Wednesday Miscellany!

• Justice Antonin Scalia says internment camps could happen in America again. For once, I can't disagree with him. I don't see any immediate reason why we'd have internment camps (cue whining from paranoid idiots here), but a huge disaster like 9/11 would change things. I am, actually, very surprised that we didn't have internment camps in the years after 9/11, and I would be stunned if that conversation never happened at the Bush White House. (For the record, I think Bush would have vetoed the idea. He was incompetent, not evil.)


• The British Government carried out a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) on supporters of Anonymous. More here. If you or I DDOS someone without their consent, we go to prison, and we do hard time.


• New Deal Democrat points out that the oil choke collar may finally be relaxing. If true, that means that the proximate cause of the Great Recession is no longer a problem. That just leaves, you know, all the structural problems in the banking system.


• Verizon is already taking advantage of the death of Net Neutrality, by throttling residential NetFlix traffic. Slashdot has a discussion.


• navalny (in Russian) on the unfolding PR disaster that is the Sochi Olympics.


• It was lopsided, one-sided, a complete blowout, and utterly pointless in the end. No, not the Super Bowl — the debate between Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and creationist demagogue Ken Ham. Nonetheless, there's actually disagreement on who won. Was it Bill Nye, or Ken Ham? This fiasco makes me pine for the days when devout Christians did real science.

Clinton versus Rubio?

I earlier posted this link showing that Hillary Clinton beats any of five likely Republican nominees for President in 2016 by at least fifteen points. However, I noticed that the data excluded one of the more interesting matches, between Hillary Clinton and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio spoke just before Mitt Romney at the 2012 Republican National Convention, and displayed Reaganesque charm. If anyone is a contender for the GOP nomination in 2016, it's him.

That said, he has a lot of ground to make up. Although he fares better than the others in a head to head poll versus Clinton, the latest polls show him trailing by double digits. If he's the nominee, Clinton is still the favorite.