Playing 3D Chess With the Empty Chair

In the fall of 2012, the great Clint Eastwood gave us the superbly outrageous 'Empty Chair' meme. I, LibertyAtStake, shall now apply this meme to historical events now unfolding on NATO's frontier.

Putin: So, chair, you think this is no game of chess? I'll show you. I take Crimea. Your move, punk.

Chair:

Putin: John Kerry! I tweet my flatulence. Kerry's head looks like a giant 'Reset' button to me. I take eastern Ukraine. Your move, punk.

Chair:

Putin: No, I don't want your insurance plan. The KGB plan has lower premiums and a better network. Hmmmm ...summer is nice in Estonia¹ ...

To be continued.

Footnote:

¹NATO member since 2004.

Archiving 'This Just In' (3/2/14 - 3/18/14): "Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain" .... Nobody "controls" the Internet!

3/18/14
I can no longer stand all the blubbering on the Right about “losing sovereignty” and “giving up control of the Internet” just because ICANN’s contract with the Department of Commerce is up for renewal in 2015. The italicized excerpt is my comment to a NewsBusters post having the title 'Networks Yawn as Obama Administration Gives Away the Internet.'

I'm yawning. The US isn't "giving up control of the Internet." Nobody "controls" the Internet. The proposal is simply to transfer stewardship over the low level administrative function of making sure addresses are unique and routable. Until 1998 it was literally one guy at USC. Since 1998 it has been a bunch of non-profit IT geeks called ICANN with a Deprtment of Commerce contract. With IP v6 there are 2 to the 128th power possible ip addresses and associated domain names. Nobody is in danger of running out anytime soon. It's no more insidious than the international cooperation that is necessary to ensure phone calls connect worldwide. Except you pretty much get to pick your own block of phone numbers from a practically unlimited range and all you have to do is register them to make them uniquely routable. Holding this database of unique location identifiers offers no more security access to the locations themselves than the postman knowing my address offers access to everything in my home. Plus, if I do it right, everything in every letter (ip packet) the guy handles is encrypted so that only I can read it. Yawn.

I should have also mentioned none of this has anything to do with the actual activity of routing Internet packets. That is accomplished by the incomprehensibly deep redundancy of all the Domain Name Servers out there, too numerous to count, to which the entire database is continuously propagated.

Nobody is taking our Internet away. Nobody can. That’s why it’s the greatest 1st Amendment weapon in history. Every entry level sys admin everywhere essentially has a complete image of the Internet's topology. Focus, people! The issue for Liberty vs. Tyranny 2014 is ObamaKare.
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3/17/14
There are reports some precincts in the Crimean secession vote yesterday had more votes than living souls. Well, if any American President can pin this type of corruption on someone else it should be OFA's political leader!
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3/14/14
The only solution to this "dilemma" is a blanket order deputizing all First Responders as ICE agents. Only in Obama's America could an illegal immigrant dare to go on the top rated cable news TV channel to press his case for a civil lawsuit against the very people who saved him from drowning. The watery motif also bring s back to mind that old lawyer joke ... "What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start."
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3/11/14
Why is Bolshevik thug Vladmir Putin annexing Crimea? Because he wants a friendly puppet government in Kiev running Ukraine according to his wishes. And because he can. He wants domain over the people of Ukraine because Russian imperialism (whether czarist or communist) is alive and well, despite the naive and bungled 'reset' diplomacy of the Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy regime. He can because he sees retreat and retrenching in every move made by the naive and bungling Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy regime. Three things our so-called national leadership should be doing right now (but isn't) ... (1) freeze every single dollar of wealth the Russian thugocracy has stashed in western assets, (2) forward deploy significant offensive military formations to NATO's new eastern frontier in Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary (a short drive to Kiev), (3) start exporting America's abundant supply of natural gas to Europe to begin severing their dependence on Russian pipelines. I might add a fourth project - build time machine to go back to 2009 with today's newspaper in order to convince the newly elected Chicago Community Organizer that cancelling ABM defense for NATO is not a good idea. Nah, the odds of success would be too long ... not of building the machine, but of convincing the Whirled Peas ideologue.
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3/6/14
There is great irony in the corrupt IRS apparatchik Lois Lerner seeking constitutional protection in the 5th Amendment - when she is clearly guilty of scheming to abuse her official powers to deny her political enemies their 1st Amendment rights. In any event, unfortunately for her, she was too loquacious in her May 2013 testimony to Congress. When she asserted she did nothing wrong she effectively waived her right to hide behind the Fifth. The next logical step is to hold her in contempt of Congress and let her think about her options behind bars for awhile. I would advise Ms. Lerner to choose the orange jump suit over the striped two piece. She seems more of a fall in terms of fashion.
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Oh yeah, have I mentioned ... when it comes to high stakes international poker - always take the KGB Colonel over the Community Organizer. Putin's line that the Russian soldiers in Crimea spontaneously generated is especially entertaining. He will get away with it.
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3/4/14
Quick note on the human capacity to learn from experience. I have been very accurately (trust me, very accurately) measured by the Myers-Briggs instrument as an INTJ. The dead on proof of the human capacity to learn from experience is this line from the linked Wikipedia article: "Perhaps the most fundamental problem [with INTJs], however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense." I have based every analysis for god knows how long on the sure knowledge they almost never do.
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3/3/14
The italicized excerpt is my concluding remarks from a Daily Caller comment board encounter. I have reprinted it here because it neatly encapsulates my position on immigration amnesty, crony capitalism, and why the US Chamber is on the wrong side of the issue. Also note I waited an entire day for my sparring partner to answer a simple and direct question. He did not - the dead on sign I was sparring with a paid troll. Probably paid by the US Chamber.

Since you have avoided answering my simple, direct question for an entire day (What number of employees constitutes "big" on your scale?), I will give you the reply I already had teed up. In my experience, it is just above 100 employees where the pressures of making the payroll creates pressures transforming company leaders from entrepreneurs with the best intentions to naked capitalists. At that relatively smallish (compared to GE) scale, the math of meeting a payroll, maintaining cash flow, and staying profitable with shrinking margins is very daunting. The corporate leader will begin to cut corners, such as taking on the habits of the crony capitalist. It may start with seeking favors from local politicians and zoning boards. It can certainly include joining a trade association (such as the US Chamber) in the hopes of aggregating into an entity with the scale Jeff Immelt's GE has to hire lobbyists to create loopholes that allow GE to pay zero taxes. Agri-business, construction, restaurants (fast, slow, and in-between) with 100+ employees … how many of these smart capitalists valuing cheap labor to help tight margins do you think there might be? By your own description, most would be Chamber members, no? The solution to crony capitalism is neither more cheap labor nor demonizing these employeers. The solution is removing gub'ment's power to grant special favors to the employers that the rest of us pay for.
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3/2/14
Those Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC) liars who, according to Dingy Harry Reid, have been smearing the glorious roll out of ObamaKare with dastardly lies are now building Mardi Gras floats to spread their lies. I expect Team Obama to blame the spontaneous demonstration represented by these floats on a Koch Brothers funded YouTube video.

Update 11:47 am

Just for grins and giggles ...

Demotivational Nobel Peace Prize

Demotivational Lois Lerner

Oops.

Ouch.

Update 3/12/14

Congress is building the case for contempt. Then the contemptible corruptnik known as Lois Lerner will have a decision to make: take the fall for her masters in the White House or deliver them to glaring disinfectant of sunlight.

Ukraine and Crimea: The Kinks Have a Song For That, Too.

Enjoy.



Putin gets it. Obama not so much. It is what it is for now.