. . . the spooks used to have to break into your home to plant bugging devices.

Now, you bring the bugging devices home as consumer appliances, and install then them yourself for the spooks.

This saves them a lot of effort. Cost effective.

I'm still suspicious on the whole matter. It sounded like that broad disclaimer up front was in preparation for some catastrophic news about a General Mills product. Like, "Cheerios causes Autism!" Or that Wu Tang Clan rapper . . . he wasn't doing any hard drugs . . . but he was eating a bowl of Cheerios, before he chopped off his dick!

General Mills has been slapped by a few damaging lawsuits in the last few years . . . because they were downright lying about the ingredients in their products. This disclaimer would have let them walk away from that.

With that legal wording, they could intentionally put ground glass in their breakfast cereals, without any responsibility to the law.

Yes, in a TV interview a Tea Party spokesman who identified himself as John Galt said it. Serious answer.

The Tea Party seems to have a lot of folks named "John". Other Tea Party rally folks said their names were:

John Whorfin
John Bigboote
John Ya Ya
John Small Berries
John Fledgling
John Milton
John Nephew
John Two Horns
John O'Connor
John Grim
John Many Jars
John Coyote
John Chief Crier
John Littlejohn
John Mud Head

Now if we could just push back the date of the Iowa Caucuses . . .

Obviously, the government is covering something up . . .

. . . maybe the guy dumped a oil drum full of pure LSD into the water, before pausing to take a leak. The authorities are not mentioning the LSD to avoid panicking the public. You don't want to panic the public, while they are tripping their balls off.

. . . or they spotted the Loch Ness Monster, and are draining the reservoir, to catch it in the shallows.

. . . or maybe the guy showed signs of being a zombie, and they need to wait to see if he morphs into one.

Ya gotta try to see through the headlines these days . . . the government is out to stuff you with disinformation . . . and they're always up to something not good . . .

If you're in Portland, I would suggest just drinking pure grain alcohol . . .

Grand Arts High School was formerly known as Ramon C. Cortines School for Visual and Performing Arts . . . apparently, lowly science is not a "Grand Art". It doesn't sound like the place you would send your kid to prepare to study Physics at Princeton or Electrical Engineering at MIT. I pity the poor teacher of science or math in a school full of kids from "pushy" parents, determined that their offspring is destined for stardom.

Kinda weird . . . normally we expect the anti-science crowd to come from the religious corner off the ring . . . and low and behold . . . they get upstaged by a "Grand Arts" school staffed by administrators confounded by the entire concept of what "science" is.

"Grand Farts High School", indeed . . .

Plus . . . I haven't seen a Snowden press release yet that the NSA has technology for snooping in pencils and paper. When they come knocking on your door, you can eat your notes. A USB stick will not digest.

Maybe there is some kind of edible rice based paper that would dissolve quickly in the stomach . . . ? In old spy movies, folks used to munch down secret notes all the time.

Imagine if a christian church ran a vast real estate and financial empire, built palaces with 15,000€ bathtubs for Bishops of Bling, and systemically obstructed justice in cases of sexual abuse of minors.

Oh, yeah . . . no need to imagine. They should be hit with RICO charges.

I can't see any difference between political action committees and churches. The NRA spends money supporting a pro-gun political platform. Churches spend money promoting their own religious beliefs in political platforms.

Like it or not, those Tea Party folks could probably register themselves as a religion. All those Ayn Rand Objectivism rants, like, "Altruism is evil" sounds like religious beliefs to me.

I think all folks should be free to practice whatever religion they choose, or not choose. However, when their religion is organized into something that walks, talks and acts like a business . . . they have no right to escape the taxman than any other folks.

My favorite are "Peoples' Republics", which obviously aren't. At least "Islamic Republics" are honest about what they are.

I'd like to super-size that with side orders of Tesla, Google Glasses and Global Warming . . .

"I'm driving my Tesla, which I bought with bitcoins, wearing Google Glasses, wielding a 3D printed gun, and polluting the atmosphere by using coal produced electricity . . ."

Can anyone beat that . . . ?

Gast = Guest, Arbeiter = Worker . . . so Gastarbeiter = Guest-worker. If you liked playing with Lego, you'll love German.

"Lieber Kinder statt Inder!" means, Rather children instead of Indians! Which meant that the government should pay more attention to social programs encouraging working women to have children, and investing more in tech training for German students . . . instead of importing (cheap) foreign talent.

Of course, the whole plan was a ruse by companies who wanted to drive down the wages of IT workers.

Gastarbeiter

Talk of creating an H-1B program in Germany a while back created a backlash phrase: "Leiber Kinder statt Inder!"

"Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"

A lot of stuff that I read on the Internet . . . looks like it has been posted by toasters an refrigerators.

The problem with tech these days, is that too many people are jumping in because they think it is a gold mine. All they need to do, is throw a bit of money and time at it, and they will be the next Gates, Bezos or, aptly named, Zuckerberg ("pile of sugar", in German). I think there will be some very excellent ideas in there with all the trash and gimmicks. But the ratio of crap to good will be about 1000:1.