What Christmas would be complete without a special greeting from a special friend of the blog? Open thread.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
After Action Report
I’ll leave it to the military historians to write the authoritative version, since, like most combatants, I’m far too close to the events that have just transpired. Even so, though the fog of war has barely cleared, it’s pretty clear that the War on Christmas has been won by a lily white, WASPish St Nick and his sidekick, Anglo-Saxon Jesus.
Festivus poles aside, as far as I could tell, this Christmas transpired like any other. During my one shopping trip to the mall, the department store workers I encountered assured me that they would be on their feet for long hours, as stores kept their minimum wage employees working from dawn ’til dusk, and well into the night, to be sure that any consumer who wanted to consume could do so at any hour of the day, on any day of the week. Though I neglected to save photographic evidence, I can assure you that the line for Santa at the mall was as long (and for the parents, as miserable) as ever, even on the early Sunday morning I chose to sneak in to shop.
Just like every other year, I was still burping up Thanksgiving turkey when I heard my first of thousands of Christmas carols blared from in-store Muzak systems. If the irrational urge to begin my Christmas shopping had overtaken me prior to consuming said turkey, I would have been able to sate that desire by a Thanksgiving Day trip to one of dozens of stores in my area that had Thanksgiving hours. Those stores that failed to resist the overwhelming force of Christmas and weren’t open on Thanksgiving still opened at zero dark thirty on Black Friday, they were still covered with the same tatty Christmas decorations that have graced our retail establishments for generations, and they were still selling the same cheap Chinese crap that is presently being ripped open by sleep-deprived children across this great land.
In short, it was the same damn thing, only more of it. The Jewish, Muslim and Hindu kids had to take Christmas off, not Hanukkah or Ramadan, and the only birthday being officially celebrated sure as hell isn’t Vishnu’s . Millions of dollars were again spent on liquor for work Christmas parties so Bill from Sales could feel up Patty from Accounting in the copy room. Black kids only saw a black Santa by special request.
We’re still putting the Caucasian and the Christ into our White Christmas, just like we always have, and only the delusional or hysterical think otherwise.
I Know Why He’s Laughing
I’m still on the mailing list for my ex-Congressman, Tom Reed (R-NY-23). When I received his latest, titled “My Plan to Stop Obamacare”, I was wondering what he had in mind. Here’s the complete text of the email:
Friend —
Over the past several months, I’ve witnessed the perils of Obamacare. From our neighbors in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier who are losing their coverage to the destructive regulations being jammed down Americans throats by Washington. We need to stop the Obamacare rollout before its too late!
By constantly fighting Obamacare we are sending a message to the liberal, big government, extremist agenda in Washington that it is wrong for New York, and wrong for the rest of the country.
We are approaching an important fundraising deadline and I need your grassroots support in ensuring a strong showing.
Join our team and help send the message that Obamacare is a bad prescription for America!
Thank you,
Tom
Apparently, Tom’s plan for repealing Obamacare begins and ends with giving him money, but that’s no surprise. “Obamacare must be repealed” is the Carthago delenda est of the Tea Party. It doesn’t matter if you have a plan–you need only utter the words.
Vindicated!
Slate does the world a public service by publishing a “long read” about the Welfare Queen St Ronaldus Magnus made famous. As the serious conservative intellectual journal Powerline notes, if I may summarize, “nyaah nyaah nyaah libtards”. Therefore, no welfare for anyone. QED.
(Thanks to reader J for sending this in.)
Target’s Big Problem
This Target data breach is exposing some of the laziness, laxity and lies of our credit card oligopoly.
First, as Kevin Drum points out, if we had Chip and PIN in the US, Target and banks would be in much less trouble, because you need a smartcard chip and the user’s PIN to complete a transaction using the standard most other first world countries use.
Second: I have a Target Red Card, their store card, and I used it a couple of times during the breach period. Now that Target has enough call capacity to actually answer the Red Card fraud line, rather than having it just give a fast busy signal, the first thing they are eager to point out is what the credit card industry would rather obfuscate: “You have zero liability for any charges you didn’t make.” Over the past decade there have been lots of scary commercials from businesses trying to sell identity theft protection. Some of those products are from banks that issue credit cards. People watching those commercials might think that they’re in trouble if their credit card is stolen and it is used by the thief. Though they’re probably in for a big hassle, in the end the bank and card companies are liable for the transaction. That’s part of the deal with interchange, the 2-3% that banks and card companies charge retailers for every credit card transaction.
Of course, banks are now limiting transactions on accounts used at Target to cap their liability, which is another huge hassle, but I’d cut up that card and use a different one if my bank did that. They make billions of dollars of easy profits from interchange and interest on credit cards, so fuck ’em if they can’t secure the product that they’re jamming down our throats.
Bitcoin Shits the Bed
Bitcoin, the glibertarian dream currency, lost half its value because China shut down the Bitcoin exchange that trades 1/3 of the world’s Bitcoin. Cry a small tear for BtC hoarding douchebags like the Winkelvi, who seem to have a talent for being screwed out of their investments.
The last time I characterized Bitcoin as glibertarian, I got a lot of angry pushback in the comments. Here’s a little explanation why Bitcoin is, indeed, that:
For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created (‘mined’, in the jargon: new bitcoins are created by carrying out mathematical operations which become progressively harder as the bitcoin space is explored—like calculating ever-larger prime numbers, they get further apart). This means the the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, so that the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market. Less money chasing stuff; less cash for everybody to spend (as the supply of stuff out-grows the supply of money). Hint: Deflation and Inflation are two very different things; in particular, deflation is not the opposite of inflation (although you can’t have both deflation and inflation simultaneously—you get one disease or the other).
Bitcoin is designed to be verifiable (forgery-resistant) but pretty much untraceable, and very easy to hide. Easier than a bunch of gold coins, anyway. And easier to ship to the opposite side of the planet at the push of a button.
Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn’t look like a “Fiat currency”. You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. Nation-states don’t control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks.
Another One Down
The security company RSA was given $10 million by the NSA to weaken one of their security products:
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.
Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.
If you work in a corporation, you may have used a RSA product like SecurID to access your corporate network. After revelations like this, any RSA product is automatically suspect. I assume most corporate security people, who are incredibly risk-averse and ass-covering, will never recommend a RSA product again. That’s certainly true for any international customer thinking about buying from RSA.
You can blame the NSA, you can blame RSA, or you can blame Snowden for leaking this, but this kind of thing was going to come out at some time. It was incredibly shortsighted for RSA to risk their company–and, really, the reputation of any US security company–for $10 million of quick revenue.
But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because RSA is just another casualty of the out-of-control stupidity of the War on Terror. I had the unfortunate need to take a business trip this week, and while standing in the endless TSA line with crying children and miserable holiday travelers, I had yet another opportunity to reflect on how smart Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 strategy was. He knew that we were easily scared and prone to overreaction. He knew we’d pour millions of dollars into pointless security theater, and that a lot of our veneration of constitutional liberty was just lip service. So when I got my pat-down because the Rapiscanner decided that something under my armpits (powerful BO?) was suspicious, or when I watched people carefully separate out little baggies full of liquids and gels to counter a comic book threat, I had to once again appreciate the genius of that malignant fucker, because he’s still winning the long game.