[PrestonSturges]

I think you are confusing the right wing with the Democratic Party, proud inventors of the Klan Bake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1924_Democratic_National_Convention

And "Republican" literally means the party of strong central government. They went to war to crush "states rights," they gave America the draft and the personal income tax, Sherman's March, and burned Atlanta.

1924 was the year when the Klan started swinging towards the GOP because the Klan went berserk after the Democrat's nomination of Al Smith, a Catholic. The nomination of Smith was a major defeat to the Klan, and their loss of power helped create the coalition that would elect FDR in 1932.

But nice white supremacist talking point about how "liberals are the real racists." Want to explain why people voted for Obama, and can you do it without using a white supremacist talking point? I'm kind of guessing you can't.

[careinke]

But nice white supremacist talking point about how "liberals are the real racists." Want to explain why people voted for Obama, and can you do it without using a white supremacist talking point? I'm kind of guessing you can't.

Sorry, other than to ping the blatant ideologues once in a while, I've given up on politics as a hopeless cause.

Now I'm working on disconnecting from companies and government policies that are killing the earth and destroying individual rights. In addition, I'm learning how to harness the energy systems on the property by proper design, and use of appropriate technologies.

Finally, I'm helping others do the same as insurance against a very possible collapse. Hopefully, if enough of us do this, there will not have to be a collapse.

Anyway, this has become much more interesting to me than pointing fingers at each other while we slowly commit mass suicide. The only way to win, is not to play. Quit blaming others, pick up a shovel, and do something positive for a change.

[PrestonSturges]

The point remains that white supremacist themes are pervasive on the right.

Did this happen by accident? i don't think so.

The goal is pretty clearly to establish Fascist government at the local or national level, and they are counting on the cooperation of the people who are yapping about "tyranny" now.

[ennui2]

I didn't read the article but I would think quasi-eco-terrorists like Derrick Jensen might want to finally shut their yaps. I don't like radicalization of any stripe--the sort of radicalization that promotes vandalism or violence. I think as things get worse, you're going to have radicals on all sides. Anti-civers will be the lowest number. You'll probably have more right-wing and anarchist types, because these groups only require scapegoats to fire people up. And to me, blaming 'government' IS a scapegoat. It's looking at a symptom rather than the root problem. It's what nutcases like Alex Jones do, or at a lesser level, Glenn Beck and the right wing who constrain their rage at only one party.

[PrestonSturges]

There is no equivalent phenomenon on "the left," not that this country has a "left," or that I'd even join if there were.

Nobody is on the radio every afternoon reading Mao's little red book for instance.

But it is pretty funny that conservatives are now reading "1984" since Orwell was a socialist his whole life.

[careinke]

But it is pretty funny that conservatives are now reading "1984" since Orwell was a socialist his whole life.

That's interesting considering his book "Animal Farm".

[careinke]

But it is pretty funny that conservatives are now reading "1984" since Orwell was a socialist his whole life.

That's interesting considering his book "Animal Farm".

Then again, maybe you just made the whole socialist thing up. I have doubts Orwell would have labeled himself a socialist.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/stop-taking-orwells-name-in-vain/277027/#comments

[PrestonSturges]

But it is pretty funny that conservatives are now reading "1984" since Orwell was a socialist his whole life.

That's interesting considering his book "Animal Farm".

Then again, maybe you just made the whole socialist thing up. I have doubts Orwell would have labeled himself a socialist.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/stop-taking-orwells-name-in-vain/277027/#comments

Orwell went to Spain with the Communists to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. I don't think he was ever a real Communist, but he remained a socialist.

But hey, American conservatives latch onto just about anyone, including militant atheists like Ayn Rand and Adam Carolla.

[dorlomin]

An undercover police operative co wrote the infamous McLibel document.

[PrestonSturges]

I don't want to divert the thread from the theme of the government being prepared for problems that they may regard as inevitable while keeping us entertained with bread and circuses.

But using that as a starting point, isn't there an obvious power struggle developing where local wealthy billionaires prepare to carve up the country into private landholdings? Oh sure, they'll still have names like "Kansas" and "West Virginia" but they will be run directly by corporations with whatever level of force they need to use.

[careinke]

I don't want to divert the thread from the theme of the government being prepared for problems that they may regard as inevitable while keeping us entertained with bread and circuses.

But using that as a starting point, isn't there an obvious power struggle developing where local wealthy billionaires prepare to carve up the country into private landholdings? Oh sure, they'll still have names like "Kansas" and "West Virginia" but they will be run directly by corporations with whatever level of force they need to use.

I agree, but think the corporations are aiming at a much higher level of government. Think Monsanto, who gets special protection from the Fed. It is far more effective to get the Feds to control 50 states at once than to have to control 50 separate states.

[PrestonSturges]

Over the long term, the goal is to destroy the idea of government and elections. Don't many conservatives believe they don't control DC because of massive voter fraud?

And even if a conservative is elected and goes to prison, it still advances the goal of destroying the credibility of democracy.

