Links and Minifeatures 07 30 Sunday

UN rights body orders US to shut "secret" jails.



No word on well-known gulags worldwide. Or several dozen entire countries that imprison their entire population.

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Mexican Man who lied to get Border Patrol job sentenced



I ran a whole series on this guy last August



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Willisms has an excellent piece on pension reform



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What did you expect? Caracas threatens oil cut in case of US aggression



The fact is that thanks to forty years of ignoring alternative energy sources such as nuclear, political opposition to developing US petroleum sources, and just generally not having the guts to carry through with making a bad situation better, the US is stuck with the large oil producing nations. With the economies of China and India growing as they are, the oil producers no longer need the US as a customer. Their leverage on us: enormous and growing. Our leverage on them: still significant but decreasing.



Don't you think it's time we got off the ball and started doing something about this?



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The Al Gore of Mexico? Mexico left takes election protest back to streets



I know that the Mexican elections were not clean. All three parties routinely play games with the voting. What I do not see is any real evidence as to whether PRD cheated better than PAN. Did PAN take an election that PRD would have won, or did PRD make it look closer than it was? Nobody knows right now. But the election results is all they've got and there is zero evidence another election would return a better (as in cleaner) result.



Mexican elections are a joke. But they're the best thing they've got.



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Spot on! Rove says voters not stupid

Rove said work, family, friends and other interests consume much of voters' time and crowd out campaigns and policy.



"The American people are not policy wonks," he said. "But they have great instincts and they try to do the right thing."

Every so often, Mr. Rove comes out and says something like this that convinces me he is, if not a genius, at least more in touch with the heart of the US than any other political figure in a long time.



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ICANN to Cut U.S. Apron Strings?



I hope not. Private entities are too subject to demands from state actors like China and North Korea, and we could find ourselves subject to "politely requests" to alter or delete content lest we find ourselves stripped of our domain names (or even, potentially, access). Don't even get me started on the UN "solution." I would be willing to have a consortium of democratic countries with a free press, although most nations fall shorter than they would have us believe. But it appears to me, even leaving aside the question of who built the internet, that the United States has done an excellent job, far better than any other country would have a prayer of having done, in its stewardship of the internet. Actually, in my opinion, if the US were to cede stewardship to any other actor currently on the table as a serious proposal, we would end up creating a second internet within a very few years, in reaction to unacceptable changes said entities would put the internet through. That "Internet II" would quickly gain the lion's share of the internet market. Or we could just save ourselves the trouble by not ceding control of the internet in the first place.



Blackfive illustrates why the UN is the worst possible place to deposit custodianship of the internet.



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More identity theft woes: Sentry Insurance says customer data stolen They buried the lead, but if you read the article, over 112,000 people.



This is going to continue until we make it impossible. How? Not by making the penalties tougher. Not by making the data more secure. With appeals and the like, criminal or civil penalties are a joke. Nor is any amount of security is going to stop those in charge from turning, as happened here. But by requiring biometrics, and notifying the real owner immediately anytime someone tries to use their identity, even if it's them. The idea is to make certain it is them. By putting the information out there where anybody can tell that the person using the identity is not the rightful owner if only they will do their due diligence. Mind you, this is going to be scary, and our concepts of privacy are going to change radically, but it's the only way to make it really work. Otherwise, the situation is going to get worse and worse as the identity thieves get better and better, to the point where our global financial markets are going to collapse or come very close to it.



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Texas Rainmaker notes John Bolton smacking down John Kerry



Or, Knowledge of details beats denial of issue. Every time.



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HT to enrevanche for a link to an article in the

Economist telling us that welfare to work, far from being a right wing reactionary ideal, reduces not only the welfare rolls but poverty as well.



Perhaps if the left did not claim every idea that does not come from their end of the political spectrum was a "right wing extremist, out of the mainstream" idea that will cause a catastrophe, I might believe them more often.



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Via Below the Beltway, So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn't Even Know You, indicating how well we have it, or, to put it another way, capitalism extends lives, and makes them healthier.



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Mortgage Fraud Blog has an article on avoiding mortgage fraud through stopping appraisal fraud.



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Powerline notes more reports of Iraqi WMD being boved to Syria.



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a humorous Mideast Idol



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Asymmetric Information notes some troublesome news on the economic horizon.



The thing holding the economy and consumer confidence together right now is a large influx of foreign dollars buying US Treasury bonds because the return is decent and it's more secure than anything else in the world.



Folks, if the chinese (and others) stop buying dollars because they think the returns will be better (or more secure) elsewhere, and look for the thirty year fixed mortgage to go to nine percent at least. If they start transferring their money that's already here out, I have no idea how bad it'll get. And sooner or later, this will happen. What are we going to do when that happens, other than go through a severe economic contraction? The time to start planning is now, so that when it happens, we're ready to take ameliorating action.