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Living Freedom by Claire Wolfe. Musings about personal freedom and finding it within ourselves.

Want to Comment on a blog post? Look for and click on the blue No Comments or # Comments at the end of each post.



Archive for the ‘Resistance’ Category

Claire Wolfe

The black bagging of Adam Kokesh

Friday, May 24th, 2013

Jeff Berwick’s take on the strange public “disappearing” of Adam Kokesh.

You’d think that, with every public thing now being videotaped, the thug class would, at minimum, become more careful and cagey. Instead, they’re ramping up their violence and their sheer, bloody brazenness.

Good. This means they’re scared. (And scared of activists who are, after all, people who are still hopeful enough to ask Massah to relent just a tiny bit.) Bad. For the reasons expressed in Berwick’s headline.

Anybody hereabouts in contact with Kokesh?

Claire Wolfe

Weekend freedom question a few days late (or a few days early depending on how you look at it): The ultimate impact of 3D printing

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

A friend and I got to talking about the deeper implications of Cody Wilson’s “alarming” achievement (which, naturally, has already been trumped and will soon be trump-trump-trump-trumped ad infinitum).

My friend said that the real achievements will be in 3D-printed firing mechanisms and make-at-home-and-throw-away magazines. (Perhaps he’ll come here and give a more thorough explanation than I just did.)

As far as firearms go, that may be correct. But he got me thinking about the broader, long-term implications of 3D printing. Cory Doctorow speculated about that clear back in 2006 in his short story “Printcrime.” (Amazing foresight there, CD.)

So the question for today is: Will 3D printing do for physical objects what the Internet has done for communications? To wit: What will happen to patents and trademarks? Will this lead to a vast decentralization (right down to home-workshop level) of manufacturing of everything from toasters to automobiles? How will governments and mega-corps fight against the technology (as you know they will)? Will there be a huge burst of creativity as high-tech “tinkerers” get their hands on ever-more-affordable printers and open-source plans? Will innovators get screwed over by opportunists? Will there be greater prosperity as the price of thousands of objects drops? Or higher prices and political repression? What products will be most changed? Where will we be with this five years from now? Ten? Twenty-five?

Claire Wolfe

Tuesday links

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
  • Lessons from the singing spaceman (and a reminder of how only NASA could ever have made outer space so darned dull).
  • Beretta says bye-bye Maryland.
  • The Lulz Liberator. This one was made on a cheaper printer, fired multiple shots, and has a rifled barrel. Nope, you really can’t stop the signal.
  • “We’ve comforted ourselves in all of this with the belief that, while government might potentially have all of this power, it would rarely use it or that, when it did, its use would be well-intentioned and circumscribed. Plus we had rules and systems to stop any abuse: The Bill of Rights, the due process clause, oversight by the media and courts, the two-party system, and strong procedural requirements.” Ha ha ha ha ha.
  • “Even billionaires keep their mouths shut.” John Kass recalls how he learned about Chicago-style politics. (We’re all living in Chicago now.)
  • Gold markets rigged? This time, even respectable Barrons admits gold bugs have a point.
  • Yeah, what Kent said on Kokesh’s armed march. And on Kokesh’s kidnapping-by-cop”.
  • I do find it odd, though, that in all this flapdoodle about Kokesh’s proposed armed march on DC, not one person has mentioned that the same thing was tried not so long ago in even more radical form. Big hoo-hah over it then, too. But that was in the Fidonet days when hoo-hahs didn’t make so much noise in the wider world. Linda Thompson. Ms “Acting Adjutant General” indeed …
  • ADDED: Awesome. And a high school girl did it.
Claire Wolfe

The history of smuggling

Monday, May 20th, 2013

Great piece from the great Paul Rosenberg. Smuggling as free trade and a boon to mankind. Which may be why the history books don’t like to talk about it?

Claire Wolfe

On unstoppable signals and other sunny-day thoughts

Monday, May 6th, 2013

liberator_2

I think this makes me the 3,456th gunblogger to “announce” Defense Distributed’s proudest new achievement, The Liberator. Although their video pairs it with images of the Liberator bomber, we know which WWII equipment they really named it after.

I believe I’m also the 1,274th blogger to immediately think (if not immediately say), “You can’t stop the signal!”

And you can’t, you know. Nobody can.

I think Cody Wilson is a brave genius — who’s cruising for a terrible fed-bruising and who’ll deserve our ardent support (and contributions to his legal defense fund) when it comes.

I think the hysteria about criminals suddenly being able to make their own weapons (e.g. here and here) is … well, hysterical.

Because aside from the marvelous modern technology of 3D printing, “criminals” (and schoolkids and anybody else) have had the ability to make their own single-shot .22 firearms for decades. The darned thing was called the zip gun, and the last time the media got its undies in a bunch about it was ca. 1955.

But how many zip guns have you seen or heard of in your entire life? They seem to have only one modern application (if the New York Times has got it right; always an iffy proposition): being tossed together in a hurry to be turned in for profit at anti-gunner buyback programs. Even that was apparently a brief, limited, though seemingly lucrative, revival.

And isn’t that a marvelous bit of enterprise?

