Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

There has been much debate whether the United States is in for inflation or deflation. It seems that it’s going to be – it is now – both.

Some things will deflate in price, while others will increase. This sounds obvious, and an average of certain of these items is used to determine an overall inflation, or possibly deflation, rate. However, certain rather important items are left out of the calculation by the government today, including housing and fuel.

In reality, the price of housing is deflating, while at the same time the price of fuel is inflating. If these were included in the calculation and balanced each other out, the inflation rate would show no inflation or deflation, and so all seems well.

In reality, this is very wrong. If house prices keep deflating – and why wouldn’t they? – then more and more people are going to be underwater in their mortgages. Equity for every homeowner and property owner has been evaporating by the trillions, and it’s not coming back.

Wages are also deflating. When the unemployment rate is as high as it is, then barring unions or other restrictions, employers are going to replace higher-paid workers with lower. Some are actively firing and replacing, while others are simply taking advantage of the job market to pay less when hiring.

Food prices and transportation costs are increasing. Some of this is due to the ‘high’ price of oil, which is currently ~$90 per barrel, more than four times it’s historical level and a prime reason the U.S. economy is still in recession.

So we have two key items deflating and two other key items inflating. Do they balance each other out? Maybe on paper.

A couple of days ago I said that the young, disaffected, and technically savvy had found a way to strike back. A way to keep freedom alive.

Since then, two significant events have occurred:

1. Anon took down the sites of numerous financial institutions that were blocking funds from reaching Wikileaks.
2. It was easy.

A lot of executive types, whether corporate or political, should be very, very worried right now. Scared shitless is cruder but more accurate. They may have finally pushed too far.

This was not a real attack. This was a warning shot. It could have been much, much worse. That (along with a guilty conscience) should be what concerns those at the top with something to hide.

I honestly hadn’t realized it was so easy. According to sources on Reddit, many Internet browsers have an option to refresh the screen at a specified interval. All Anon and friends had to do was open a bunch of browser windows, go to the desired site, and set the refresh interval. If you get enough people doing that, the site cannot handle the load and goes down.*

This can be taught to anyone in a minute or two. The written instructions could fit in a Twitter or text message.

If enough people band together, any website can be taken down in seconds. Mastercard.com, Visa.com, and various others went down in just this way – and it started with 40 people. More people joined in until there were 4,000. (It could be far more now; as of this writing, Mastercard.com is still down. It has been down all day.)

If 4,000 people are enough to take down the websites of the largest companies in the world, imagine what happens when these instructions spread to tens of millions of pissed-off young people, who are looking at a bleak future and at the same time being told to behave by people who have made a hell of a lot of money off the status quo.

Now, it is true that so far only the public-facing sites for the banks and credit card processors have been downed. As I said, this was a warning shot. If kept up for a long time, their online presence – in which these companies have invested many millions and through which many people sign up for credit cards and such – would be useless.

If Anon gets to the inside somehow, by which I mean something vital like payment processing servers or company emails…wow. The former would put the company out of business – zero income – until resolved. It would also be a huge hit to their reputation and reliability, and would cost them business in the long run.

Or imagine if they did this; how much of that would it take before a credit card company went out of business?

I don’t think that those in power are going to stop trying to squash WikiLeaks. But whether they succeed or fail they are going to be exposed. And the more draconian, repressive steps they take to silence WikiLeaks, the stronger the response will be from Anon and a growing legion of angry people who are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more.

Keepers of the status quo, you have been warned. Repent now, or suffer the consequences.

*****

* This is called a DDoS, or distributed denial of service attack, and I don’t think there are ways to stop it. After all, the goal of a company is to entice and impress you with their website, and they need the site to be public to do that. Perhaps adding massive redundancy in servers, but if >4,000  can take down Mastercard.com, wait until millions pile on.

Freedom with a capital damn ‘F.’

You may not agree with everything WikiLeaks is doing, but you must admit that it is necessary. Our governments, in particular the U.S. government, have gone too far. They are keeping too many secrets, and a secretive government cannot be trusted. The truth must come out.

Many Redditors are donating. Others may be helping with the current hacking of those banks and other institutions attacking Assange and WikiLeaks.

(To digress slightly, I really think governments and corporations are going to be in for a very rough ride. Once a few million young people realize they can make a difference by hacking to help WikiLeaks, why would they stop there – whether or not Assange is freed? Why would they not start choosing targets for transparency? If I were the CEO of CitiBank or Goldman Sachs I would be very worried right now.)

A whole lot of people want to do something but don’t want to risk arrest. So let’s do something.

Post your ideas on Reddit; upvote the best, and let’s donate to make the best happen.

Choose formats that are in the real world. Internet freedom is not enough, not will it last without wider freedom. First they came for Julian Assange, and I did not speak up, and so one day they came for the web….

I tried to choose messages that would be appealing to conservatives, because we need them on our side. It’s not conservatives versus liberals, or right against left. It’s those who value liberty against those who lust for money and power, and original conservative values are very much for freedom. I also picked formats that are IRL – we need to get our message off the net and ‘out there.’

If this takes off, we’ll need to coordinate donations and route them to the areas that donated. Does anybody have a suggestion for the best way to do that?

My suggestion for a relatively inexpensive way to get the message out:

Billboards, bus stop ads, any organization with digital advertising boards.

Benefits:

• Relatively cheap
• