Last night I stayed at the Bates Motel. Seriously. It was better than its namesake because — obviously — I survived the night. However, I dared not take a shower. Not from fear of knife-wielding weirdos, but because, as Mr. Bates himself disingenuously explained, “We have two other guests and they might have used up all the hot water.” I don’t know what the other guests did (if they existed, they were very quiet), but this was definitely a cold-water experience. It was the only open motel in the itty-bitty village where I stopped, though. I was too beat to…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Okay, now this is odd. Couple of us were working in the meadow this afternoon when my youngest, loudest, and most car-chasing dog informed us of somebody coming down the road. Sure enough, along came a car, which went just past our driveway and stopped in a “where the heck am I?” sort of way. Now, we’re in the middle of nowhere, a good 12 miles from town, six of it on dirt and through washes. And once you’ve gone past our driveway, there is simply nowhere to go. Anyhow, there’s nowhere a stranger has any business going, unless he…
Via lrc.com comes an excellent bit of tax-day snark: “What Do We Do If the Rich Start to Leave?” Good beginning of a good question. The writer, Bill Frezza, says, “500 American citizens and green card holders in the last quarter of 2009 said goodbye to America forever. Not many, but double the number of expatriations in all of 2008. Good riddance, other millionaires will take their place.” He’s not real clear on what he means by the rich, or whether those 500 surrendered their citizenship or just slipped away, PT-fashion, to friendlier climes.* But it’s the thought that counts.…
Tip o’ hat to Radley Balko, the Flex Your Rights video 10 Rules for Dealing with Police is now on YouTube in four 10-minute segments. I haven’t yet seen this and I understand it’s directed primarily at urban minorities who so often find themselves profiled and stopped on flimsy pretexts. But the earlier Flex Your Rights video, Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, is excellent and we all need to know the things FYR teaches. How to: Deal with traffic stops, street stops & police at your door Know your rights & maintain your cool Avoid common police…
One year ago today, a man named Ian Tomlinson was attacked by police. He died minutes later. They tried to cover it up, of course. Most Americans have probably never heard of Tomlinson. Let’s just say our country has no monopoly on armed thugs roaming the street in uniform. Tip o’ the hat to Jim Bovard for this lovely interactive map that shows current rates of return for census forms. Good going, Texas! Some of your counties have rates as low as 19%. Interesting that basically the whole southern tier of states is balking at the snoopery. (To see your…
Yep. Times are a changin’. And the Times it is a changin’ — even if only slightly. Ten years ago, the New York Times published a snarky piece about that tiny group of loons and wackos who objected to census snoopery. Among other things, the author, Gail Collins, quoted my pal Jim Bovard. Here’s a portion of her snarkfest: How many of you out there have strong reservations about the United States Census? May I see a show of hands? I thought so. Everybody’s cool. Once again, the radio talk-show circuit has plunged us into a violent debate about an…
Every once in a while, I beat the drum for Linux. I swear it’s not just for geeks any more. After all, I’m no geek and I’ve been using Linux — and watching it get better and better — for 12 years. Windows users usually ignore me when I bang my Linux drum. Ah well; so it goes. But a couple of things happened recently that convinced me Linux has finally, truly, really, no-kidding gone beyond being a contender against Windows for the average desktop user. It has become clearly superior to Windows for the average desktop user. So, you…
An anonymous correspondent chides me: You’re WRONG, Claire! You shouldn’t be slyly urging readers to resist the census. Instead, we should be helping the census, just as all the ads and promos say. I live in a rural area in [state deleted] and I noticed that dedicated census workers had hung forms in big white baggies on the doorknobs of dozens of places I knew to be either abandoned or mere weekend or vacation cabins for people who live in cities. You don’t think all that effort should go to waste, do you? I sure don’t! So I helped the…
I’m still traveling, but now I’m in a place where I can satisfy my news addiction. It seems that a lot of 10-year-old articles about the census are turning up right now. Which isn’t a bad thing (though some of them should have been updated first and most should be more clearly marked for what they are). Ran across this one by Dave Kopel that reminds of yet another reason to tell the census-taker to go to hell: because information about you will be sold to marketers and some of it could quite easily be personally identifiable. The main thing…
An out-of-order post. Though you’re seeing this after I’ve “escaped,”** I’m writing it at 3:45 a.m. in the sleepless hours before my flight from the U.S. I’m at a friend’s house in the big city, connected to a network one of their zillions of neighbors left handily unsecured. —– I’m still excited about my trip, but I’ve been struck by pre-flight paranoia. It started yesterday as I packed. Deciding to take tea along, I slipped some regular old Lipton, then a few Earl Greys into a baggie. Finally, I tossed in a couple packets of my favorite treat-tea, the lovely…