Wisdoma

The morons at the FBI have threatened to criminally sue Wikipedia because it has an image of the FBI seal on its web page about the federal agency.

The FBI claimed that federal law prohibits anyone from possessing any insignia of the agency.

As quickly pointed out by Wikipedia’s lawyers, there is no such federal law. The statute at issue prevents anyone from displaying a fake badge to fraudulently deceive someone into believing that they are an FBI agent.

No one would believe that the Wikipedia website is an FBI agent. I’m not either. In fact, I would be insulted if someone believed that I was one of the inept and incompetent attorneys working for the FBI who sent the threat to Wikipedia.

The letter from the FBI also claimed that the purpose of the seal is to “authenticate the official communications and actions of the FBI.” So? Where does that preclude anyone from displaying the seal so that we know what it looks like. So we in fact know what the official FBI seal looks like?

To help educate the public, posted below is what the official FBI seal looks like. If you see something else from someone claiming to be the FBI, be suspicious.

Here is a high resolution image of the FBI seal that the FBI has had posted on their website since 2005:

FBI Seal

Source: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report052005/fcs_report052005.htm

Here is another one, also posted by the FBI on its public domain website. Conveniently, the FBI titled the image “fbiseal.gif”.

FBI Seal

Source: http://norfolk.fbi.gov/images/fbiseal.gif

According to a image search on Google for ‘FBI seal’ – there are at least 228,000 pictures of the FBI seal floating around.

And new ones are being posted all the time. Such as the one just posted by the New York Times.

Enough to give the FBI lawyers a lifetime job filing lawsuits!

Dear FBI, after you get your butts kicked by Wikipedia, feel free to sue me too (and don’t forget to sue the New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, Yahoo, and hundreds of thousands of others). Just make sure you’re prepared for the inevitable malicious prosecution lawsuit and result from seeking to prohibit my First Amendment rights.

The University of Texas recently removed as the name of a dorm a former long-time UT law professor. He was also a former Klansman.

In the discussion about the continuing name of the dorm, I read it was mentioned that UT promotes “diversity” and as a result continuing to recognize a former Klansman was inappropriate.

Apparently, only “approved” diversity is permitted.

I’m NOT going to justify the former Klansman. There are many reasons why a UT dorm should not be named after him.

The bigger question is the concept of “diversity”.

It should mean, among other numbers, accepting a number of viewpoints, including those viewpoints one does not like or even finds repugnant.

Now, ironically, UT may be less diverse. Only “politically correct” perspectives are allowed.

That is not diversity.

One sees this all the time, a typical formula found especially in academia: We promote diversity. Because you do not like ______ you are not allowed.

It is never questioned that by restricting the opinions and perspectives that are unwanted, and which may even in fact be false, that the very concept of diversity is turned on its head. You have to like ______ to be diverse.

More accurately, diversity is simply a code word for, mainly, approved liberal think.

For months – years in fact – we’ve been hearing about how Sacramento County does not have any money, has a huge budget deficit, needs to law off non-managers, and so on.

Now the yearly State Fair is upon us.

Animals. Rides. Fried Twinkies. Fun to be had by all.

Sacramento County inspectors will be out in full force. Not to make sure rides are safe. Not to make sure people are having a good time.

But to inspect over 150 food vendors to make sure there are no artificial trans fats in any food they may sell.

The Sacramento county food inspectors will be testing anything cooked in oil, any food that is not baked or pre-made such as hamburger buns, pre-prepared box mixes, and batter.

Just keep this in mind whenever you hear the County squealing about budget problems.

The money is there. It’s just a matter of prioritizing what you want to spend it on.

The Sierra Club, in cooperation with the EPA, has announced an intent to sue Exxon for violating federal pollution control laws.

Here is an interesting quote from the AP about the upcoming lawsuit:

“The environmental groups’ legal maneuvers are part of broader accusations by the organizations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that Texas regulators are failing to properly monitor, control and enforce federal emission standards.”

Read that last part again … lawsuit because Texas has failed to properly enforce federal law.

In other news, the federal government has sued Arizona because Arizona is attempting to properly enforce federal immigration laws.

It used to be that all my Internet searches were with Google. But the last couple months have seen a drastic change in Google – none for the better.

Now, Bing gets most of my searches. Then Yahoo. Finally Google – mainly just because I’ve used the service for so long and still feel some need just to ‘check it’.

I have even changed the primary search engine in my Firefox browser from Google to Bing.

How did this happen? Changing from the ‘no evil’ startup Google back to the corporate borg Microsoft.

- Relevancy. Google is simply not returning as relevant of search results. It appears Google has lost its way while trying to diving what every searcher is “really” searching for. How about: exactly what I am searching for. Not what some computer thinks I should be searching for.

Google still shows more results. But more of what? Irrelevant pages which only seem to make using Google feel even more useless.

I’m not referring to spam or junk pages, although there is plenty of that on Google. The results are clearly not as relevant as they were a year ago.

I’ve done many searches and found Bing and Yahoo have similar, but not identical results. They do a good job returning primarily relevant results.

Google? It’s now from another planet.

- Poor details about search results. This is harder to articulate, but the informational snippets from pages Google is showing in its search results are often unintelligible. A mass of gobbledy-gook on the page.

- Junk all over the search results page. Google used to have a nice clean interface. Just search results. Now, it is mainly ads, menus and submenus of options and more menus, and then some results.

- Google’s Ego interferes with its results. Have you noticed that more and more of the search results are simply pages Google owns? For instance, medical searches. Google now shows at the top a page from Google. A page of information that is merely copied from a federal website. Ouch. The Google of old would have had as its top listing the actual federal website so a searcher would directly go to the most relevant information.

Now, Google thinks of itself as another website to compete with all other websites – instead of a world class search engine directing people to the most relevant information.

It’s not just medical searches. There are only 10 search results shown by default on the first page of Google. Between Google’s own pages. Google’s books. Google’s products. Google’s news. Google’s YouTube videos. There isn’t much space left for the billions of web pages.

Apparently, Google search is becoming a search of Google.

Google has become the new evil. Bing is now focused on quality for its customers.

Maybe Google should focus on search instead of the 100s of other products it has become involved with that now demand its attention and resources.