Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It sez here I have to tell you: “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” Now, I thought and assumed you already knew that, but it appears that I have to tell you right out and assume you are too dumb to know. So, consider yourself told. There, I have now met the Federal requirements and stuff.

 

Reading. Yes, I’ve been reading:

 

My Country and My People, by Lin Yutang Tells about China back before WW2 and the commie takover.

History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. One of the 20th century’s leading logicans take a logical look at the ideas of some of the great thinkers. Very logical it is. Yes. Logical.

August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn About the opening Russian/German battle of WW1.

 

Three books by Chinese science-ficiton writer Liu Cixin (or Cixin Liu if you want his family name at the end):

I’m only about half-way through the second book, but it’s a fine tale!

 

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy This one is very grim, with a sort-of-but-not-exactly a happyish ending. Grim.

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Brian Fagan — mostly about the Medieval warm period (ca. 800-1300)

The City & The City, by China Miéville. A truly astonishing tour-de-force of story-telling. It takes a while even to figure out what’s going on. It seems to be a murder mystery, but the setting/world is so strange and bizzare, that half the fun is just gradually coming to understand the place where it is taking place. Brilliant, and highly recommended:

Kraken, by China Miéville. This one is set in London, and, ya see, there is this giant squid preserved in a museum and it gets stolen. The whole gaint tank it's in and all. Suspicion immediately fally on a religion that worships the giant squid. There are also a pair of scary evil bad-guys. And… And … well, it is dang good.

Embassytown, by China Miéville. Most science fictional aliens are not really all that alien. These ones are. Very, very alien. The humans in the story keep thinking they have figured these guys out, but … no.

 

And a few rather interesting articles:

On Psychopathy and Power
by Caitlin Johnstone

I often say that we have found ourselves ruled by psychopaths because we have a system wherein (A) those who are willing to do anything to anyone are rewarded with immense wealth, and (B) immense wealth translates directly to immense political power.

Add in the fact that studies have shown that wealth itself kills off empathy and compassion, and you’ve got yourself a perfect recipe for a plutocratic dystopia dominated by antisocial personality disorder.

I’m not really interested in getting into the specific clinical diagnoses of psychopathy and sociopathy for the purposes of this discussion.

What I’m talking about here is a specific slice of humanity that is neurologically wired in such a way that they experience the world more as a series of puzzles which can be manipulated around to get them them whatever they want regardless of who it hurts, rather than experiencing a world full of fellow sentient beings with whom you can have deep, meaningful connections and interactions. Not all people who are diagnosed as psychopaths are high-functioning enough to manipulate people at high levels, and not everyone who manipulates people in this way would necessarily be diagnosed as a psychopath or even a sociopath. Feel free to mentally substitute whatever term you prefer.

Whatever you want to call it, people who have this condition (and are able to avoid prison) tend to do quite well for themselves by our society’s standards. Because they don’t see other people as anything other than tools and resources, they don’t let empathy and compassion stand in their way when viciousness and exploitation will help them achieve their goals. Because they don’t value connections with other people, they don’t see narratives and descriptions as paths toward deeper understanding, but as tools which can be twisted and distorted in order to secure themselves more wealth, status, sex, or whatever else they want. They quickly rise to the top in corporate and financial settings, in media institutions, in government agencies, and in politics. In modern society this ability is a natural advantage that the rest of us simply cannot compete with.

[Read More]

 

Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground
by Edward Snowden

In every country of the world, the security of computers keeps the lights on, the shelves stocked, the dams closed, and transportation running. For more than half a decade, the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks has been ranked the number one risk in the US Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment – that’s higher than terrorism, higher than war. Your bank balance, the local hospital’s equipment, and the 2020 US presidential election, among many, many other things, all depend on computer safety.

And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe.

In the simplest terms, encryption is a method of protecting information, the primary way to keep digital communications safe. Every email you write, every keyword you type into a search box – every embarrassing thing you do online – is transmitted across an increasingly hostile internet. Earlier this month the US, alongside the UK and Australia, called on Facebook to create a “backdoor”, or fatal flaw, into its encrypted messaging apps, which would allow anyone with the key to that backdoor unlimited access to private communications. So far, Facebook has resisted this.

If internet traffic is unencrypted, any government, company, or criminal that happens to notice it can – and, in fact, does – steal a copy of it, secretly recording your information for ever. If, however, you encrypt this traffic, your information cannot be read: only those who have a special decryption key can unlock it.

I know a little about this, because for a time I operated part of the US National Security Agency’s global system of mass surveillance. In June 2013 I worked with journalists to reveal that system to a scandalised world. Without encryption I could not have written the story of how it all happened – my book Permanent Record – and got the manuscript safely across borders that I myself can’t cross. More importantly, encryption helps everyone from reporters, dissidents, activists, NGO workers and whistleblowers, to doctors, lawyers and politicians, to do their work – not just in the world’s most dangerous and repressive countries, but in every single country.

[Read More]

 

Well, those ought to hold you for a while. Stay deplorable, my friends!