Anti-Gun Group to Launch Nationwide Boycott of Starbucks
Patrick Burke at CNS News - The National Gun Victim's Action Council (NGAC) is organizing a boycott of Starbucks on Valentine's Day, February 14, protesting Starbucks' policy of allowing open carry in their stores in states where that is legal. Tuesday is a bad day for me to drive half an hour to the nearest Starbucks, but I've put it in my calendar anyway. Good time to have a cup of Joe. That Starbucks is in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, where open carry is banned, so there may be no protesters there, but at least I can help their bottom line a little bit. Let's multiple that by 3 million!
Dave Workman, communications director of the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said in a phone interview with CNSNews.com that the revenues of Starbucks increased during and after the Brady Campaign’s attempt in 2010 to force Starbucks and other businesses to adopt more “anti-gun” store policies.
“That attempt didn’t really gain much traction, and in the subsequent financial reports for about a year, Starbucks reported increased profits at their stores,” said Workman. “That indicates to us that not only are people not as worried about legally armed private citizens that may or may not be in their midst – they enjoy a good coffee product.”
New SSL Certificate
My GoDaddy SSL certificate expired today. I decided to stop using them. Renewals were more expensive than I wanted to pay, even though they're one of the cheaper Certificate Authorities (CA). And I did not at all like their on-now-off-when-our-customers-go-away attitude about SOPA and PIPA. And I absolutely despise navigating their web site. I couldn't build something that confusing if I tried. So goodbye GoDaddy. Hello CACert. CACert provides free certificates, but they are not known by all browsers, e.g. Firefox. They're working at it, and will hopefully be listed sometime soon, but until then, you either have to tell your browser to make an exception for my certificate or install their root certificate in your browser. You can do the latter here by clicking on the "Root Certificate (PEM Format)" link.
Here's the info to let you verify that the certificate you're seeing is the one I actually installed. You can find my pgp key at billstclair.com/pgp.html, and at keyserver.rayservers.com (the newest key from a search for bill@billstclair.com).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Serial Number: 738957 (0xb468d) Issuer: O=Root CA, OU=http://www.cacert.org, CN=CA Cert Signing Authority/emailAddress=support@cacert.org Validity Not Before: Jan 27 15:09:06 2012 GMT Not After : Jul 25 15:09:06 2012 GMT Subject: CN=billstclair.com MD5 Fingerprint=25:9C:49:29:DD:EF:D2:6A:EE:1C:A3:92:87:72:B2:04 SHA1 Fingerprint=1F:6C:E3:0E:1B:1C:2B:23:E8:A7:3F:07:29:D5:C0:80:EC:7B:73:D1 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPIvu8AAoJENim99wXg5awzpkP/1y4ILrh0jcLZbSssZbY4Afr 339nfddlIYS61K4PszidrLaE6isvUqEfGQ56QEDwKeOzgGAnYWyVh0PGhV3xeH6w 6abdHVT2hi8BBIBaFJBx/c6Gltra54Dsm0BoD/ymFYeO3jQ8DQzcaFF0ki/m6E7R U5pCM27arvMoPnsn6PyOpE5Nx47r0hkgdlWkDX7B4gg7t+RItHon9d4skBPHVE5q CQMLJJNdGjtEI4V4fe33HRHQr0bNWZRIm2HB2vRPAg/Epl4Cd8OZbDxP3HVsILAd 7lgwlla7KpIlJWzU1vJL82ahXY+y3hwoPqkpOh5ScojFpoOWbAJjzCubDnUQ9l3p 2nSdEwNLJ7YpQHJXmyuKQhItfqZGA1/3gun0SAsPg+LAP94bFNFJICoBKZXZht44 11ef0sYNhbkFMFa5Nbuf3PGgdHR4oK+T0R+7D3sS160d+A4TTbCYg5eJjBTqaJWk EHske8cEzzNNppc0xonPcrdFWMzHV2TekzgSA+6jbGKDVSP1f/R3WW6YgjWoUcbd WVpOGCPx/LwufrehGZ5NTE3U1GZeFF/0TtwgIrIi6uEDuwOK1ffxgNO/MunoN5q9 pQTwNz5gZSXTOq0cw5HipHMxaQ5QOyLt3SI93PNy6O9BZsUDeDPYqNDpg2eLRyN7 CC+KwC3cSvKcARGaT6rb =4MKO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
CJDNS
CJDNS is Caleb James DeLisle's Network System. A new way of routing internet packets. Encrypted content, reversible routes, DDoS resistent. I don't completely understand it, but it looks interesting. Link is to a white paper about the motivation and details of the protocol. Git archive contains an implementation, in C, that is known to work in Debian 6 (Squeeze), and thought to possibly work in Mint and Ubuntu.
