Those are good qualities in someone wanting to undertake public service. My thanks to him and to his family for being willing to step up to that service; I wish them well.

Now… let’s get down to business.

It’s impossible to have paid any attention to the news over the past couple of weeks and not know about the Zimmerman/Martin case. I wrote about it myself back on March 26th, with specific reference to how the news media and many of the usual leftist groups were leaping to unsupported conclusions and, frankly, asserting things that weren’t facts in evidence. At the time, I didn’t know just how right I was that that’s what they were doing. I also didn’t know some of them were outright manufacturing things.

NBC is one of the most egregious offenders, deliberately editing the audio of the 911 call Zimmerman made reporting the presence of a suspicious person in the neighborhood. They cropped out entire questions asked of Zimmerman by the dispatcher so as to make Zimmerman appear to be offering up a judgement that Martin was suspicious solely because he was black. Having been caught in the attempt, NBC supposedly did an investigation and found that some production person “made a mistake” and edited the audio. I didn’t buy it then and I sure don’t buy it now, now that NBC is engaged in an all-out effort to quietly remove all evidence of their attempted frame-up:

NBC is busy taking down the evidence of its repeated usage of its bogus edit of the George Zimmerman 911 call. This follows the firing of a producer for the use of the same bad edit on the March 27 Today Show. Left unanswered – what about the March 22 use on the Today Show? [LATE ADD: a third usage of "He looks black" has been found and edited out of existence (but not Google Cache!) at NBC 6 Miami, as described below.  When will the Elite Media sniff a cover-up?]

NBC must have a very low opinion of the intelligence of their consumers to be trying to pull this kind of crap in this day and age. They aren’t the gatekeepers to information any more and what they’re doing is being done in the full light of day, their blindness to that fact notwithstanding. Their product – the “news” they broadcast – cannot be trusted to be in any way accurate. They are no longer a news agency, they’re a propaganda arm of the left. It’s a shame they’ve come to this, but it was their decision.

Mike Wallace, the famed CBS reporter, has died at a care facility in New Haven, CT. He was 93.

CBS newsman Mike Wallace, the dogged, merciless reporter and interviewer who took on politicians, celebrities and other public figures in a 60-year career highlighted by the on-air confrontations that helped make “60 Minutes” the most successful primetime television news program ever, has died. He was 93.

Wallace died Saturday night, CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said. On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer said Wallace died at a care facility in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had lived in recent years.

Wallace is most famous for his long-running career on “60 Minutes,” a show he helped bring from a news oddity to one of the most recognizable names in the industry. His son, Chris Wallace, is a Fox News contributor and host of “Fox News Sunday.”

Regardless of your take on whether Wallace was a good influence or bad, there’s no argument that his career was one of the most influential in television news. His style of interrogative interviewing lives on in countless reporters around the country and, no doubt, around the world. My condolences to his family and friends; my prayers for his eternal rest in Heaven.

“Then, as they were afraid and bowed their faces to the earth, they said to them, ‘Why do you see the living among the dead?’”

Happy Easter, my friends.

There are messages that are crucial for a free people to hear and to adhere to. This is one of those.

One of the stories of the week was the unveiling by Google of their “Project Glass,” a bit of tech that’s designed to bring wearable displays and information access to the masses without looking like we’re all wearing the 15-pound getups from the 1980′s Photon game. The reviews on the success of Google’s efforts to be fashionable are definitely mixed – especially after the sighting of a set on the face of Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin a couple of nights ago – and so are the assessments of what the technology would mean to us all.

Google’s glasses are designed to allow you access to information in a manner intended to be both intuitive and less distracting than having to pull out a palm device and typing on a keypad. One of the more useful applications of this device is as a navigation aid, exactly like your in-car GPS offers today. The difference being, of course, that this one walks along with you as you leave the car. Walking around in DC I could certainly see the utility of that. Another idea is the concept of being able to pull up information about what you’re looking at at the moment. Again, using my DC example, you could look at a building and get a list of the businesses there.

Information retrieval regarding your currently-viewed target brings up the notion of being able to access profiles for people you meet as well. Example: you walk into a meeting and go to shake hands with someone you’ve met only once or twice – and have forgotten the name of – and see their name pop up in your view. Having been in sales for several years I can tell you there’s been plenty of occasions where such an application would have been useful. Of course, you’d really want to turn that off before you left the building and got pummelled by an endless stream of names popping up as you pass the hundreds of other pedestrians on the sidewalk with you.

I have no idea what the technican limitations of Project Glass are, as of yet, but there are a few questions I have already. The pictures you see in the press releases are showing this sleek glasses-frame device. Is the battery self-contained? How long will it last? How is it accessing information – WiFi or cell service? What’s the speed? What’s the interface for configuring the device to use whatever access service is available? And how, how, how is it secured? Can you imagine the information bonanza this tech would represent is it became widely adopted? If it were compromised then whoever it was that managed to hack in to your device would see and hear everything you do. Your ATM PIN as you withdraw cash, your credit card numbers as you open your wallet, the sales forecasts for your firm as you prepare that report for your boss, the location of your spare key in the garage for those times you accidentally locked yourself out – it would be like you’re giving a guided tour of your life to someone. That’s a lot worse than someone hacking your Facebook account, that’s for sure.

Another aspect of this is the personal/social angle. By having this information readily retrieved from online – the names of people popping up as you see them, for example – we’re effectively moving our memory “to the cloud.” We already have an example of that effect with us today. Think about the people you call and talk to on a regular basis on your phone. I would wager that the phone numbers for a majority of them are stored as speed dials and are accessed by a push of a button or, as in a cell phone, by your saying their name to initiate a dial. How many of those people could you dial up and call if you had to actually input their phone numbers on the keypad? I mean, without looking their numbers up? We have already pushed that memory requirement out to the devices we carry. What happens when we can access all that information about people and places via the Glasses rather than having to commit it to memory ourselves? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing or a good thing, yet, I’m just saying it’s something we should be considering.

