Common Sense Wednesday: You Down With CSC/DoD? You Know, Conspiracy!

I watch enough documentaries and political/government dramas (hello Scandal! hello Homeland!) to make me a nut job when it comes to trusting the government, but hear me out.

A few weeks ago the NBC Nightly News (whadup, Bryan Q. Williams!) featured a story about how the Department of Defense fleeced American taxpayers by conducting a runaway $1 billion dollar technology project that produced zero results or usable product (or some results if you count "lessons learned").

Today I was Googling to find this article and reference it for work. I looked on several news sources, including NBC, and even calling the Mr. to have him look it up got me nothing.

The story was nearly nowhere. It had either been taken down by NBC because, at two weeks old, it's now old news OR... the main contractor on the project, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), put some lawyer muscle into this and asked that the tracks be wiped OR...

Conspiracy!

How else would the story have been wiped from all other news sources too?

I'm not sure what the truth is, but I know that if you somehow read of me being locked up for insanity or killed in a freak accident, know that I was right!

Who am I kidding. You won't read about it. They control the papers!

Well, you might read about me in the IEEE Spectrum because that's where I was able to find the real story about CSC and the DoD.

Source: retrocampaigns.tumblr.com via Retro Campaigns on Pinterest

When I searched for "Bryan Williams" on Pinterest, I got this image. I was immediately sold on it's incongruity and turn-of-the-century sex appeal - HA!

More Babble for Your Ears

Words below are not my own. I just like them. 

Question: Are you pro second amendment or do you support this new legislation?

Answer: I don’t accept this premise. I am both.

I’m pro compromise, common purpose, safety, reason.

Americans have been asked to give up many rights far more fundamental than the extremity of our personal arsenals in the name of safety. We allow ourselves to get patted down and disrobed in public, stopped and frisked while walking. Our calls and communications have been monitored without warrants. So prevalent is the degradation of our privacy, so entrenched the idea that “9/11 is why we can’t have nice things” that we are now in a tech environment that uses our personal information as a commodity and most of us don’t notice or mind. That’s the price you pay to play. You want in, you have to expose yourself. That’s what we have been asked to accept, the freedom we have been asked to give up.

We have also been asked to give our money and our friends (and for some of us, ourselves) to foreign conflict in the name of our public safety, notwithstanding the specious nature of much of our involvement.

Some of this has helped, some of this hasn’t, but it’s what’s been asked of all of us to protect the lives of those around us. And the process has contributed to the stagnation of both the American Dream of individual liberty and the American Dream of social mobility. The only group who has not had to sacrifice one modicum of their dream? Those who wish to use guns for recreation, sport and protection. Lost in the nebulous conjecture of potential threat is the stark reality that less innocent people would die with reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. And yet, the NRA has chosen to lash themselves to a (relatively modern) position of never giving an inch, that any regulation is the enemy (sound familiar?) and we all pay for it every time there is an episode of extreme violence like so many recent instances I need not cite.

People should be able to own guns, should be able to protect themselves but should be able to give up a bit on the margins to save lives. We give up a lot more for a lot worse reasons every day.

via I love Charts by the chartmaster himself. 

Flip It Friday: C is for Cookie... or Congress

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Learn more about Sesame Workshop’s early childhood initiatives in the United States

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