BluegrassBulletin.com

More Americans Turning To Internet For News

I am very happy to have been recognized as the top Conservative website in Kentucky by the Washington Post and to have the growing number of readers which we enjoy. 

With so many other sources of news out there, thank you for reading the BluegrassBulletin.

Hmmmm....Twitter Let's Muslim Brotherhood Organize, Not US Truckers

Do you recall the "Arab Spring" protests?  Remember the news accounts touting how Twitter was being used to organize the eventual overthrow of the Egyptian government by what turned out to be the Muslim Brotherhood?  Well, Twitter has shutdown the account of US truckers trying to organize a protest in Washington DC.

“The Truckers For The Constitution” plan to shut down the Washington, D.C. beltway on October 11th.  The truckers sponsoring the three day rally are demanding the police detain politicians who are an “accessory” to “treason,” including the President himself.  Now their twitter account has been suspended https://twitter.com/T2SDA. [Gateway Pundit]

While Twitter is a privately owned and operated service, nevertheless this action seems to discriminate against the non-violent protest plans of the Truckers.  The Twitter account was suspended almost immediately after an article about the protest appeared in U.S. News and World Report.

“The Truckers For The Constitution” plan to shut down the Washington, D.C. beltway on October 11th.  The truckers sponsoring the three day rally are demanding the police detain politicians who are an “accessory” to “treason,” including the President himself.  Now their twitter account has been suspended https://twitter.com/T2SDA :

- See more at: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/#sthash.0IIP7MjR.dpuf

How Blogs, Facebook, And Twitter Are Making Us Smarter

Here's an interesting read, and one I encourage you to ponder.  The time you spend making the case for a position you hold somewhere on the Internet, whether on a blog, in a blog comment, on Twitter or Facebook helps to exercise your brain.  As this author concludes, this use of the Internet is making us smarter.

The argument is this: Writing in public, whether it's in the form of blogs or microblogs, like a Twitter stream, is forcing us to be clearer, more convincing and smarter. A big audience isn't required. Knowing you write for an audience of just a few people will force you to stretch and grow:

"Having an audience can clarify thinking. It's easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

"Social scientists have identified something called the audience effect — the shift in our performance when we know people are watching. It isn't always positive. In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or concerts, the audience effect can make athletes or musicians perform better — but it can sometimes psych them out and make them choke, too.

"Yet studies have found that the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to pay more attention and learn more."

That network effect is nurturing. And not only is it great for grown-ups to write so much more, it's also fantastic for students, who can show cognitive gains because of all their short-message composition.Thompson write in The Globe and Mail:

"Students not only write more, they write more quickly. ..."

"And when it comes to writing and thinking, speed matters. It's what's called transcription fluency: 'If you can't write fast enough, you can lose an idea or a way of phrasing something, and it never comes back,' Steven Graham, a literacy scholar at Arizona State University, told me. In contrast, when you can write and edit more swiftly, you can include more ideas and flesh them out more deeply. The emergence of the cheap ballpoint pen, the typewriter — and now the computer and smartphones and tablets — precisely match the cognitive curve of our students' performance." [NPR]

 

Watch Sale Of Washington Post To Move News Away From Paper

The purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos brings to a dying industry the technical know how of a man who turned shopping in stores on its head.  If you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it anywhere, and for the most part, Amazon has better prices, better service and better shipping options.

Oh sure, if you need a tool right now you can run down to Lowes and pick one up, but if you don't need it this minute, you can have it delivered to you virtually anywhere in the country by tomorrow and you won't be limited to the "in-stock" selections a the hardware store.

The same is true for almost any product out there which Amazon carries.  In fact, if it wasn't for Amazon I'd say book sales would be much more dismal.

So when people begin to compare what a left leaning, democrat donor like Bezos might do with a faltering newspaper, think digital delivery and a new era of online news.

Wake up GOP.  Compete or lose.

Big Brother Update: Confusing Story Is Scary Nonetheless

You will probably need to read this story more than once in order to understand it, and even then it may be confusing.  Here's my attempt at making it more digestible.  Adobe software has a new idea.  Instead of buying their software and using it as long as you like, you will be required to rent it on a monthly basis.

And just how will this be accomplished?  Are you familiar with "cloud" computing?  Instead of your software being installed on your computer, you will access it in "the cloud" that is, you will sign on and use it in a virtual setting rather than pulling it up from your hard drive.

But here's where the story gets very weird.  Apparently the Immigration bill under consideration has some hidden provision which requires the collection of "bio-metric" data on all people.  What is bio-metric data?  It is the collection of things like fingerprints, facial recognition, personal data such as social security numbers, passwords, birth date and other identifying data including that which can make sure who your are by creating a stockpile of information about you physically.  The Adobe "cloud" will be able to collect such things and here is how.

Since you will no longer be using Photoshop from your own hard drive, photos of you, your wife, your kids etc. will all be fed into the "cloud" where facial recognition, height, weight, hair color, eye color and body identifying marks will belong to a super computer, not limited to your own.  And you will no longer own these things.  Under the license agreement, all content you create becomes the property of Adobe.

Sound weird?  It should. But it gets worse.  Adobe is very closely tied to the Obama administration.  In fact Obama is paying a criminal with tax dollars who has been pushing "cloud computing" and has the CEO of Adobe working as head of his Management Advisory Board.

So, in a nutshell, it looks like Big Brother is getting bigger and could soon know everything about you, and I mean everything.

Now are you starting to get the picture?

Kentucky's Mike Duncan Chairs New RNC Data Company

Mike Duncan of Martin County Kentucky, former treasurer and chair of the RNC will be chairing Data Trust a company which will assist the RNC in managing the processes being developed by another company called Liberty Works which has been chosen to help the RNC compete in the digital arena.

Karl Rove had been working with Liberty Works in talking with potential donors for the $15 million project though Rove is not directly affiliated with Liberty Works, Data Trust or the RNC as POLITICO reports.

Competition for this arrangement has focused on organizing voter data in a more useable manner and developing interfaces between raw data from many sources and creating a platform for communicating with the RNC's known base.

It would be my hope that the project not get pigeon holed into such a structured and limited mindset, though substantial improvement in this area is sorely needed. The bigger opportunity for the GOP lies outside of this project and dovetails with it.

Mike Duncan brings perhaps the highest level of integrity and professionalism to the project of anyone in the nation and his determination to succeed should be a huge positive for the republican cause going forward.

This is another plus for Kentucky.

Posted from my I-Pad with Blogsy

Here Comes Hillary

Hillary Clinton is beginning her run for the presidency, as if you didn't already know.  And a new superPAC has been formed to line her pockets fund the campaign.

“Ready for Hillary” on Friday filed with the Federal Election Commission, following on the heels of another group called “HILLARYCLINTONSUPERPAC.”

“Our purpose is simple: we are ready to work for Hillary to be president when she is ready to run,” Black, a George Washington University professor and historian, as well as a longtime Clinton backer, said to the Center for Public Integrity in an email. “When our website launches in a few weeks, we plan to reach out to our grassroots networks and contributors to mobilize them to support her.” [POLITICO]

The only good news in this development is that as the media begins to focus more and more on who is lining up for the 2016 run, Obama will begin to fade from the top stories and his lame duck term of office will limp off into irrelevancy.

Meanwhile the GOP is gearing up too. [NOT!]

They are still trying to get a bunch of old white guys to tighten the knot in their neckties and cozy up to corporate America.  The most dazzle the GOP can muster seems to be some how or another trying to hype Marco Rubio, give Bobby Jindal a speaking gig or two and let John McCain run point on the immigration debate.

Maybe Rand Paul is right.  Maybe he's the only guy who can get enough attention to be viable since geting attention is key in politics these days.

On another front, Ambassador Chris Stevens is still dead, the arms for Syria scandal is going nowhere, Hillary is up to her neck in some sort of scandal that kept her under wraps for weeks and nobody seems to think that giving those stories any attention matters.

Maybe it's time for an expanded conservative media presence.  Otherwise a topless movie star in a Wildcat jersey might look like senatorial material before too long.

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Limbaugh Nails It: Conservatives Have Given Up

Rush Limbaugh nails it.  He has told us precisely why the left has such clout with what he calls "low information voters".

Tina Fey, the last year that I was on the list of Barbara Walters’ top Ten Most Fascinating Americans, the last time was two or three years ago, Tina Fey was in it for impersonating Sarah Palin, one of the Ten Most Fascinating People. She didn’t make it as Tina Fey, she made it as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. She ended up being one of Barbara Walters’ Ten Most Fascinating because of her impersonation of Palin. Meanwhile, Palin is not in the list, and yet an impersonator is. So it’s clear as a bell to me why it’s tough to find a conservative in the media with any credibility with low-information voters. Every one of them has been taken out. There are other reasons why conservatives aren’t defended. The conservative movement is in a constant battle for people in it who want to be seen as the leader, who want to be seen as the smartest person in the room, who want to be seen as the go-to person.

And so somebody getting a lot of media attention is a threat, just in a high school jealousy sense, is a threat. So you take ‘em out, you help take ‘em out. It keeps the pathway cleared for you, whoever you are, if you want to be the go-to conservative for the media or the leader of the conservative movement or what have you, if you want to be perceived as such.

All right, that’s that. I wanted to get that out there because everybody calls here, and they have ever since I’ve been doing the show, “Rush, what can Republicans do?” The first thing they can do is unite. The first thing they can do is unite and start defending each other and not letting this character assassination succeed every time the left tries it. [Rush Limbaugh]

Can't Say It Any Better: "Join Or Die"

In keeping with the theme of today's blog postings I would direct you to another from a few days ago.  It is worth reading.  Here's a tease:

Fact No. 1 is to realize a political party isn't a church nor a cult but a mechanism to get diverse people who share some things in common to work toward a common position of power that none could achieve on their own. Fact No. 2 is that unless you can convert your principles into actual policies, standing upon them does no one a favor. If you believe in your principles but can't convert others, you are not an asset. If you antagonize them, you and your principles are a real liability, and perhaps you should shut the hell up.

The Tea Party loves the Gadsden flag symbol, with its poised-to-strike rattler and "Don't Tread on Me" message, but there is another illustration of that era that it ought to note: Benjamin Franklin's cartoon of a snake, chopped into 13 small pieces, unable to make any threatening noises. Beneath it was Franklin's exhortation for unity among the 13 Colonies: "Join, or Die."

READ FULL STORY HERE

Feds Say "Disable Java" On Your Browser

For what it's worth here is a warning from the Department of Homeland Security:

The Department of Homeland Security is urging computer users to disable or uninstall the Java programming language because of a serious security vulnerability.

The flaw in Java 7 "can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system," according to a warning posted Thursday by the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

Hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses may be affected.

Hackers could exploit the flaw to install malicious software or malware that could make users vulnerable to identity theft or allow their computers to be exploited by "botnets" that could crash networks or be used to attack web sites.

"Note that applications that use the Internet Explorer web content rendering components, such as Microsoft Office or Windows Desktop Search, may also be used as an attack vector for this vulnerability," the warning adds.

DHS said it is "currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem." [USA Today]

Of course if you do disable it or delete it, you may not be able to use many websites nor engage in chat.  You better call your computer folks before taking any drastic action, but at least now you have been warned.