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Category: Government

Government evils — but I repeat myself

I still don’t know whether it’s true …

… but we may be about to find out. For days, news has been going around the alt-right that revelations are about to come out about the Clintons that are so far out there that every other Clinton scandal pales beside them. The accusations have been very specific and involved (among other things) child sex abuse on a large scale. But all this “news” had its origins in one unreliably sourced story on one website that nobody ever heard of before. So like a lot of people, I’ve been watching but skeptically. Now Anonymous and WikiLeaks appear to be about…

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Thursday links

  • Bill Weld has turned the Libertarian Party into even more of a fiasco than it’s previously been. He’s not only driving away individuals with his ignorant anti-gunnery and his preening support for Hillary Clinton. Even state LP organizations are holding their noses and running from him.
  • Mike Jordan, who participated in the Cascadia Rising exercise and is busily answering questions for a Living Freedom interview, sends along these two links — mostly of interest to communications folks: Cascadia Rising Resources and the Department of (Achtung!) Homeland Security’s National Interoperability Field Operations Guide (which Mike say is damn good considering the highly suspect source. Scary, but also full of wonderful info, he adds).
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  • Friday links

  • Fred Reed: “The beginner’s guide to death throes.”
  • Kit Perez: “Does entrapment really make good people do bad things?” A must-read.
  • From Jim B. in comments. There’s yet another new nation, this time in space. Hm. Aside from the slight matter of inaccessibility, Asgardia already seems to have a suspiciously large number of government ministries (and a rigidly top-down structure) for someplace that claims to be about freedom.
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  • Midweek links

  • Oh weep! Oh wail! Oh, such a tragedy. Some 100+ DMV offices in California were closed for business up to two days due to a presumed hardware glitch. (H/T ML) Seriously, though, this does give a preview of either a) TEOTWAWKI or b) election day; take your pick.
  • Hm. Seems Iceland isn’t the only country where clowns and jokers are rising in national politics. Italy, too. (Tip o’ hat to the elusive J)
  • Hardly news, but always a good reminder: activists must be on guard against entrapment. (Also: read Rats! the free no-snitch book and pass it around.)
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  • Weekend links

  • The title says “How Half of America Lost Its F*cking Mind.” The author says rural Americans have been abused to the point where Trump looks like their savior and they’re understandably, righteously pissed at political business as usual.
  • Hillary’s views on cybersecurity are not only dumb and evil. They’re impossible, as even some of her advisors clearly understood. Can’t have super-security plus nice backdoors that only the “good guys” — that is, Hillary’s friends — can walk through. But not to worry! Hillary! Has the Experience! We Need! To become our dictator.
  • How one itty-bitty Nebraska town v*ted itself out of existence. (H/T MJR)
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  • Weekend links

    Another example of history rhyming. Until new polls come out, we can’t know (and actually we can’t know until the v*tes are counted, assuming — yeah, big assumption — that they’re counted honestly), but the very smart Nate Silver examines whether Trump is really torpedoed this time. Unlike all the other times the media predicted his electoral demise. OTOH, Clinton, Comey and company would be in far worse trouble in a just world. Five times evolution “ran backward.” This is only one small example of how self-driving cars will spy on their occupants. But in the good news department, a…

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    Midweek links

  • Niall Ferguson on simplifiers vs complicators and how they can both be big problems in politics and government.
  • What the hell is a “security directive,” anyway? Sounds like something Ayn Rand would make up for her villains to impose. And why would any supposedly private company jump to comply with one? And furtherwhy, after the righteous drubbing the big ‘Net companies took for kissing the NSA’s butt (post Snowden) would Yahoo (and probably others) be so eager to continue osculating stinky feddie posterior?
  • Speaking of security, Bruce Schneier says, “Stop trying to fix the user” and fix the underlying systems. (I think he’s a lot right and a bit wrong, as spotted by his commentors.)
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