Occupy Your Ownself
Claire Wolfe reflects on the usefulness of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Bottom line: physician free thyself.
YOU are the one thing that government and their Siamese twins in the financial world can’t manipulate, can’t “reform,” can’t control. Your independent mind and your intelligent desire to live separately from their concepts are the most powerful freaking weapons in the whole wide world.
Can government and their incestuous siblings in power really, truly eff up your world? Oh my. It’s the one thing they’re absolutely great at. We always have to work around the damnable things they do, and it gets harder by the day.
But that won’t change if we do them the honor of throwing ourselves at them in protest. That just tells them we believe in their authority.
You want a real freedom revolution? Then go inside your own head and demand that you free you. Heavens, the influence you can have there! The change you can spark! It’s awesome.
You can just go in there and tell your ownself what it needs to do to be more free — and it happens. No v*ting, no protesting, no petitioning, no lawmaking required.
Linux In JavaScript, With Persistent Storage
timothy at Slashdot - Back in May, Slashdot linked to Fabrice Bellard's jslinux, a PC emulator written in JavaScript, booting a tiny command-line Linux. Fabrice Bellard is the creator of QEMU, "a generic machine emulator and virtualizer." Kevin van der Vlist has extended jslinux with persistent storage. Aim your modern browser here, wait a little while for 5 megs of Linux bits to download, login as "root" with no password. "cat README" for instructions on setting up the persistent mount. Cool.
The Air I Breathe
L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - Neil has often referred to "Western Civilization". Here he explains what that means to him.
What is Western Civilization? The undeniable triumph, ten thousand years in the making, of the individual, in a society of self-governing individuals, deeply rooted in a respect for knowledge and tradition, yet continually looking to a new and even better future, a system that cherishes institutions of private property, individual achievement, and equality before the law, whose only operational boundaries are purely ethical ones, and to whom, beyond that, not even the sky is the limit.
It is nice to be loved. I make my second Clinton "Enemies List."
Mike Vanderboegh has apparently attracted the attention of Hillary Clinton. Cool.
Really.
Hillary.
Damn.
The only woman on the planet who scares me more than my ex-wife.
The Third Wave, CNC, Stereolithography, and the end of gun control
Clarke at Popehat - CNC metalworking machinery will very soon make victim disarmament impossible. Yay! [claire]
And speaking of technology-driven emancipation, we arrive at the thesis statement for today’s rant: the end of gun control is not politically or culturally driven, but was a historical inevitability that was written into the book of destiny by 1810, when Joseph Jacquard started using punched cards to control weaving patterns on his looms and when the practice of chucking rotary cutters into lathe headstocks was adopted en masse at water powered factories in Western Massachusetts in response to British attempts to confiscate American civilian-owned firearms.
Respecting Intellectual Property
Libertarians seem to be of two minds on Intellectual Property (IP). Many authors I know, e.g. Claire Wolfe, L. Neil Smith, & Scott Bieser, firmly believe in it. Many respectable anarchists, led it seems primarily by N. Stephan Kinsella, do not. Mr. Kinsella has written a short book, Against Intellectual Property, which is available as a free download at mises.org/books/against.pdf or on dead trees (for $6), also at mises.org. L. Neil Smith published a series of articles supporting IP in The Libertarian Enterprise: Neil, Richard Bartucci, Cathy L.Z. Smith (Neil's wife), Cathy.
As a practical matter, I don't find Kinsella's and (Neil) Smith's arguments to be all that different. Smith argues that he creates what he writes, from his mind and his effort, hence he should be able to control it. Kinsella says that ideas are not scarce, hence should be unownable, yet he acknowledges that they can be protected by contract, if those who have explicitly agreed to the contract are the only ones controlled by it (no "social contract" here). Smith states that he doesn't intend to defend his intellectual property by using the power of the state to assault and kidnap copyright violators. But he doesn't go into the details of how he will enforce it. I have read many times that intellectual property requires state enforcement. My disagreement with that is the reason I'm writing this essay.
First off, I want to be clear that my support of intellectual property in no way involves the state. I no not believe in prison. I created NoMoreCages.org, dedicated to eliminating the concept of prison. "Caging humans is inhuman. Stop it." I consider arrest to be newspeak for kidnapping. But I support Neil's assertion that creators own their work, and Kinsella's argument that only explicit contract can protect it.
The core of my argument is that enforcement is not the issue here. The issue is respect. If an author or inventor spends his precious time creating a story or a tool or toy that enhances my life, my respect and gratitude to him for doing so will cause me to naturally respect his wishes for compensation for his work. If I wish an author/inventor to be able to create more stories/inventions, I will want to pay her to enable that. Respecting a creator will also cause me to naturally disrespect someone who copies her work and attempts to pass it off as his own.
