Dreams Of Noise

Because if you believe in any sort of reincarnation you're just delaying the issue.

Because if you're bright enough to see through the lies and know that this will turn sour then you're bright enough to help those around you.

Because if you're bright enough to help those around you and you die you take other bright minds with you into your death.

And because if you're one of the bright shining ones and you die the darkness grows that much more for the rest of us.

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If the options are submit, fight or die.. I choose fight.

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poltr1

To quote Styx, "We need some long-term, slow-burn gettin' it done / And some hard-hittin' straight-shootin' son of a guns". More now than ever.

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catsittingstill.livejournal.com

Powerful and depressing stuff. I hadn't thought of the stuff about the Internet.

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docwebster.livejournal.com

I have only one thing to offer in response - remember, remember, the fifth of November.

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Time to start preparing.

1 gets you 10, we'll be next.

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redaxe.livejournal.com

Time to found and maintain control of some useful corporations. And I reiterate that it would be a Very Good Thing of there were a concerted effort to purchase control of a major media outlet by a group (or corporation!) whose intent is to provide an unbiased, or possibly liberal, POV (contra the actual ownership by effectively all such outlets now by groups and people who have the opposite POV, or at best are apathetic). (That would be a VERY long, hard effort, but worth it. I can't organize it; it would be a conflict of interest with my primary employment, which is onsite at a large bank/investment bank.) (Please, no whines about how Air America's bankruptcy proves it can't be done; they allowed themselves to move off message, and got slammed for it.)

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This is doable - if you have the money. And provided the gooberment doesn't yank your incorporation on shakey grounds.

You did rattle loose something else in my mind though - anybody who can afford to should incorporate. The rules for corporations are going to be more lax than the rules for individual citizens so personal incorporation would likely be a good thing even though it's a lot of work.

And since the men behind the curtains don't like sharing you can bet it'll be a lot harder to incorporate after then get fully vested in their power.

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saganth.livejournal.com

Europe is starting to look a lot more attractive...

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Don't worry, we'll be next...after all America is really good at exporting the American Dream.

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Well...there goes box number three in theory.

We all know what the last box of the four is and if nobody overturns this then we're gonna need it.

I urge people now - those of you with bright minds - to plan and figure out how you would take back your government.

But plan this as if you were a member of a group being sought out for death by said government because if this doesn't get fixed that's what you'll be.

*sigh*

I never thought my paranoia would be right but the universe seems to be playing true to it every thought.

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realinterrobang.livejournal.com

Now is the time for techies in countries not the US to start duplicating the backbone. Sure, right now the majority of the world's internet traffic routes through servers in the US, but it doesn't have to be that way. The US may disappear behind the Great American Firewall, but the rest of the world does not have to go with it; the architecture itself permits those of us still living in other countries to "interpret censorship as damage, and route around it."

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The problem with that is... what do you think is going to happen when the Corps control everything in America? They're going to want to do that everywhere else too.. I mean, there are New Zealand and British owned ISP's being forced by their own governments to install monitoring equipment for the FBI & CIA in their server farms in appeasement to the American government...at behest of American companies who are also pushing for American style Copyright laws.

I think the solution to retaining freedom on the net is to go underground, and develop the darknet still further.

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A solar powered wifi mesh with darknet links through the main bandwidth sources. Maybe solar lamps with wifi repeaters/mesh units in them? Attached at multiple points to the internet with darknet links.

Cheap to make and cheap to replace.

Then the only choice of the gooberments would be to go house to house to remove them all (which is like trying to kill an anthill by burning individual ants) or completely cut off the major backbone lines to prevent the "whack a mole" symptom of darknet links reappearing when cut.

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That's a pretty good idea...I mean, it's not difficult to build a small wifi web-server/router unit with a mobile broadband link and make it solar powered. Heck, you could use the casing for one of those solar powered lamps easily.

Hmm, come to think of it, aside from the mobile broadband unit, I've got everything I'd need to prototype something like that...design and build a unit and put the info out before they start to really crack down on the net.

Folks in China and places like that could use the info right now anyway.

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Unfortunately the US gooberment already has calea units at most backbone points so the choke points are already in place. But yeah I've got the servers and other such things for hosting information so I think that's a good place for me to start.

I don't think they've spread to your location yet so you better get cracking.

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Working on it...fortunately my ISP is one of the few here objecting to all this government intrusion, and they're pretty large but independent company, so they'll be one of the last to go down.

Downside, I'm in the middle of sheeple country, so I'm pretty much on me own here.

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The bad news is...every dystopia cyberpunk future is now possible, and some quite likely.

The good news...when the corporations own and control everything, that future isn't going to be sustainable or stable, economically, socially, politically or ecologically...

of course, the really bad news is that the inevitable crash is going to be a stone-cold bastard of an apocalypse... but it's going to put paid to this corruption that's poisoned civilisation once and for all, and maybe, just maybe, in a generation or two, we might be able to build something better.

Sucks to be us in the meantime though... we get to fight the system, but it's our children or grandchildren that'll reap the rewards with a bit of luck.

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Y'know...you reminded me of something.

In general the ones who see this for what it is are the ones who know how to survive.

Think about it.

A great number of people that I know directly and indirectly are people in SF/Fantasy/Filk fandom are people that have the knowledge on how to survive in the face of poverty and adversity.

These are the people who know how to grow their own food, make their own power, and in general repair things. Not all of them of course but some of those that don't know at least know who does.

That gives me some sort of hope. Not sure what kind but it's hope nonetheless.

