Building a Shade Structure for Burning Man. I'm building a pretty simple shade structure for our camp at the upcoming Burning Man festival.

Freedom of Travel / Secret Law. I sued TSA to make them stop demanding that citizens identify themselves in order to travel. Not only airports, but trains, cruise ships, and some buses, are now "asking for" IDs. You can't read the rules -- they define your rights and obligations, but they're super secret information (SSI). I petitioned the US Supreme Court to examine whether the Feds can enforce secret regulations. I lost every one of these lawsuits. The constitution is a dead letter as far as the one-branch Federal dictatorship is concerned. Whatever the Executive does, the Congress and the courts rubber-stamp. What we did discover is that there is no requirement to show ID to get on an airplane. TSA said so in their papers and in open court. But each of these courts refused to make TSA stop lying to the public with airport signs telling every passenger that their ID is "required".

If you politely decline to show ID whenever someone asks (or demands) it, you will discover what your rights are. You'll be surprised. Most of the people who were asking for it have no right to demand it. They've been relying on your voluntary cooperation. Hmm, they forgot to tell you that part; but you just found it out for yourself.

Deflating Idiocy About Security. The US government says we are always at an "Elevated" threat level. They have no plans to ever reduce this reported threat level down to "Low", no matter how many years of untroubled life we go through. It's like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "doomsday clock" which in over fifty years has never been shown with less than 17 minutes remaining before Armageddon. Well, 17 minutes have ticked past more than a million and a half times since 1947, and the bombs haven't blown us up. These are both scare tactics, not real reflections of reality.

In reality, the likelihood of you being directly affected by a terrorist attack has not gone up or down since 9/11; the likelihood has always been extremely low. You and your friends are far more likely to die in bed, in a car wreck, of heart disease, or by falling down the stairs, than from a terrorist attack. Similarly, the risk of you or your friends being directly affected by an atomic explosion is also low -- perhaps at 10AM rather than at 7-minutes-to-midnight. More...

Disarming the rogue United States. The United States should be forced by United Nations resolutions to surrender its "weapons of mass destruction" or face the consequences. "That nation has gone beyond the pale. It repeatedly threatens and attacks other sovereign countries without provocation, holds massive stocks of nuclear and conventional weapons, tortures its own citizens and those of other countries, refuses to follow its own constitution and laws, breaks international treaties which it co-created and signed, holds 500,000 political prisoners in its jails. It imprisons the largest number and percentage of its people in the world. Every government with that kind of track record needs to immediately disarm and submit to a regime change, or face the consequences from the international community."

What's Wrong with Copy Protection? Why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse. This early paper on DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems is still relevant in spots.