ConservativeINC

When I was on Drudge earlier today I saw this story about how Google’s Street View had gotten really up close and personal with a family’s house. According to The Smoking Gun one family has already sued Google because the Street View thing offered too much detail of their house and Google took down the offending images.

But what about up close views of the Sears Tower? How about the Empire State Building? Or the Capital building in DC? Is it OK to have images of every detail of every building in America? To tell you the truth, I really don’t know if it is a good thing but I think it is worse to prevent companies from taking pictures of public buildings than it is to stop them.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Internet allows for a much freer flow of information and this information has been used for evil. Pedophiles have become more effective due to the Internet, hackers have stolen billions of dollars, and terrorists have a de facto spy agency thanks to the Internet. If al Qaeda or some other organization (and there are hundreds if not thousands of these groups) wants to pull of a huge attack on an American landmark the first place they should go is the same place every college student goes when they start a report - the Internet.

Do you think I’m being ridiculous? It took me about five minutes to find a 3D rendering of the Empire State Building along with satellite and Street View shots of the building. Of course I’m not a guerrilla warrior so I don’t know how to fully exploit this information but it wouldn’t be hard to figure out.

Just consider the fact that America’s Special Ops warriors have gone into missions with less intel than terrorists can get with Google. In just a couple of clicks our enemies have more intel at their disposal than we have about them.

Even though it is manifestly true that our open society makes us an easier target for our enemies I don’t think, as it stands right now, we should do anything to change that. Please don’t misunderstand this to mean I’m against spying on our enemies or taking the fight to our enemies. In fact I think we should be leveraging our open society and our vast resources to be attacking them more, uh, forcefully. But that’s for another time.

America should not, under most circumstances, limit services like Google Earth. Doing so would not solve any problems and would only serve as a distraction to fighting the War on Terror. If some terrorist cell wants to attack the Empire State Building or some other landmark they have a number of different methods for gathering information. Are we to prevent all information about public places? It’s just not possible.

So what the heck should we do? We know that fascism doesn’t work all that well and it destroys a nation’s economy. So that’s out the window. We could become a communist nation but there really isn’t a difference between communism and fascism (sorry, there isn’t).

The best course of action would be to press our advantage. Get Google’s Street View team in Baghdad. Well, OK, I doubt you’ll get Google’s people to pass up that 4 star dinning they get at Google’s campus but you can get that same equipment into Iraq and Afghanistan. Have predator drones patrolling Iraq and Afghanistan all the time. Set up CCTV cameras on every corner. If it’s OK for Americans to be monitored at such a high rate why not monitor the people in the countries we’re in?

The only thing I know for sure is that once a nation starts playing defense they lose. The only way to deal with our enemies is to defeat them. This means a lot of things but it should never mean preventing a private company from publishing public information. Even if that public information does make it easier for a terrorist attack to be successful. BigT

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Yeah, that’s just what we need. Rice, who is the leader of one of the most ineffectual organizations in America, was at one point universally loved and adored on the right. But then she started to mellow out and drifted towards the left. I don’t know if that change was brought about by her helmsmanship of what is basically the Department of Peace or if it was just something that happens to many with convictions who go to DC. Whatever the reason for her slipping towards the left she has slipped.

Here’s some of the information from ABC News’ Political Radar Blog:

ABCNews’ Mary Bruce Reports: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is actively courting the vice presidential nomination, Republican strategist Dan Senor said.

“Condi Rice has been actively, actually in recent weeks, campaigning for this,” Senor said this morning on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

According to Senor, Rice has been cozying up to the Republican elite.

There are a couple of reasons why she will not be the VP nominee.

One: like I was saying before, she’s not a conservative.

Two: She doesn’t have experience dealing with the economy - a weak spot for McCain.

Three: I seriously doubt her being black and female will help McCain get more votes. She’s seen as one of the standard bearers (by the left) of the George W. Bush legacy and the left has succeeded in painting that legacy as hateful of blacks (Katrina being the foremost example).

At one point I would have been happy if she were our presidential nominee. However, times change and so do people. McCain needs to pick someone with unimpeachable conservative credentials. Preferably a young governor. He can’t pick someone who is a bureaucrat, no matter how successful they have been. BigT

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Sometimes I seriously question whether listening to music, watching sitcoms, or many other forms of entertainment are worth it. Our robust appetite for “culture,” if you can call modern day entertainment that, fuels nearly every entertainer’s oversized ego and has spawned a symbiotic industry of entertainment “news” that strokes those oversized egos. After watching one of those top 100 Bestest Everest music video shows I have to say that my patience with these “artists” is wearing thin.