Still, if criminals haven’t been making their own firearms all this time when all they needed was a metal tube, a rubber band, a block of wood, and a nail (BTW, exactly the same firing pin The Liberator uses), Schumer & Co. can unclench their sphincters about the possibility of the meth-head down the street setting up his $8,000 (or even $1,200) 3D printer and whipping out weapons of mass destruction.

—–

But the signal is being sent. It can’t be stopped. And The Liberator (bless you, Cody & friends) is merely the beginning. No, the beginning of the beginning.

Is it true that 3D printers can print new 3D printers? Well, why not? And the printing goes on.

It’s entertaining to watch politicians squirm and media blondies tsk tsk. It’s instructive to speculate about what pols will attempt to ban, license, or otherwise control next. Three-D printers? Plastics or metals that can be used for printing? Homemade guns? Plastic guns? Guns whose serial numbers aren’t in a government database, complete with owner’s name? (Oh yes, they’d love that one.)

Warning: chaos ahead as the try to jam the signal Defense Distributed is beaming.

The one sure bet: They’ll focus on controlling guns, printer technology, gun parts, tech buyers, gun making, gun, gun, gun, guns — when what they really fear (and need to fear) is information loose in the world.

I don’t know how to build a gun. Don’t care. I have no interest in building my own. But I can download all manner of files, including ones that have already been subject to suppression attempts. And so can you. And so can we all. And it only takes one person saving those files and making them available to others (and of course it’s already gone dramatically beyond that) for the signal to beam across the universe.

I keep remembering that the Soviet Union was brought down, in part, by fax machines — inferior technology that barely lasted a few years in the U.S. before being obsoleted by better tech. But given the USSR’s own long-term problems, all it took was one creaky bit of information technology in the hands of dissidents and malcontents to give the rickety old structure a toppling push.

Obama surely didn’t mean it the way some of us might like to take it when he burbled and blathered recently about government not being some far-off tyranny, but ultimately being us. In the cliched and moronic way he meant it — well, happy horsesh*t, Mr. O. But in the way things might really unfold one day, yes — we are the best and ultimately the only valid governors of ourselves.

Interesting times, interesting times. And today, on this lovely spring afternoon, the sun of freedom is shining a little brighter than before.

Claire Wolfe

Mike Vanderboegh, smuggler
and one heck of a speechmaker

Sunday, April 21st, 2013

The incomparable Mike Vanderboegh spoke yesterday from deep within enemy territory.

Source for those who can’t see the embed. Or Read the transcript here.

I don’t usually have the patience to view 15-minute YouTube videos, but this is terrific stuff and only gets better as it winds to its conclusion. It opens:

My name is Mike Vanderboegh and I’m a smuggler. I am from the great free state of Alabama and I am a Three Percenter.

If you need to pigeonhole my politics I consider myself a Christian libertarian. I believe in free men, free markets, the rule of law under the Founder’s Republic and that the Constitution extends to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or religion.

I most especially believe in the right of the people to keep and bear arms as the ultimate guarantor of liberty.

I have also been called a “seditionist” by members of the current regime. If faithfully fulfilling my oath to the Founders’ Republic and unrelenting hostility to those who would undermine and overthrow it makes me a “seditionist” then I cheerfully plead guilty.

(H/T JJ)

Claire Wolfe

Tomorrow

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

Remembering the first battle. (H/T Jim Bovard, whose blog recently acquired a shiny new look)

And fighting the battles still. The Lexington, MA, board of selectmen revoked Oath Keepers’ permit to muster on the green tomorrow, citing (groan) “public safety” in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Stewart Rhodes says he’ll be there, anyhow, and David Codrea will let the world know if he needs bail money.

Whatever happens tomorrow, yesterday went pretty darned well. And got some enemies of freedom really frothing.

Captain John Parker: “Stand your ground. Do not fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

Claire Wolfe

Weekend freedom question: walking away

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

This was a week for getting reminded of unconventional freedoms — and unconventional Outlawry (though some might call it just plain criminality).

First, we got fascinated with Christopher Knight (aka the Maine Hermit), whose solitary life some found irresistible. Imagine speaking only one word to another human in 27 years and sleeping outdoors through 27 northern winters. Imagine doing that, yet remaining so un-resourceful that you think stealing from a camp for handicapped kids is a legitimate way to survive.

Then yesterday afternoon, NPR interviewed Mike Brodie — not their usual sort of book author. At 27, Brodie is a freelance auto mechanic who disdains any claim to thinking of himself as a writer or photographer. But at 17, he started hopping freight trains, taking along a Polaroid camera. Now he’s published A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, a photo memoir of that Outlaw life.

Most of us are more respectful of property than the Maine Hermit and more settled than Mike Brodie’s friends. But tell the truth: Do you envy them a bit? Do you sometimes wish you could just walk away from the life of earning and spending and getting, the life of being responsible, filling out paperwork and carrying credit cards and IDs? Do you sometimes long even to give up some of your comforts? Do you think you could do it in the future? Or have you done something like that in your past?

I’m not asking if you’re ready to chuck it all, or if you approve of train-hopping hoboes or thieving hermits. Just wondering if you ever feel the urge, ever acted on it — or ever might.

 





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