It looks as though the major NSA tricks are: Taking over routers using tricks similar to those botnet operators use to take over individual computers. Twisting the arms of major corporations to backdoor their products and share information, for example Skype. Encouraging the adoption of flawed cryptography with hidden backdoors through its standards arm, NIST. Taking over individual computers using tricks similar to those of botnet operators. However they do …
All your keys are belong to us
The official truth, which for once seems believable, is: because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware. So, the NSA has the private key that is used by your https server. The question …
Cladistic analysis of neoreaction
As humans are bony fishes, and the Cathedral the heretical spawn of Cromwell’s puritans, the neoreaction is the heretical spawn of Libertarianism and anarcho capitalism. Consider for example the blog title Anarcho Papist. The Dark Enlightenment is libertarians mugged by reality, a libertarian who realizes that the eighteenth century was right about women, and Bull Conner right about blacks.. An anarcho capitalist favors a free market in law and defense …
The Dark Enlightenment critique of Libertarianism
The problem with libertarianism is that it really only works if libertarian rules are generally enforced, accepted, and felt to be right, only works if other people practice libertarianism. What, then, do you do with the large majority of mankind that are disinclined to live by these rules, or incapable of living by these rules?
Radish nails libertarianism’s race problem
Libertarianism had its one brief shining day in power in alliance with the anti racist, anti slavery brigade, was swiftly kicked out of that alliance, and has been beaten over the head with race stick ever since, despite endlessly begging to be allowed to renew the alliance. Since then, the only times it has ever gotten anywhere is in alliance with the “racistâ€, aka white, faction.
War with Syria
If crimes committed far away by bad people against other far away bad people are important enough for Americans to go to war over, they are important enough to call Congress back to work early from summer vacation to vote for war or peace. If they are not important enough to interrupt congresscritters summer vacation, they are not important enough to go to war over.
Dysgenics and mutational load
It seems probable that most variation in health, beauty, and IQ is due to genetic load, large numbers of rare genetic variants. About fifteen percent of the human genome is under negative selection, meaning that in about fifteen percent of the human genome, any random change is likely to be harmful, most variants get eliminated by natural selection in a reasonable time. The mutation rate in humans is one or …
On Judaism
I have been arguing in the comments with B about Judaism, and in the course of this argument, my position shifted considerably. Judaism was a theocratic national religion, state religion, and ethnic religion, a nation state religion. Just what the doctor ordered, just the kind of thing reactionaries like, just the kind of thing that makes a people strong. Upon the Jews being exiled, the Sadducees lost their power base …
Christians did not build the Cathedral – but Churches did.
The Orthosphere is always apologizing for Christianity, supporting it, and defending it, while I treat as merely markedly less harmful than the belief systems that people are likely to believe when they stop believing in Christianity. And today the Orthosphere publishes a guest post that asserts Christians Did Not Build “The Cathedral†Which tells us: you should begin to doubt the internet authors who tell you that the leftist programs …
Words and meanings
When the ostensive meaning, the nominal meaning, and the nominal ostensive meaning of a word differ, the word is itself a lie, a lie contained in a single word that makes any sentence containing it a lie. A word primarily means what it is used to refer to, its ostensive meaning. During childhood language acquisition, it means what mothers refer to when speaking to their children. The mother says “look, …