There's actually a term for this category: LOVEINT, when intelligence officers use their access to surveillance tools to spy on the human objects of their affection. It's happened at all levels of the government, from NSA employees who accessed email and phone data of romantic partners to local police officers who have snooped in DMV databases to get women's home addresses.

In 2008, a couple of academics decided to study how long it would actually take to read all the privacy policies the average American agrees to in a year. Their estimate? More than 200 hours. That's 25 workdays, or a month of nine to five reading. To prove how ridiculous it was to expect consumers to read these agreements, one gaming company added to its online terms of service a claim to “the immortal soul“ of anyone who placed an...

Privacy isn't just about what people know about you, it's about how that knowledge gives them control over you.

This is the challenge of protecting privacy in the modern world. How can you fully comprehend what will become possible as technology improves? Information that you give up freely now, in ways that seem harmless, might come back to haunt you when computers get better at mining it.

Google created a blurring option to pixelate houses in Steet View photos to make them unrecognizable. Pro-tech vigilantes sought out the blurred homes in the real world, the locations easily ascertainable from Google Maps, and egged them, leaving notes in their mailboxes that read, “Google's cool.“ Those who chose privacy over progress thus became the villains. Evidently, there would be no hiding in this new rabidly transparent world.

Most people think that the sheer existence of a privacy policy means a company protects their data, but, in fact, the policy exists to explain, in lengthy legalese, how the company may exploit it. It would be more accurately termed a “data exploitation policy.“

In 2016, researchers at Microsoft released a public data set with millions of photos of “celebrities,“ explicitly to help people working on facial recognition technology. Most of the people included were actors, but there were also journalists and activists, some of whom were prominent critics of face recognition. They had no idea that their own faces were being used to improve it.

June 11
Abscotchalater (n.) Someone hiding from the police.

Joe Biden was the best and most underrated president of my lifetime. My respect for him grew even deeper when he finally dropped out of the race. But then I read this book, and, sadly, that level of respect has now plummeted. Why did he not drop out sooner? How deep did his delusions run? More importantly, why didn't anyone stop him? This book is as shocking as it is heartbreaking. #2025Book22

“Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?“ Hostin followed up. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,“ Harris said, in perhaps the worst moment of her short campaign. Most of the public thought the country was on the wrong track, and she was presenting herself quite literally as “more of the same.“ She tried to recover, but it was too late: She'd just provided new footage for a ...

Nancy Pelosi sat down and wrote the president a letter on her stationary.
“A master class press conference showing mastery of foreign policy,“ she wrote of the NATO event. “A positive grassroots event in Detroit. Not a reason to stay, but a way to go out on top.“

After the debate, Moulton had approached an irreverent colleague on the floor of the House. “What did you think of that performance?“ he asked him.
“We need to sub in someone with more energy,“ the other congressman said sardonically. “Like Bill Pascrell.“
Pascrell, an eighty-seven-year-old New Jersey Democrat, was sickly and just weeks away from death. It was a dark joke, but Democrats were in a dark place.

Emmanuel noted that Biden's “cohorts have told us that he's healthy for over a year.“ Pointedly, he added, “I had a father who died at ninety-two, but at eighty-one I took away his car.“

“Well, I'm pissed off at the Founding Fathers,“ Ari Emanuel said. “They had the start date of thirty-five; they just didn't give us the end date.“

“They did such a disservice to Joe Biden and the country,“ Axelrod later said. “The family as well. I don't understand how you could see him in the condition he's in and think, 'Yeah, you oughta go run for president again.' To do that to someone you love?“

June 10
Sheep-biting (n.) Treacherous, underhand behavior.

It was clear early on that Biden needed to acknowledge that prices were too high and needed to come down,“ one pollster said. “But Donilon and others at the White House would refuse. They said if we acknowledged it, no one would remember anything else.“
This instruction came from Biden himself, they were told.

Biden didn't always like getting notes on his delivery but would listen to someone like Spielberg. The famous director would also coach the president before speeches like the State of the Union. Katzenberg hoped that voters' age concerns about Biden could be assuaged with a little Hollywood magic.

“How bad is your memory?“ asked a reporter from Fox.
“My memory is so bad, I let you speak,“ Biden snapped. 😅

Trying to understand a point in time in 2013, he asked, “Well, if it was 2013--when did I stop being vice president?“
“2017,“ a White House lawyer reminded him.
At another moment, asked about a “Facts First“ file with documents “related to Afghanistan from 2009,“ Biden asked, “I'm, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?“

June 9
Curfuggle (n.) A confused mess; disorder, disarray.

June 7
Wunderkammer (n.) A collection of oddities; a room set aside for just such a collection.

June 8
Boothale (v)-- To pillage or plunder.

A year later, that official told us, “I blame his inner circle, and I blame him. What utter and total hubris not to step aside and be a one-term president, as he said he would, and have an open primary when there was time to let the process play out. Even though he did so many good things for this country, I can never forgive him.“

Still, he had beaten Trump, and he wasn't confident that she could. He privately called her a “work in progress.“ It became an additional rationalization for his reelection run: There was no plan B.

To the Biden team, Harris was a regular headache. She often shied away from politically tough assignments when Biden had accepted such assignments as vice president. She even turned down seemingly simple asks, such as headlining DC's Gridiron Club dinner. She had considerable turnover, as her aides tired of what they called her “prosecuting the staff“ style. And her cautious nature could reach the point of parody.

Given the president's age, Harris's team thought that building the vice president up should have been a priority, but many on the Biden team didn't agree. Harris aides began dividing Biden advisers between the helpful and what one called “the cabal of the unhelpful.“

Biden's advisers did not fully trust her. Harris and her advisers felt it. Her aides got the impression that doing more than the bare minimum to help her was considered an act of disloyalty to Biden. Some of that culture carried over into the White House.

In Iowa, at an April 2022 event about ethanol, Biden plodded through a list of policy priorities but eventually admitted: “I'm starting to bore myself here. But this is important stuff, I think.“ Aides watching the speech knew how much effort Biden had put into prep but noted that even he seemed to sense he wasn't landing the argument.

Still, some doctors speculated that the only reason to perform a neurological test but not a cognitive one was if you feared the results.

Periodic surveys in the last decade have asked people what they'd rather sacrifice for a year: their smartphone or sex? In every survey, nearly half of the respondents chose abstinence over the loss of their touch screens. How did computers come to be such a dominant part of our everyday lives, so essential an appendage that some regard them as more necessary than a romantic partner?

Darwin was very nearly rejected from the voyage that yielded his groundbreaking theories because the ship's captain was an amateur physiognomist who didn't like the cut of Darwin's jib. “He doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage,“ wrote Darwin in his autobiography. “But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.“

Extra-foraneous (adj.) --Outdoor

This would've been a good book if the author had focused exclusively on the arson case. It seemed as if she didn't have enough material to write exclusively on the arson, so she also wrote about everything else, spending two-thirds of the book writing about the entire history of the wine region. She should have stuck to the arson story, even if it meant writing a long article instead of a book. #2025Book21

The cheetah kills approximately 58 percent of the animals it hunts. The lion is next, at less than half that--one quarter of its intended kills hit the mark. And the wolf captures only 14 percent of what it stalks. The true deadly killer is one that hardly anyone would think of: the dragonfly, which manages to capture an astounding 95 percent of its targeted prey.

June 4
Anaphora (n.) A figure of speech that repeats a sequence of words at the start of successive clauses.

June 3
Morganatic (adj.)-- Designating a marriage between two people of unequal social rank.

There are no “rules“ of behavior, only norms and suggestions--and within certain broad constraints, anyone might break those norms at any point.

June 2
Vespering (adj.)-- Flying westwards, heading towards sunset.

The history of the next fifty years will be the story of how we deal with--or fail to deal with-- the coming food shortages.

Bananas (continued):
Organics also tend to be grown at higher, drier elevations to somewhat limit pests, which means the bananas need massive irrigation to grow. The result is the food product with the highest chemical and carbon footprint, as well as the highest staff turnovers from death in any industry. Happy eating.

For those of you organic buffs who refuse to eat anything that's been touched with anything artificial, know that a roughly half-mile radius around organic banana plantations is practically nuked with non-organic pesticides and herbicides and fungicides to protect your proclivities.

“But once in a while the odd thing happens,
Once in a while the dream
comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is
altered,
Once in a while the Moon turns
Blue.“

W.H. Auden, Libretto For Paul Bunyan

“Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.“
--Fausto Magistral, in Thomas Pynchon's V.

“I wish you luck, because what lies ahead is no picnic for the prepared and unprepared alike, and you'll need luck. Still, I believe you'll manage.“
--Joseph Brodsky “Speech at the Stadium“

This was a very interesting book, but I wish that Zeihan would've taken more time to explain exactly WHY the world will be become deglobalized, rather than just treat it as an inevitability.

Readers who enjoyed this will also enjoy the books of George Friedman, as well as $20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner. #2025Book20

When are they going to bring back the Litsy app? There are many things that I want to post, but can't, until they do.

May 29
Transnivean (adj.)- Located beyond the snows, beyond snow-capped mountains.

The entire concept of the order is that the United States disadvantages itself economically in order to purchase the loyalty of a global alliance. That is what globalization is. The past several decades haven't been an American Century. They've been an American sacrifice. Which is over.

Even better, the North American continent faces few security threats between its own shores and those of potential suppliers. On average, North American products face less than one-third the supply chain disruptions the Germans are likely to feel, and one-tenth that of the Asians.

Most studies in the past half decade have indicated that by 2021, most manufacturing processes were already cheaper to operate in North America than in either Asia or Europe.