Links Ahoy! Tuesday, January 31, 2012

1)  The trailer for "Game Change" looks pretty damn awesome. You betcha!


2)  Federal communications monitoring is nothing new. Remember how flipped out a lot of folks got when the Patriot Act came up back in the early aughts? ("Someone could have been listening to my Papa John's order! Bastards!")  Not making light of privacy or civil liberties, but there's already so much going on that getting narcissistic crazy about this is like fretting that someone in IT at work is reading every single employee IM or a gaggle of feds are listening to millions of cell phone rants that even we, Joe Public, can't stand to listen to. 

     There's a lot of us talking, writing, typing and commenting on what, to a discerning terrorism aggregator, would be the most banal minutiae ever. Recent reports of the FBI's bid to contractors in creating an app to monitor social media are already raising issues for debate. I'm in the bigger-fish-to-fry mode: How about a suggestion box? Mebbe a quickie scrape (wear gloves) of Yahoo!'s comment boards, a ghastly place I imagine smells like spilled beer, wasted dreams, beefaroni, topical ointment and Jim Crow's Sunday suit. Talk about terroristic threats - check out that hot mess sometime. That said, I loved this headline from Flesh Eating Zipper.