I like listening to country music. Yeah, I know, it’s not really “country” anymore, it’s more like Southern pop, but I still think the product coming from Nashville is far superior to anything coming out of any other genre of music. Even though I enjoy country music I don’t know how much longer I can even listen to it because I happened to watch one of those lovefests masked as a special on the best country music videos ever.

It hit me like a sledgehammer how self-obsessed these men and women are. They truly think they are special people. Not only that, they really think that what they are doing makes a substantial difference in their fan’s lives. In essence, they believe they are gods.

Not even their collective belief in their own special brand of divinity would break the deal for me. These “artists” are talented and they produce a product that I enjoy. But then they have to take it a step beyond the self-aggrandizement and self-idolization and portray themselves as Christlike, enduring horrendous trials and tribulations at every turn.

Let’s take one of the top fifty or so songs, according to CMT, which is that song the Dixie Chicks did where they are saying they “don’t want to make nice” and they are being bathed in black ink and blah, blah, blah. This, if you didn’t already know, was their musical salvo against the “red state” Toby Keith (he is a democrat, by the way) and his crowd. The Dixie Chicks had said that they hate President Bush, that the war was wrong, you know, basic boiler plate stuff from the left.

I forget the specific details about the fracas because, well, I just don’t care about artist’s personal lives. When this protest video came up on the Top Bestest Everest countdown you had some industry people say that this was extremely brave of them. They went on to tell how the Dixie Chicks had to suffer so much just because they said some words - that some people even sent them death threats.

Wow, death threats, really? My God.

I apologize for treating this so lightly but let’s get real, managers in corporate America get death threats. You know, those normal people who aren’t “special” like the worshiped Dixie Chicks. Heck, they don’t even have to be managers or in the C-suite they can be even more normal than that. Threats like the ones the Dixie Chicks and other people in the public eye get are usually not worth more than the paper they are written on. If they had gotten shot up like 50 Cent I would accept the notion that they suffered. But the only shots they got fired at them were boos from the crowd.

And then this CMT special delved deeper into the psychosis of the entertainment industry. They had people on saying that the Johnny Cash music video that features a different mega star (think Jay Z, Chris Rock, Kristofferson, the Dixie chicks, and others like them) every couple of seconds or so was great because it showed that they really cared about poor people. Really? Appearing on a posthumous Johnny Cash video means you are a good person? Or even that you care?

Wouldn’t it have made more sense having a montage of, oh, I don’t know, the downtrodden? I know it’s cool having a bunch of mega-stars on a Johnny Cash video but, speaking from the point of view of a Johnny Cash fan, wasn’t he about more than that? I think he was.

I am within a gnat’s ass of getting totally fed up with all these self-obsessed jerks. Most of them aren’t even that good. I don’t care about how you summoned that extraordinary amount of strength needed to get out of your 700 thread-count sheets to film another episode of whatever it is that you star in. What you do doesn’t feed the hungry, it doesn’t house the homeless, it rarely even lifts the spirits of your fans.

During the writer’s strike the last couple of months I could barely notice a difference on my television set. What they do just isn’t that important. Reruns of Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond are far superior to nearly every new show.

And music isn’t any better. Why do they think people digitally steal their music? It’s because it just isn’t worth much money. Their music, their story, their soul, their whatever just isn’t really all that valuable to most of us.

Let’s face it, “new” country songs are just variations on old country songs about killing your boyfriend or drinking with your hunting dog on a tailgate. They’re not revealing any hidden truths and they’re definitely not gods.

For the love of the real and only God, have some humility. Don’t describe your life like you are a Medal of Honor winner. There is nothing brave about making millions of dollars for singing marginally entertaining songs.

Please don’t mistake this piece for a screed against modern modes of entertainment - it’s more a screed against modern day entertainers. I like some of the stuff that comes out these days on television and in the music industry but my problem is with the belief that those actors, singers, and everyone else who makes entertainment today are seen and see themselves as extraordinary individuals. All they are doing is pretending to be somebody else in the case of actors and in the case of singers all they are doing is singing the same old songs. That’s it, nothing more.

If you still don’t agree with me then by all means watch this video from an entertainment god; Jerry Seinfeld.

BigT

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