George Rebane

Former President Obama willfully violated Americans’ 4th Amendment rights for years by authorizing and executing large-scale surveillance on all electronic communications by our intelligence agencies (primarily NSA). He did this in the face of protests from the FISA court from which by law he is supposed to seek authorization before conducting such ‘wiretaps’. No matter how you look at it, that was a sustained criminal activity. From Zerohedge we learn that “These new discoveries come from a recently unsealed FISA court document dated April 26, 2017 and center around a hearing dated October 26, 2017, just days before the 2016 election, in which the FISA court apparently learned for the first time of "widespread" and illegal spying on American citizens by the NSA under the Obama administration.”

With the lamestream predictably silent on the matter, let’s see what recourse occurs under our corrupted justice system. (more here)

Algorithms rule. That long-known truth is finally recognized bigtime in the public media. RR readers have been apprised for years of the power and seminal role that algorithms play in sustaining modern civilization. The most recent revelations and information on algos is featured this week in the WSJ which is a running a week-long series on algos and AI in different sectors of industry and commerce (more here). The growing problem is still to find people clever enough to design the algos that can be implemented in fast computers connected to very large databases. We don’t do such a good job at turning out enough of them, and other countries are beginning to play catch up in their academia. All we can do is hope that their central planners continue stifling the entrepreneurial juices of their people faster than our leftward bound government stifles ours. That’s a hell of a strategy for us to count on remaining competitive in the global markets.

The Manchester bombing confirms something that no one is talking about in the media. Salman Abedi, the Islamist killer, was already on the UK list of suspicious people who should be tracked to see if/how their radicalized behavior progressed. More than that, it turns out that Abedi not only had a supportive network but also a bomb making shop in his home. (more here) What did the UK authorities know about all this – nothing. The obvious thing that this investigation again corroborates is that the UK police and intelligence services are overwhelmed with the literally thousands of Muslim suspects that they have to track. The number of potential terrorists in UK’s native-born and imported Islamic population is so large today that devout killers like Abedi abound. More importantly, they are so numerous that it is politically too sensitive to publicly admit that the domestic terrorist threat has become existentially unmanageable. In short, no matter what happens in Mosul or Raqqa, ISIS and other Islamist terror organization have already infiltrated the lands of the infidel to levels that dramatically changed the way we are forced to travel, do business, and entertain ourselves. In the interval the progressives’ drumbeat against ‘Islamophobia’ is heard across the land, impacting any remaining policies with which we may still defend our civilization.

[update]  The French brain drain.  Isn’t socialism wonderful, and more socialism even more wonderful?  The situation in France is now so bad that there is a national effort ongoing to reach out and convince the country’s emigrated and escaped educated classes to return to their homeland.  Why did they leave?  If you have to ask, then you haven’t been paying attention to what has happened to that bastion of collectivism in the west.  The French government has been ingenious in the way it has stifled enterprise and entrepreneurship.  Back in 2015 Emmanuel Macron, then economic minister and now president, already attempted to fashion a siren song for the French intelligentia on foreign shores (here).  No luck.  Now two years on the problem has gotten so bad that it is making news in the world’s prominent media outlets like the WSJ (here) and BBC (here).  And today our own socialists (now indistinguishable from Democrats) are doing everything possible to bring that European dream cum nightmare to America.

[26may17 update]  The WSJ series on algorithms and quants concludes today with Jason Zweig’s article ‘How to be Your Own Quant’ (a quant is a quantitative analyst in the investment field who today develops and uses computer executed algorithms for securities trading).  At the end of the article Zweig includes a little directory of all the other articles in the series and their links.