To those of a certain age, “Telex” may evoke memories of large, unwieldy, chattering ancestors of the fax machine. Today Telex is something else: a potentially revolutionary way to route around Internet censorship. S., who found the information, comments (this will make more sense if you’ve read a bit on the above links): I suspect there will be a number of interesting variations on this technology. For example, the The Mental Militia forum is almost certainly monitored by one or more Three-Letter Aacronyms. The Telex approach requires many different machines in the network to run a Telex server, and is…
Category: Resistance
Sometimes you need to say “no” to Big Brother
Moving beyond misconceptions Comment threads on part I and part II were full of interesting insights. Well, comments around here nearly always are. But these were interesting for the mix of wisdom and folly they contained — both held with equal passion. When I challenged people (sarcastically, I admit) to point me toward a single local government that consistently and reliably obeyed the law, respected individuals, and kept within its bounds, people responded with exactly the sort of examples that proved my point. Yes, you can demonstrate that when local governments become sufficiently corrupt and abusive, angry voters will rise…
First they came for the … One of the hardest things about living in a police state is watching other people be crushed by state power and feeling unable to do a thing about it. We read Pastor Neimoeller’s famous lines as a warning to ourselves. But really, there’s not much chance of heeding the warning in a way that changes anything — except perhaps for the worse. If the police state is as ruthless (and as popular among the citizens) as Hitler’s, speaking out is only likely to get the speaker rounded up along with all the other “enemies…
Still deadlining this week — on every day but Wednesday when I snuck away with girlfriends for an orgy of junque shopping. So still only “lite” posting. But I’m working on another Big, Heavy Tome of a Thought, which I’ll probably drop onto the blog with a floor-shattering thud next week. In the meantime … It’s so weird how we just take news like this for granted now. “Today you were lucky, but you will have to be lucky always. We only have to be lucky once.” Why the IRA was successful and Al Quaeda not, according to a very…
Yeah. what he said. —– ADDED: And what he said, too. (Tip o’ hat to LD.) Except that it is of course about the Declaration of Independence. And there are many ways to declare it. I have trouble with holidays. Nearly all of them. Because the “official” line, whatever it may be depending on the day, always removes the meat and substitutes pabulum. And the missing-the-pointness of Independence Day is one of the saddest things. These guys, Kevin and the Arctic Patriot, say what I, in sorrow, can’t say on the day.
That was the greeting on an email that popped into my mailbox bright and early July 1. Surprised the heck out of me, of course. A friendly stranger had promised himself last December to give me a “Christmas in July” smile (and that you did, B). So Merry Christmas to you, too. And why not? It’s Independence Day. But it’s hard to celebrate the birth of freedom while enduring freedom’s death agonies. Somehow this weekend’s three-day pops, sizzles, and crackles of fireworks sound hollow (wonder how long it’ll be before SWAT teams mow children down in their living rooms for…
Good work up there, you Canadians! But don’t you always get a kick out of these statistics on the size of underground economies? Seriously. They know this how? (Tip o’ hat to C^2.) Remember, when your camera-containing device gets “lost” or ever-so-slightly altered in police custody, there’s always this. (Tip o’ hat to S^2.) Oh, the little people are getting so uppity! You know something will soon fall down and go bust when “experts” are this confident that everything is rosy. July 4 by Thomas Sowell. Two really good (and coincidentally related) ones from Get Rich Slowly: “Defining Your Financial…
Everything is illegal these days. You know it. You’re lucky if you get through your first cup of coffee without committing a federal felony or three. Your state legislature churns out new offenses targeting you for improper swimming gear or an unlicensed lemonade stand. As we saw yesterday, mere countycrats may already be building a SWAT team to raid your unpermitted garden shed. That sucks, of course. But the silver lining is that when everything is a crime, everybody is an outlaw — and inevitably a gratifying minority of new-minted enemies of the state embrace their status, don their broad-brimmed…
I’m deadlining this week and into next. So a couple of blog entries I’ve been noodling may have to wait. One was to be about attitudes of independence. Rather than making you wait, then drowning you in prose, I thought it might brighten your day (and seriously compress your reading time!) to have the great links I planned to build the story around. Here goes: Windfall. And its backstory. What do you do when your neighbor’s storm-fallen tree creates havoc in your backyard? Stop calling them victims! says a woman who created a summer of joy for herself and her…
I admire and shake my head at the brass-balled hackery of LulzSec and Anonymous. I think these guys are gloriously crazy and that they’re either going to save the world or get their asses ignominiously whupped. Or both. For sure, they’re getting into the pit with the biggest and most ruthless of Big Dogs, breezily unaware that they’re likely to get their throats torn out. The world needs people like that. It’s so good not to be one of them. Watching them got me wondering: Whatever happened to the glorious and not-so-grand tradition of monkeywrenching? Sure, those guys of LulzSec…