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filkertom.livejournal.com

Hey. I've been saying for a couple of years now that I'm perfectly willing to let some of the Red State religious folk secede into their own little Gilead... and then we charge 'em 500 times the going rate for tech support. No, not 500%, 500 times.

Our subset of humanity has, I think, as large a proportion of blacksmiths, engineers, clothes makers, personal farmers, woodworkers, mechanics, and martial artists (from judo to rifleman to archer to ninja) as any group that you will find on the planet. We've got doctors, pharmacologists, military strategists, linguists, artists, writers, musicians, LIBRARIANS, home-builders, medical techs of all stripes....

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*chuckle* And people wonder why I have a policy of "no book leaves" at our house. (We're holding at 2000 books - a large chunk on self sufficiency, general education, science, electronics, some politics, and science fiction/fantasy. Not to mention repair manuals and such.)

And why I download a ton of pdfs from instructables.com on a regular basis.

Unfortunately if this all goes down the way I think it will then I'm going to be building hidden compartments into our house and soon.

Because one of the dystopian futures available to us now is Fahrenheit 451. :-(

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Doing the same, but using a PDA, solar charger and a whole stack of SD cards. Easier to hide and easier to copy and disseminate. Plus you can't encrypt print.

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That's a very good point.

The only reason I prefer print is that it's usable even if there's no electricity.

I'll eventually print out all the pdfs I get from instructables but not until I can figure out where to store them. (I have both a color laser printer and a heavy duty duplexing laser printer.)

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lock-box hidden somewhere dry perhaps? Got any partition walls?

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tcgtrf.livejournal.com

I've been saying since the last years of the 20th that *we* need to secede or go on strike or something....

I haven't been writing a lot lately because I've felt like Cassandra--right about the future but no one listens, especially since that fraud from the Chicago machine was elected, diverting progressives' attention from the real enemies.

We've already got left-wing populists and their (whether you agree with them or not) natural allies, right-wing populists, against the banking corporations and the Federal reserve and for the rights that we may need to protect ourselves.

I call for a truce, alliance, whatever for now between the two branches until we can salvage something from our beloved, lost country.

You'd be a lot better off as Gilead's ally than as their enemy. Deep down inside, they want the same thing--a place where they can live like they want without the Fedgov telling them what to do. I'm willing to grant them that if they're willing to help the rest of us win.

Tom Trumpinski

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Heck, we've got the single largest private army on Earth [the SCA]. Black powder weapons may not too damn efficient and primitive in comparison.. but every man jack of them know how to make their own ammo.

Most of us know how to make ends meet, and failing that, how to make the ends. It's the rich bastards who don't even know how to cook for themselves, [much less on a budget] that are going to suffer when shit happens.

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ldyerzsie.livejournal.com

HEY! The SCA is a corporation. And a really big one. With it's own army. Now, all we need is to raise the necessary funds and install our own puppet government. We can work this to our own benefit after all.

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ldyerzsie.livejournal.com

It wont take many years of overt Corp rule before grass-roots efforts change everything back. After all, as much as the govenor of my state kisses corporate tushy, I'm pretty sure they are already in charge and have been for a while.

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louisadkins.livejournal.com

So, you're the dictator of your own little country somewhere, and you're a rich, mean bastard. You start getting wind that the big USA is lookin' your way. Maybe it has to do with how you mistreat your citizens, or maybe it has to do with the mineral rights you just happen to be sitting on. So, you turn to your cousin who happens to have a prominent and notable seat on a multi-national corp that does business in the USA. He cuts you a wonderful deal. You give him 275 million dollars. The corp gets 250 million. The corp turns around and does business with different people in the US government, costing them about 200 million. Suddenly, the USA is looking at your neighbor for human rights violations, and is politely inquiring in to a very profitable trade agreement (through the corp) for your mined goods. They also are wanting to know, in a round about way, if you would be willing to take over your neighbor's country.. What a deal for 275 million! Sound wonderful? What if China had interest in corporations in the US? Oh, wait..

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"every politician in this country will be a prostitute."

Will be?

Someone hasn't been paying attention...

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unclelumpy.livejournal.com

Be prepared, then, for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution, on separation of church and state.

This part I disagree with. Evangelicals, fundamentalists and creationists tend not to be a demographic known for their disposable income.

Think about it, if your primary interest was your financial bottom-line, then between the two light-in-the-loafer DINKs and the Gawd-feerin' folk in the trailer... Who're YOU gonna side with?

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unclelumpy.livejournal.com

And think about this...

Rebellion... $ELL$!!!

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Well, let's not ignore the insidious economic reason for a corporation to ban abortion - the more consumers, the better. And if they have unpleasant childhoods thanks to parents that didn't want them in the first place, then here comes Uncle Globo-Chem to fill that soul hole with colorful money-erasers!

But yeah, banning gay marriage makes a lot less sense. Sure, gay married couples don't produce their own children, but they wouldn't anyway. Remember when Disney World opened their "Magical Weddings" program to gay couples, even though it wouldn't technically count? Money defeats morals EVERY time, for better or worse.

And banning evolution makes no sense at all. I can see the need to keep people stupider, but what PRODUCT could widespread creationism possibly sell? If people start READING the damn good book, there's a risk of graven image stock plummeting...

I just realized how easy it is for me to flick the evil switch and see shit from a corporation's perspective. I'm frightened and slightly aroused.

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unclelumpy.livejournal.com

This ruling sets a precedent; Spending money = Free speech.

Doesn't that mean if I get busted for picking up a hooker or buying a gram of weed, I can now realistically make a civil case out of it?

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Neither "crime" is immoral as far as I'm concerned, so knock yourself out.

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