Has Sanity Returned?

As always, Fox Lies.

"Excluded" reporter: "For a short time it appeared that..."

There's nothing in their slant of events that factually contradicts FOX's slant of events and if you want to believe, in a week of administration attacks on, and essentially boycotting, that network, that this one incident was an innocent 'oops', characterized by the WH explaining there's nothing wrong with doing it intentionally, then you're perfectly free to wallow in your naiveté.

I've never seen an Administration and Congress so intent on demonizing any and everyone at the drop of a hat, from accusing doctors of wantonly lopping of people's feet for a few extra bucks, to town hall meeting participants, to the Chamber of Commerce and news organizations, to name but a few.

You, and your mindless 'lair' Tourettes Syndrome, fit right in.

Lie.

Most assuredly you are.

January 16, 2008 Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software Alexi Mostrous and David Brown

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker=92s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees=92 performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer=92s assessment of their physiological state.

Google. Who's looking at you? It wants to know everything about you. It wants to be your best friend =97 or your Big Brother. Are your secrets safe with Google?

Related Internet Links Snakes & Ladders blog: Watching bees with Bill BACKGROUND The office psychologist: surveillance Your every move is being watched Beware, the boss has an eye on you It's harder to hide what you're up to Codebreaking is alive and well Related Links How computer spy will monitor everything Even bosses need to look over their shoulder Film rental service puts MacWorld in a spin Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a =93unique monitoring system=94 that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read =93heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure=94, the application states.

The system could also =93automatically detect frustration or stress in the user=94 and =93offer and provide assistance accordingly=94. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker=92s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for =93taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level=94. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: =93This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.=94

Peter Skyte, a national officer for the union Unite, said: =93This system takes the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level with a new level of invasiveness but in a very old-fashioned way because it monitors what is going in rather than the results.=94 The Information Commissioner=92s Office said: =93Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances.=94

The US Patent Office confirmed last night that the application was published last month, 18 months after being filed. Patent lawyers said that it could be granted within a year.

Microsoft last night refused to comment on the application, but said: =93We have over 7,000 patents worldwide and we are proud of the quality of these patents and the innovations they represent. As a general practice, we do not typically comment on pending patent applications because claims made in the application may be modified through the approval process.=94

Jim, I thought you would especially appreciate this post in response. It is anonymous but apparently from somebody in the UK. -Greg

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Newsgroups: rec.sport.cricket, alt.privacy, alt.activism From: Anon Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:14:29 -0500 Subject: Re: Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software

You can probably count on conservative states outlawing this kind of employer practice. The rest of you in the north eastern liberal state and who work in government, get ready to be plugged in.

Judging from the surveillance bent in the UK, I guess this should come as no surprise.

It'll come here in the US as well but, as you opine, the right-wing states will start a rebellion... I actually look forward to a civil war where it becomes legal to shoot leftists on sight ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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Did the rightwing states start a rebellion over workplace drug testing? You do far more of that in the USA than we do here in the UK.

The rightwingers have no interest in civil rights. We'd still have slavery in the U.S. if they had their way.

Right Wing slavery: One individual owns one or more slave(s).

Left Wing slavery: The government owns everybody.

Thanks, Rich

Who the heck dreamt up that myth? It was the Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, who fought a war to end slavery.

After slavery was outlawed, Democrats from the south spent a century trying to maintain it through segregation & discrimination.

Then they found they could sabotage their opponents' families and education, condemning them to ignorance and poverty. And, paradoxically, assuring their vote.

Sheesh.

-- James Arthur

Somebody observed that the black family survived transport, slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, and the Great Depression, but it didn't survive The Great Society.

John

Then you should have no trouble naming some civil rights legislation introduced by the republican party in the last 25 years.

Where did you get the insane notion that the republican party hasn't changed in 140 years?

What drugs were on when your high school tried to teach modern history?

Exactly! Left Wing slavery: The government owns everybody!

Thanks for giving such a good example.

Cheers! Rich

Several have tried to get set-asides (A.K.A. reverse discrimination) abolished. It is one of the most insidious forms of racism. The Demonicrats love covert racism.

It's now the party of the little people. Go figure.

Are you really still in high school?

Kennedy argues _for_ business, that profits are good

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ng?

I'll preface by saying I'm a liberal, a classical liberal interested in humanity and a better world, not a neo-comm who merely dons the sheepskin and mouths the words for power. I don't call giving away other people's money compassion, I call it theft. And I can think, and I can add.

You said we'd still have slavery if the Republicans had their way. That's bass-ackwards: Republicans opposed it, and Democrats went to war to defend it. And they still do, after a fashion.

It's Democrats who build slums and need them, who fill them with their policies, and whose theories deny their inhabitants their way up and out.

You think the Republicans have changed? They have. They're left of the Democrats of yore(*), supporting all sorts of Democratic social priorities and spending nearly as profligately.

~~~~ aside ~~~~ (* Consider President Kennedy, the anti-Obama, who *invaded* the lands of despots, he did not cavort with them, and, in the recession of '62, successfully argued to lower taxes, and _not_ increase spending. Care to hear a real statesman, sans teleprompter?

That's what "Democrat" used to mean. He argues fiscal restraint and tax cuts, for an increase in profits to spur employment and growth, the antithesis of Obama's formula. He's inspiring. He's eloquent. He makes the current occupant of the White House look shabby and trite.

"In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.[1]" =96 John F. Kennedy, 12/14/1962

Today's new Democrats, meanwhile, have gone completely nuts. They're Marxists--and I say that clinically, not pejoratively--spreading the wealth, and more. But, spreading wealth destroys it. Like Zimbabwe. The current borrowing and spending will crush us. Not the next generation, but this one.

As far as civil rights, it seems absurd that a party that claims to favor civil rights, that thinks the Constitution guarantees a right to medical privacy so sacred that a woman has a right to an abortion lest that right be infringed, thinks nothing of mandating full access to our _complete_, most private, personal medical records, plus financial records, plus age, "race", sex, marital status, and so forth, with criminal penalties for resisting.

Again, on civil rights, we have a President who seizes private companies at will, disposes of their executives, sets their pay, and redistributes their assets to his supporters; who re-purposes TARP funds at will, and so forth, at complete odds with the Constitution and the very core of liberty itself, civil or otherwise.

It's Democrats who oppose the right of poor people to choose their own schools, and who condemn them to low-quality schools that the Democrats run.

All that said, I am not a Republican, and I don't defend them in toto. I just think it's an absurd, wrong, and backwards stereotype to call them racists and so forth--and it obscures the truth: Republicans aren't holding people back, nor is racism, by and large. Intended or not, the Democrats' Great Society is.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The Daily Telegraph had the good fortune to have been sent a compact disk listing mp's expenses, and they had enough sense to exploit their good fortune. The Guardian managed to have a conservative cabinet minister sent to prison for perjury, which took rather more hard work and persistence.

The American Institute of Physics disagrees with their environmental correspondent - he's a joke, even if he can mimic scientific style tolerably well. If his sister wasn't married to Dominic Lawson., former editor of the sunday Telegraph, it is difficult to believe that even the Daily Telegraph would have taken him seriously.

No, it was a factual statement about the Guardian's readership, which you don't seem to be equipped to process.

Hutton wasn't an armchair critic. He was just a journalist who maintained contact with a range of academic economists - the sort who found Christopher Monckton's advice to Margaret Thatcher to be laughably wrong-headed - and he cherry-picked the stories he was being told and published those that would run well in the Guardian. Gordon Brown listens to the same kind economists, so Will Hutton hasn't between able to outguess the current UK administration in the same kind of way. He should be able to do better if David Cameron gets in.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen