Back in November, I wrote about defending personal boundaries. I typoed, then later corrected, the headline; but as several people pointed out, the typo made a certain kind of sense. So here it is again. In the original, I didn’t spend much time on why personal boundaries matter to freedom. MamaLiberty did that in the comments section: I think the boundaries, and setting them, are an integral part of self ownership. If we know for sure that we alone own our lives and are responsible for them … we are at least not as vulnerable. False guilt and ownership/responsibility issues…
Category: Resistance
Sometimes you need to say “no” to Big Brother
Charles Hugh Smith created this chart way back when to show the vast complex dedicated to preserving the status quo and offers this related comment now: There is a peculiar divide between the conventional and unconventional perception of the resilience/vulnerability of the Status Quo. The conventional view sees the Status Quo as stable and powerful enough to weather any threat or storm short of a full-scale thermonuclear war (i.e. an exchange of 1,000+ nuclear warheads) or climate catastrophe (meltdown of the Antarctic ice cap, etc.). The unconventional view is that the Status Quo is increasingly vulnerable to a “Black Swan”…
For Egyptians now. Might come in handy for us later. Well, except for that one part. Sure do hope somebody posts a translation of the whole thing, not just these excerpts.
How Egypt switched off the ‘Net. And how Egyptians — and hacktivists the world over — are routing around the damage. (ADDED: And here’s yet another way — thanks to engineers at Google and Twitter.) “Anonymous: A net gain for liberty.” Dmitry Orlov is interesting and the wording of the headline may be misleading. But why should anyone have to have faith in any human institution? How about confidence, suspicion, contempt, etc. based on performance? “What is a gold standard?” Interesting to see the mainstream financial media finally beginning to address the question without immediately tossing out words like “fringe,”…
Kitty Antonik Wakfer whacks all of us who say we support WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, but who haven’t cancelled our Amazon and PayPal accounts or cut up our MasterCards and Visas. She does one very good thing, which is to provide a list of possible payment alternatives — even if many of them haven’t reached the point of sustainability (and may never) and others aren’t really applicable. But the whole piece also does one very bad thing. It implies that because she has chosen the course of boycotting businesses on behalf of WikiLeaks, others who haven’t are wrongheaded at best,…
MS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far. Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t…
Borepatch contributes this fine graphic to the cause of Travis Corcoran, the victim of Massachusetts hysteria who lost his first and second amendment rights this week: Turns out Corcoran’s blog is the fairly well-known “Dispatches from TJICistan” (now taken down by its owner — temporarily, we can hope). Here’s Borepatch’s eloquent take on the case. The graphic is for the use of anyone who’d like to support Corcoran. And if anybody here doesn’t understand its meaning, or would just like to see one of the all-time great movie scenes (Borepatch also has the clip, but it bears endless repeating): (Tip…
So. Did you break any good laws yesterday? Any bad ones? No need to confess, of course, but it would be entertaining and instructive to see some of your more creative victimless lawbreaking in the comments section. You don’t even need to have done it yesterday. (After all, no good Freedom Outlaw is going to break a law, let alone perform the act on schedule, just because some blogger thinks it’s a good idea.) What? You say you didn’t break any laws yesterday? Not one? Were you in a coma all day or what? Short of that, you must simply…
Today is that silliest of all holidays, Martin Luther King Day. Okay, the man had his good points. But does anybody on the planet really believe he’s the one American who merits a holiday in his honor (ever since Washington and Lincoln got combined into the drearily homogenized “Presidents Day”)? Ridiculous! What makes him so special he should be elevated above Jefferson, Franklin, Thoreau, Washington (Booker T.), Lysander Spooner, Victoria Woodhull, George Washington Carver, Clara Barton, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaron Copland, Alexander Graham Bell, Anne Hutchinson, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nellie Bly, Malcolm X, Andrew Carnegie, Maria…