But this is copyright with no teeth. It's patent with no enforcement. Nonsense. We who believe a stateless world will be a better world are already proposing a reality where your reputation is your most valuable asset. Without a good reputation, insurance companies won't back you, you become an outlaw, and if someone decides to rob you, or shoot you, you will have little but your own gun and ingenuity to protect you. So copy a book, or a computer program, or the design for a better mousetrap, when the creator of those has not granted you license, and people who respect the rights of creators will shun you, and you could be in much worse trouble than being kidnapped and put in a cage, as the state will do to you now.
So how will copyright and patent work in the stateless new world? As usual with arguments about agorist society, I don't know. The solutions will be as many and varied as there are people to create them. But here's one likely scenario. The click-through EULA's (End User License Agreements) that we all routinely ignore now, will be backed by digital signatures, proof that you agreed to them. Give away that copy of The Probability Broach, and Neil will have proof that you agreed not to, and most arbitration and mediation services will support his side of that very real contract. Make him whole or suffer docking of your insurability rating. Enough of those, and you're as good as hanged.
Of course, open source will still exist. In both the copyleft viral form and the variety of Creative Commons licenses. I distribute most of the software I write (that doesn't belong to someone who paid me to write it) with the Apache License. You may use it and change it for any purpose, as long as you give me credit. In the stateless new world, Cory Doctorow will continue to provide free copies of his novels, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute will continue to provide free PDF downloads of their books, if you have the patience to find them. But Neil and Claire and Scott will be able to enforce their copyrights, better than they can today. And I will continue to respect their desires about the copying of their writing. I hope you do too.
Obama’s Very Real Death Panel
Anthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com - the man who accused the Tea Party of planning to create death panels to ration health care has a death panel of his own, tasked with picking those to target with drone assassination. They're secret, not authorized by any law, and answer to nobody.
Let that sink in. The U.S. presidency, supposed leader of the free world, has a clandestine committee that chooses American citizens to assassinate. This from the administration that promised unprecedented transparency and a ratcheting back of Bush-era civil liberties abuses. This from the president who vowed to restore habeas corpus and subject executive war powers to judicial scrutiny. This from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
There is a more fundamental lesson to be learned, however, and one to remember for the ages: This is the nature of the state. It is, by its institutional nature, always and everywhere seeking to expand power in any way it can. To claim and practice the power to kill on its own unreviewable prerogative is simply the fulfillment of its very design. At times of crisis, especially concerning national security, states almost always tend toward aggrandizement toward their realization as totalitarian entities.
Steve Jobs, RIP
Steve Jobs, a founder of Apple Computer, died yesterday, at the young age of 56. I have respected him since I first marveled at lisp running on "this little toy computer", as I ran Coral Common Lisp on my Mac Plus in 1989. I have owned a IIcx, IIci, IIfx, two iMacs, and three iPhones since then. And I have always loved Steve's dedication to making "insanely great" products. The image above is from the home page at apple.com. Full resolution version here. Apple has a dedication page at apple.com/stevejobs:
Steve Jobs
1955-2011
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend
and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built,
and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
YouTube video of Steve Jobs reading "The Crazy Ones", which Richard Dreyfuss read in one of the "Think Different" commercials. "While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." Thank you, Steve Jobs, for changing the world.
Stories of note:
- Time Magazine special Steve Jobs commemorative issue.
- Wired's home page is black and filled with quotes. And they have a tribute video and story.
- Steve Jobs and the Reserved Seat - Alex Heath at Cult of Mac reminds us that there was a seat reserved for Jobs at Monday's iPhone 4S introduction. They must have known that he was ailing, making their performances that day very difficult for all.
- Boing Boing changed their site's style to resemble the Mac Plus.
- And thousands more.
Quote
From tmm:
"So we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner who orders executions without trial? The guys at the Onion ought to just give up." -- Bear
The Grift
L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - the state is a con, perpetrated by the best con men in the world.
The grift. It's as old as humanity—possibly even older. Perhaps there were Neanderthal con men, Homo habilis hucksters, long before Homo sap (no abbreviation) first raised his credulous eyes to the stars.
The word is slang, a noun, according to Dictionary.com, meaning "1 ... a group of methods for obtaining money falsely through the use of swindles, frauds, dishonest gambling, etc. 2. money obtained from such practices." But there's more than merely money involved (although that's a big part of it) there's the matter of power. The United States of America—just like every other nation-state that ever existed, every empire, kingdom, and satrapy—is first and foremost a griftocracy.
Perhaps a better definition may be "the act of accumulating power and wealth by pretending to struggle with easily-solved or nonexistent problems." Almost invariably, it turns out that the problem isn't the problems themselves, but the individuals who stand to gain most from them.
...
I'm not going to explain that, either, not here, not now. I want to be paid to solve these problems, at least a fraction as well as the grifters being paid handsomely to create and sustain and exacerbate them. The solutions each involve writing a book (what did you expect—I'm a writer, after all) of a kind that some people, afterward, will deeply regret can't be unwritten, a book that will fundamentally alter absolutely everything that most folks think with regard to these "problems".
It isn't rocket surgery.
It isn't brain science.
And it isn't free.
