Find a hidden treasure at auction. Give it back. You’re a better man than I. It’s a bad idea, but a provocative thought experiment. “What if, just for a change of pace, it was the opponents of free speech whose ideas were deemed hateful?” Though the lede is about investing in the new cannabis industry, the most fascinatingly weird part is about the work being done in laboratories to isolate (then market) product with specific properties. So we know birds came from dinosaurs. Now scientists have taken chicken embryos part of the way back. Honest, I thought it was The…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Some of these may have begun as performance art or a political statement. But it seems that anti-surveillance wearables are now a thing Shades of RebelFire’s street scene. (H/T C^2)
America’s largest bank joins the war on cash. This isn’t surprising, but nevertheless darned scary, especially considering it’s also a war on gold and silver coins. Since we don’t have a full name for this guy, I wouldn’t yet take this story as gospel. But if true, tragic (and stupidly so on the part of dog-breed bigots). Danish man kills himself after his dog is forcibly euthanized. For those who can stomach a once-secret report on surveillance. (Tip o’ hat to MJR) Seven epic fails of environmental predictions. And five phony fields of forensics. One more reason not to live…
The story of the reserve deputy who killed a pinned-down suspect in Tulsa County gets worse and worse. Wonder who this cop is or who he knows that entire chains of officialdom were ordered to falsify records for him? Ohhhh, wait. It says right there in the article … Don’t be nervous now. It probably means you’re a terrorist. In the future your insurance company (ugh) will know when you’re having sex. And of course so will “security” ‘crats in DC. ‘Cause you know we still don’t have enough surveillance. I wonder … why don’t these people ever get that…
The poor WaPost is worried about the “growing insurrection.” So very, very much the poor WaPost fails to understand. Just how bad is the growing growing student loan mess? More info on why the DoJ is so desperate to conceal info about its stingray searches and interceptions. Oh, there’s so much to hide! What? You didn’t already know this? And this, too: “When everything is a crime.” UPDATE on Joel’s siding bleg. He’s getting there, but could really, really use another $400. Just that much more. Yeah, I know it’s tax time and the fedgov thinks you should give your…
Seems cops and the U.S. Justice (sic) Department will go to amazing lengths to hide their newest tracking methods from us. A must-read for philosophical Libertopians: “Welcome to the Arena in the Clouds” by Max Borders. Guerrilla civic improvement. (H/T AG) It takes 13,000 words for the Columbia Journalism Review to say it and those words are thoughtful and worth reading. But bottom line: in their zeal to confirm an agenda, Rolling Stone’s staffers chose to mistake the behavior of a manipulative liar for the behavior of a poor, traumatized victim. (To their credit, RS and writer Sabrina Erdely cooperated…
MamaLiberty reviews Jackie Clay’s Summer of the Eagles. Somebody in the mainstream media finally questions whether it’s right to destroy mom & pop businesses that aren’t sufficiently politically correct. Glad ordinary folk don’t even need to ask questions like that. Back when the RICO statutes were first passed, libertarian alarmists predicted that they’d be so misused that the feds would soon be busting penny-ante poker games. Well, it seems they’ve been misused for just about everything except that. But here’s one of the most creative turns of the RICO story. David Boaz notes that the final stage of socialism is…
Once in a while, buddy Jim Bovard will include “Claire Wolfe” in a group of searches. This apparently gets interesting. Images like this come up (embiggenate for proper appreciation): I have no idea who the cute-in-an-officey-sort-of-way “me” is, but she’ll do.* And while I truly, truly, truly don’t get why Sonia Sotomayor keeps coming up in searches on my name, it’s a fact. And it’s far from the first time. Poor Sonia and I appear to be linked by karma. Bad karma, no doubt. But her karma or mine, who knows? (I’ve probably deepened the karmic connection by writing her…
Five simple ‘Net security tricks from a Google engineer. I’m already doing four and a half of them. How about you? Don’t it just figure? Willie Nelson now has his own cannabis variety and hopes to open a chain of stores described as “the Whole Foods of marijuana.” Fascinating. Twenty-five percent of people have an extra color receptor in their eyes. Hm. Wonder how many of those are artists or go into fields requiring good color perception? So what do you think? Should this guy have been kicked off that plane or not? On hiding cops’ identities, a governor does…
An Agitator who might not want to be named sent me a .pdf pre-publication copy of an upcoming report, “Bulk Collection of Signals Intelligence.” It’s from the wittily named “Committee on Responding to Section 5(d) of Presidential Policy Directive 28: The Feasibility of Software to Provide Alternatives to Bulk Signals Intelligence Collection; Computer Science and Telecommunications Board; Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences; National Research Council ” and its aim is apparently (not their words) to find better ways of targeting everybody rather than just randomly spying on everybody. (It’s a fine distinction, I know. But when you’re well-connected enough…