With even “safe” states contemplating monstrous anti-gun crap like this, it’s heartening to see firearms and equipment makers (who in the past, with rare exceptions like Barrett, have tended to be compromising weenies), responding like this. (H/T JB) More creepiness. (H/T JG) We need some better news. Dalmatian adopts a spotted lamb that was rejected by its mother. And more good news. A senior pit bull saves her family — human and four-footed from a fire. And here’s a wonderful short-short story from the wonderful Maggie McNeill to brighten your weekend. (Good find, S!) To be published in March, but…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Of course you know this video is fake. What’s awesome is how fake it is. Hobbit alerts us to another get-it-free-while-you-can preparedness book: Prepping on a Budget: The frugal survival guide when time matters the most! Parody alert: Small Hispanic women aren’t the only ones (speaking of the “only ones”) cops shot because they looked didn’t look like Madman Dorner. (H/T MWD, and to JS for pointing out that this news is so close to reality that it has to be a joke.) OMFG. Here’s an aspect of cannabis legalization that not many of us considered (when we really should…
Department of Homeland (Achtung!) Security decides that it’s okey-dokey for the Department of Homeland (Achtung!) Security to continue suspicionless searches of our electronic devices. Why do people never get it? If store shelves look like this after a single snowy weekend, how are they going to look when something really serious hits? (H/T JB) Sheesh. I think we need an adorable dog picture here for a little sanity break. (This one is also H/T JB — but not the same JB 🙂 ) Surely some of us have lefty friends who are nevertheless pro-gun. (Yes, they still exist.) Here’s a…
Bad grammar. It makes better passwords. (H/T J for several of today’s items.) Even in Wyoming the politicians are wimpy on guns. And in Idaho: without freaking clue. Yeah, force freedom on people; that’s the way to do it. The most important thing on the Internet. (Tip o’ hat to C^2) I think I’d trust this cool and easy-sounding new encryption more if the company that created it weren’t based in Washington, DC. (H/T MJR) ‘Nother example of how the D’s just build on tyrannical crap the R’s started. And vice versa, of course. (Via yet another one of those…
Police get banned from a Vermont shooting range. And the FBI gets banned from Iceland. We can only go on wishing the ATF would get banned from the universe. And that the Pentagon could be kept out of the world’s computers. I fear this is much more ominous than it seems. OTOH, maybe we can foil snoops in part with the idioms we use. I never thought I’d side with the operators of red-light cameras. But in this case … But of course, the USPS is certainly not all bad. Finally, Jim Bovard borrows a marketing spiel from The Onion.…
You know how the FBI and DHS have been broadening … and broadening … and broadening … the definition of “domestic terrorists” for all these years? Well, now Esteemed Senator Mr. Lautenberg and company want to bring us the logical culmination of that. Let the AttyGen arbitrarily deny firearms to anybody who fits the one-size-fits-all definition. Due process? Does anybody in the fedgov remember due process? Or is it now purely “we do it, so it’s the process”? (H/T WL) Well whodathunkit. Tina Turner is Swiss. Woot! Seattle gun collectors turn a police gun buyback into a free-market curbside gun…
I intended to write a long (and no-doubt Deeply Profound) meditation on the above. And on how, even if we were all flying around in those personal gyrocopters the futurists of the 1950s were all so certain we’d own now, life would still be pretty much life, humans would still be oh-so-very-human, and time would still be pretty much wasted. But my brain has been feeling soggy and loggy the last few days, as if somebody left it in tepid bathwater and it got all pruney. That may be a good sign. Sometimes I get like this when Ye Olde…
In 2009, her young husband was killed in an accident. After the shock of coping with the planning he and she had left undone, Chanel Reynolds started a website whose name the New York Times is too proper even to print. It’ll help you Get Your Shit Together. We have met the 1% and he is us. (H/T S) Some people have doubted that the White House can give an interesting answer to one of those WhiteHouse.gov petitions. Think again. (Via several people including S, who offers to build a Death Star for a mere $450,000,000,000,000,000.) Stealth wear anti-surveillance fashion.…
Do you IM? Do you use Windows? Okay, then, this is for you. Thanks to those brilliant boys at Freedom Feens, you’ve now got an EZ tutorial for encrypting your instant messages with OTR (Off-the-Record) Pidgin. The tutorial is long. But that’s because its steps are so comprehensive. They’ve been vetted and foolproofed. I dislike instant messaging. Life (and the ‘Net) have enough other disruptions without that. I know I’m in the minority, though. And Michael W. Dean, who wrote the tutorial, points out its privacy advantages over email when done right. Then he shows Windows users exactly how to…