I noted with some amusement this story at the Loudoun Times-Mirror announcing that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has declared Loudoun County Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio’s group Public Advocate of the United States is a “hate group.” And what’s that mean?

SPLC listed Public Advocate as an “active hate group” in 2011 based on research compiled through hate group publications and websites, citizen and law enforcement reports, field sources and news reports.

According to the SPLC, an internationally recognized civil rights non-profit, “all hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

By that definition, SPLC is as big a hate group as they come. Or they would be if they hadn’t already demostrated themselves so basically silly as to make it a real effort to even consider their screeching seriously. I mean when your last big thing was to announce that you were labeling pick-up artists as a hate group, it’s pretty much a given that you’re just a bunch of frothing lunatics.

Delgaudio’s organization makes themselves perfectly clear that they don’t approve of the homosexual lifestyle and paticularly the efforts by gay advocacy groups to promote their agenda in our public schools. SPLC is no different regarding socially conservative groups. Public Advocate disagrees with gay advocacy groups, but in the eyes of the left these days any disagreement means you’re a hater. It’s ad hominem fallacious arguments and logic, pure and simple – and wrong. I might not feel Public Advocate’s mission as a priority myself, and might even disagree with them on one issue or another, but that disagreement doesn’t rise to the level of “hate”. SPLC is simply showing they have no ability to actually respond to arguments of Public Advocate so they resort to puffed-up outrage and name calling.

I’m sure Public Advocate will wear SPLC’s little label as a badge of honor. Perhaps someday SPLC will actually recover their relevance.

I’ve been listening to reports here and there about a new trend among some employers where they are making, quite frankly, outrageous demands that job applicants give over their passwords to Facebook and e-mail accounts so the prospective employer can check out what you’re saying and who you’re friending. I’m here to weigh on on the matter with a hearty “Hell, no!”

In spite of attempts to the contrary, you’re not an indentured servant to your employer. While they have the right to set certain behavioral limits on you while on the job they do not own you and cannot impose such mandates on you in your private life. And both what you say and who you friend on Facebook is most certainly your private life. Speaking as a professional in the IT world, I’d also point out that many, many services and web sites are using Facebook as an authenticator service, meaning that they authorize access to their services based on whether you can log into your Facebook account or not. Giving that password over to someone else permits them to access those services as if they’re you, whether you ever accessed them or not.

I would also take pains to point out to any such employer making that demand of me that I wouldn’t give someone else my user ID and password on their system if I were employed at the company, either, and that’s an attitude they should be happy with, not trying to break down.

If an employer is starting off their relationship with you like this, it’s going to get worse and not better, I assure you. My suggestion: tell ‘em thanks but no thanks and move on with your job search so you can find an ethical firm to work for.

(FYI, it appears that the issue has gotten enough people angry enough that there are laws being proposed that would make such requests illegal.)

An interesting note on Instapundit sent me to this story regarding the shoot-down of a private surveillance drone.

A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday near Ehrhardt, S.C.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”

I take note that Mr. Hindi is quite clear in his implication that his activity is completely legal and, therefore, he should not be hassled in his pursuit of said activity. It would be nice for him to take note that the activity in the Broxton Bridge Plantation was just as legal.

I have a number of issues with what went on, here, most of them with Hindi’s group, but I’d like to make a comment on the actions of those shooters that decided to engage the drone in flight. While I understand completely the urge to shoot the thing down, I must give credit to Mr. Hindi’s concern about the line of fire. Those shooters are responsible for where their bullets land when they shoot them, up into the air or anywhere else. The event they were attending was no doubt located there specifically to provide sufficient backstop to the bullets fired so as to keep them safely contained. By engaging the drone, they might very easily have overcome that barrier and some of their rounds might have flown into populated areas unsafely. Not cool, folks.

However, that shooting was severly provoked. While flying that drone may have been perfectly legal – and I would emphasize may have been – it is morally questionable to say the least. I would ask Mr. Hindi and his team to picture themselves at their home where their spouses and children are enjoying a lovely, sunny day relaxing in the sun. In order to provide the family with a comfortable place to enjoy the outdoors the team members all built privacy fences around their yards or patios. Some next door neighbor who happens to sit opposite of them on some issue or another decides to collect video of the family in hopes they’ll do something they’d be uncomfortable having splashed all over YouTube and erects a 35-foot-post in his own yard with a camera mounted atop it so the family can be viewed. Would Mr. Hindi and his team be ok with that?

Or are they presuming they have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

I’m guessing they would not be ok with the ongoing taping of their family on their own property, especially when they went to the trouble of putting privacy safeguards in place, albeit safeguards that proved to be ineffective. So, sure, what “SHARK” did may have been legal. But I would propose that it shouldn’t be.

Either way, a nation’s airspace is all of that above the ground that nations owns or controls. Should private citizens also be able to protect their airspace from unwanted trespass?

To the members of the plantation or anyone else suddenly facing this kind of invasion of privacy, I would recommend a solution that’s far less problematic than firing 9mm rounds into the air. I don’t know what model of drone the SHARK people were using but it appears to me a helicopter-type arrangement and it appears to cost several hundred dollars. May I propose that those targeted by SHARK equip themselves with an Air Hogs R/C Eagle Ray Redeco instead and, rather than fire ballistics, pilot a missile instead? At $30 a pop, you’ll win the economic battle with these people pretty quick.