To make way for a ruthless dictator, the public must be convinced Democracy itself is a scam perpetrated by shadowing figures:

In the country of the "freest democracy," (there is) an almost unlimited dictatorship indirectly through public opinion.....Democratic majority rule has by no means always dominated mankind, but on the contrary is to be found only in brief periods of history, which are always epochs of the decay of peoples and states. (Mein Kampf p451).

[Rod_Cloutier]

World war III has already begun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... LJ9h0#t=1s

(scary stuff) -how will you react?

[Graeme]

Three Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself From Online Spying

Encrypt Everything

Encryption has been around as long as the written word. In fact, written language itself is a form of encryption, albeit with a widely understood and publicly available decoding key (ie the ability to read Mandarin or Portuguese or English). Private data encryption, on the other hand, encodes the information on a hard drive, memory stick, cloud locker, or other storage medium so that without the proper “key” (that hopefully only the sender and intended recipient have access to), all the data appears as gibberish (same as trying to read Mandarin).

Encrypting your drives, both local and remote, is a really easy way to shield your personal data from prying eyes. Both Windows and Mac OS have built-in encryption systems known as Bitlocker and FileVault, respectively. On Mac:

Security and Privacy
FileVault
Turn on FileVault.
For Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise and Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise users with computers running Trusted Platform Module chip:

Control Panel
System and Security
BitLocker Drive Encryption
Turn on BitLocker
If your system isn’t equipped with a TPM chip, Bitlocker can’t help you. TrueCrypt, an open-source full-disk encryption program that hides your data on a virtual encrypted drive, and DiskCryptor, which can use any combination of AES, Twofish, and Serpent algorithms, however they aren’t nearly as picky about your hardware.

Plus they’re both free and you can use them to encrypt your cloud lockers and mobile drives with them as well. I mean, services like Dropbox and, um, just Box already encrypt the data on their servers, but it’s still readable to the service’s employees and, consequently, law enforcement. Using TC or DC to generate a virtual drive to store files within the cloud service would prevent that.

There's more here.

[Keith_McClary]

Trusted Platform

Richard Stallman's thoughts on “Trusted computing”

...
“Trusted computing” would make the practice pervasive. “Treacherous computing” is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.
...
Programs that use treacherous computing will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If Microsoft, or the US government, does not like what you said in a document you wrote, they could post new instructions telling all computers to refuse to let anyone read that document. Each computer would obey when it downloads the new instructions. Your writing would be subject to 1984-style retroactive erasure. You might be unable to read it yourself.
...
There are proposals already for US laws that would require all computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers to the Internet.
...
But even if they don't legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see “We Can Put an End to Word Attachments”). If only a treacherous-computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many people will switch to it

[PrestonSturges]

Wow, the Supreme Courts ruling on the Voting Rights Act and the instantaneous rush to enact abusive new laws goes right back to my point about how the GOP no longer gives a rats ass how it looks as they make a mad dash to create their own regional apartheid systems. They really do seem determined to enact some sort of slow ethnic cleansing of these regions even if the local economies go back to the corporate/libertarian plantation system.

But why? Do they see some looming collapse that even dedicated doomers are missing? Is it some private crackpot scenario embraced by a few senile billionaires, or do they have hard data about someting apocalyptic like ocean acidification? Heck, maybe their hatred of greenhouse gas regulation is because global warming is key to their Lex Luthor vision of a world being destroyed for everyone but them.

[careinke]

Wow, the Supreme Courts ruling on the Voting Rights Act and the instantaneous rush to enact abusive new laws goes right back to my point about how the GOP no longer gives a rats ass how it looks as they make a mad dash to create their own regional apartheid systems. They really do seem determined to enact some sort of slow ethnic cleansing of these regions even if the local economies go back to the corporate/libertarian plantation system.

But why? Do they see some looming collapse that even dedicated doomers are missing? Is it some private crackpot scenario embraced by a few senile billionaires, or do they have hard data about someting apocalyptic like ocean acidification? Heck, maybe their hatred of greenhouse gas regulation is because global warming is key to their Lex Luthor vision of a world being destroyed for everyone but them.

Preston.....Go take your meds.

[Pops]

Three Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself From Online Spying

Encrypt Everything

The title is misleading, saying encryption is the key to privacy from "online spying" but talking about storage.

Encrypted communication by US citizens is the ONE thing the NSA can or at least IS, keeping forever -

The documents state that the NSA is not allowed to intentionally target persons known to be located in the U.S., but describe several provisions under which the agency is allowed to retain, or share with other U.S. agencies, communications of U.S. persons that were acquired inadvertently. These include cases when the data is likely to contain foreign intelligence, information on criminal activity or is encrypted.

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/465 ... efinitely/

.

[PrestonSturges]

Wow, the Supreme Courts ruling on the Voting Rights Act and the instantaneous rush to enact abusive new laws goes right back to my point about how the GOP no longer gives a rats ass how it looks as they make a mad dash to create their own regional apartheid systems. ...

Preston.....Go take your meds.

You had to whine about my comment that is on topic?
That's the best kind of response, the kind that that shows I clearly hit a nerve.

[PrestonSturges]

Also this week, Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina all try to pass abortion bans at night, in secret.

There is a shadow government at work. They are coordinated, but what do they want and what is driving them?