Talk about SHTF! Here’s the blog of somebody who survived a solid year of you-know-what impacting the rotary airfoil. He now teaches others.

His English isn’t perfect. Never mind that. (Tip o’ hat to A.)

—–

And you’ve probably heard about this incredibly lucky young lady rescued from her car in the Arizona highlands after nine days stranded in snow.

This article doesn’t say it, but she was apparently on an extended road trip, wandering around with no destination and nobody knowing where she was. In December. A mile above sea level. With snowstorms forecast. With a dead cellphone. With no emergency gear. Not even a warm coat or a blanket in her vehicle.

I won’t say anything about the gene pool. I realize even the best prepared among us could get stuck in deadly circumstances beyond our control. But if you want a textbook case in how not to survive, here you have it.

Almost as bad as those young morons a few years ago who decided to take Nevada dirt roads when the freeway was closed by snow. You do have to give them points for pluck, if not common sense.

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• Fascinating scientific detective work reconstructing the DNA of the black plague. Fascinating, too, how even something as horrible as plague can ultimately change the world for the better.
• See? We told you never to talk to cops.
• Oooh. This is gonna be good. “A tale of suspense, pyromania and sexual tension, coming to an Amazon near you!” J.D. Tuccille can write like nobody’s business. He’s even entertaining when he’s just blogging about being a dad. I’m gettin’ my hands on a review copy ASAP!
• Bill St. Clair on respecting intellectual property without government.
• Is it a good sign or a bad sign when they’re talking about the Weimar hyperinflation on CBS?
• Way to go, little ISP.
• Hey, Silver now has a blog.

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The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship just got the kind of review authors dream about.

Thank you, Frank DuBois! And thank JF and the good people at Paladin for pointing that out while I was keeping my mouth shut last week.

I must also note that this is probably the first time I’ve ever been mentioned (favorably, at least) by a former Secretary of Anything. He’s got a good blog, too. Very prolific and worth checking out, especially for Westerners and people interested in the kind of land/water/leave-me-alone issues so prominent in the West.

Also: The Bad Attitude Guide is now available on Kindle at half the price of the print edition. Yay!!!

It joins several of my other titles, including at least one otherwise out-of-print book. Thank you, good Paladin people!

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If you scroll down and look to the right just below the archives, you’ll see a “real” blogroll. Until now, there’s been only a redundant set of links to other BHM blogs that Oliver put in that spot.

My blogroll isn’t strictly a blogroll because not everything on it is a blog. What I’m aiming to do over time is list the top two to 10 sites, blog or otherwise, in some of the most important liberty categories. This is just a beginning. While a blogroll is no big deal, I know (like a certain something else, everybody has one), this one is connected with some re-thinking I’ve been doing about the nature of this blog.

More on that soon …

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There’s a new blog in town. Or rather, about as far out of town as it can get. In any case, it’s a charmer for everybody who’s interested in things like off-grid technology, permaculture, DIY homebuilding, and independent living in general.

It’s The Independent Spirit.

TIS is the work of three people you sort of know if you regularly visit Living Freedom: Joel of The Ultimate Answer to Kings, Ian, and Debra. The latter two you may have seen as “M.” and “landlady” on Joel’s blog.

I suspect The Independent Spirit blog was born from the clamor of Get Rich Slowly readers to know more about Ian’s prize-winning video success story. In any case, it’s a great addition to the blogosphere by three people who write well and are super-doers. (And since I’ve known all three for years, I can verify that they really know what they’re talking about — and tell you that Ian’s even more handsome and charming in person than he is in his video. He’s Hollywood-handsome, in fact, and it’s always been an amazing thing to me that he prefers hanging out with a bunch of desert rats and being a desert rat himself rather than … well, doing the usual things Hollywood-handsome men do.)

Anyhow, prepare for some good reading and great information from three bright, charming, cussedly independent freedomistas.

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Few days ago, for reasons that escape me, I got curious about the fate of Laissez Faire City. If you’ve been around a while you might remember LFC as a hopeful and apparently well-funded effort to build a libertarian community in Costa Rica. That is, a hopeful, well-funded, and unfortunately badly “mis-mangled” project that died aborning.

Wanting to see if there were any shreds of it remaining, I googled it startpaged it duckduckgoed it and found, sadly though not surprisingly, that it has disappeared without a ripple. The ‘Net that Never Forgets has forgotten it. Even its Wikipedia entry simply redirects to a page on anarchist utopian communities — which then completes the humiliation by not even mentioning it. The scamdog site that once gleefully tracked old, dead, and sometimes criminally misbegotten libertopias is also no more, taken over by a cybersquat operation that offers links to dog medicines, dogs for sale, and dog training.