A System Is Only Secure When Nobody Has Total Control
Quote
"if yr not getting happier as you get older, then yr fuckin up." -- Ani DiFranco
Barhnardt: The Patrick Henry Project
Western Rifle Shooters introduces this recitation (embedded below) by Ann Barnhardt of Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. I plan to record my own rendition soon. I have registered the domain PatrickHenryProject.org, and put up a place-holder web page. I intend to adapt my FreedomOutlaws.com technology to collect YouTube video URLs and optional names and web sites of others who post recitations.
Ann Barnhard't email to Western Rifle Shooters:
Gentlemen-
I have just posted a recitation of Patrick Henry’s speech. It might be extremely powerful for Americans, and even non-Americans all over the world, who believe in liberty to record their own versions, and then for those to be edited together. I especially like the idea of those people in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, etc., who are being oppressed by Marxist-Statism and islam to echo Henry’s words, which are no longer exclusively American, but are now utterly transcendent.
If you think it an idea with potential, run with it.
Ann
Pakistan Drone Kills Added to Obama Body Count
I have been maintaining ObamaBodyCount.org since January of 2009, shortly before Obama took office. It contains dynamically-updated images containing counts of Iraqi civilian deaths and deaths of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I update those numbers every morning. Last night I added a new image, counting deaths caused by US drone attacks in Pakistan.
I include HTML snippets you can use to put any of the three images on your web site.
Thanks to Dana Visalli for finding the statistics at Wikipedia and encouraging me to make a new image. He recommends his essay, War, Ecology & Intelligence (PDF). He has written about his visit to Afghanistan at LewRockwell.com.
The Rules of American Justice
From a series of tweets by @ZahraBilloo, starting here:
The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:
(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.
If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.
(3) If you are a victim of US war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.
(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.
"Bradley Manning should’ve really considered committing some war crimes instead of exposing them."
Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases - http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/rules_of_american_justice_a_tale_of_three_cases/
Quote
"There wasn’t any Great Recession and there won’t be a recovery. You don’t recover from what ails the US economy. You die. Then, a new economy can be born." -- Bill Bonner
How a Sewing Machine Works
Why was MegaUpload REALLY shut down?
Shauna Myers at Google+ - on December 21, Digital Music News reported a new service, MegaBox, that MegaUpload already had in beta. It provided a cloud music service that paid artists 90% of the purchase price of music they provided. It even paid them for downloads of free music they provided. Likely scared the RIAA to death. Ms. Myers contends that this may be why they were taken down. Nothing to do with copyright violations. Simple monopoly protection.
From the Digital Music News article:
MegaUpload has the capital to do this, but they are also pushing some emotional capital as well. That is, a stark juxtoposition between them and traditional media interests, ie major labels like UMG. "These guys think an iPad is a facial treatment, the internet is the devil, and wired phones are still hip," Schmitz blasted. "They are in denial about the new realities and opportunities. They don't understand that the rip-off days are over. Artists are more educated than ever about how they are getting ripped off and how the big labels only look after themselves."
