Starvin Larry

“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.” — Admiral Ben Moreell (1892 – 1978), chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks and of the Civil Engineer Corps

As the grandfather of three young ones, ages 5 to 9, I get to see my fair share of kid movies: plenty of hijinks, lots of bathroom humor, and an endless stream of slapstick gags. Yet even among the worst of the lot, there’s something to be learned, some message being conveyed, or some aspect of our reality being reflected in celluloid.

So it was that I found myself sitting through The Angry Birds Movie

“What are the defenders of free speech to do? The sad fact is that this fundamental freedom is on its heels across America. Politicians of both parties want to use the power of government to silence their foes. Some in the university community seek to drive it from their campuses. And an entire generation of Americans is being taught that free speech should be curtailed as soon as it makes someone else feel uncomfortable. On the current trajectory, our nation’s dynamic marketplace of ideas will soon be replaced by either disengaged intellectual silos or even a stagnant ideological conformity. Few things would be so disastrous for our nation and the well-being of our citizenry.”—William Ruger, “Free Speech Is Central to Our Dignity as Humans“

As a nation, we have a tendency to sentimentalize cultural icons in death in a way that renders them non-threatening, antiseptic and easily digested…

Seems like your average, everyday grocery getter, right?

Yeah, social engineering is fun, eh?

It houses open source SDR software and hardware not too different from “other” SIGINT programs .gov uses.

Interesting article and an interesting video from the developer– well worth your time. And while this exercise’s goal was to prove a couple points- being that cell phone SIGINT can be done relatively cheap when open sourced, and to prove that you are indeed being spied upon- the pointers given are not far out of reach, and can be done for far less than his $5000 price tag if one is more concerned with the simpler tactical communications realm of two way communications.

It can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it, but SDR is an amazingly powerful piece of kit and an incredible frontier, and the options are nearly limitless. There’s no…

Bad news: “It’s hard to put into scale the collapse of new business formation. We have no precedent for that rapid and steep of a collapse.”  So said John Lettieri, co-author of a report on new business formation and co-founder of EIG. From Michael J. Coren at qz.com:

We’re supposedly living in the age of startups when people can create new businesses, enrich themselves, and employ their fellow Americans. That narrative, like much economic optimism these days, is now mostly a tale for coastal cities, and a tenuous one at best.

Fewer new businesses were created in the last five years in the US than any period since at least 1980, according to a new analysis (pdf) by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan advocacy group founded by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker and others. Businesses that did form are also far more concentrated than ever before: just 20…