Right on the first page of the search results, though, was a link to my old Wolfesblog, now kindly archived by Bill St. Clair.

If you’re interested in Laissez Faire City (and it seems nobody is), Patri Friedman has an ancient account that pretty much accords with my slight experience with the project.

But failed libertopias aside (and there’s a mindfield of them littering the recent past), I couldn’t resist clicking through a few weeks of old blog entries made by me and my fellow Wolfesblogistas circa 2003, then clicking through the links I found in those entries.

Lots of links are as dead as Laissez Faire City, of course. But I was amazed at how many are still alive and worth a visit. The scientists of AstroCapella are still making beautiful music about astrophysics despite the RIAA’s hilarously wrongheaded efforts to stop them. My favorite is still the Swift Song, even if it was commissioned by NASA.

Alan Bock still offers his ode to living the principled life.

Lots of good old stuff back there.

The thing that struck me most, though, is what has happened (or not happened) with so many of the beastly privacy threats that were making the news back then. In 2003, I was pretty sure that by now everything we bought would carry an individual RFID tag, and possibly that millions of damnfools would already be lining up for their chip injections. That hasn’t happened. Were we privacy doomsayers just being hysterical back then? Was the threat never that terrible? Or did it not happen because smart, tough people like Katherine Albrecht (and, as Ted Dunlap points out in the comments section, thousands more informed and angry people) fought back?

Other privacy threats … well, who knows? Take DARPA’s lovely [ahem] proposal for LifeLog (and more here) — a program to track every, single e-blip about every, single human being for a lifetime. That’s every email you ever sent, every webpage you ever visited, every report card you got in school, every job evaluation, every cellphone call or text message, every photo ever taken of you, every medical exam, every tax you ever paid, every ticket you ever got, every everything.

Terrible, scary sh*t. So … Was LifeLog among the many “bright” ideas of our SuperSTASI that just went away for lack of initiative or funding? Or are there computers in the Pentagon or deep below Langley whirring our life histories away right this minute? We may never know. Or by the time we find out, the news will earn 20 seconds of infamy followed by yawns. Lord knows enough real privacy threats have burdened us in the meantime.

Anyhow, it was an interesting trip down old bromidic Memory Lane.

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Excellent idea from Top of the Chain via Borepatch: a BUYcott to support Travis Corcoran, aka TJIC.

Top of the Chain sez:

Massachussetts has arbitrarily decided that the writer of a blog, in exercising his First Amendment right to infringe on his Second Amendment right by disarming him.

Travis is going to need money for the legal bills that are sure to follow. He runs an online comic book store. There are already comic book artists that are speaking out against him. What sweet irony would it be to buy something from Travis to help him make a living, that came from one of these bigoted fools?

Not interested in comics? Travis also has an online rental service for how-to videos of all sorts, from crafts to combat: SmartFlix.com.

I don’t agree with everything Travis writes, especially his belief that assassination is a valid political tool. He’s … um, more radical than I. (Now there’s something you won’t hear too often in these parts.) But even less should anybody agree with the thugs trying to deprive him of his first, second, and (as Buckeye Copperhead points out) his fourth amendment rights, as well — simply for making a remark that is roughly on par with the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea — only better because it explicitly seeks to save the innocent.

Spread the word — and some bux if you can — to BUYcott for TJIC.

The other day when TJIC’s friend Chris first posted about this outrage in the comments section and asked what can WE do, I didn’t answer. I’m not so good at being put on the spot for solutions. Bless the brilliance of the gunblogosphere.

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Hey. I just noticed that BHM webmaster Oliver Del Signore has been blogging up a storm since just before Christmas. (And apparently blogging a big enough storm to dent in the top of his car.)

I can’t imagine how he finds the time to say so much and say it so well, since I knew he was already working 12 hour days before he started blogging so prolifically.

I confess to being the friend that he refers to in his blogs on Terry Pratchett Discworld books (there; Oliver and I now have dueling Amazon links) and the Judy Holliday movie Born Yesterday. I appreciate your discretion, Oliver. But it’s okay to “out” me on books and movies. :-)

But hey, fella, if we’re such friends, how come you never told me you were blogging — let alone doing it so well?

Lucky readers. Now you’ve got an extra great place to visit on days when Living Freedom is blank. Or even on days I’m being brilliant. Oliver may be moreso. :-)

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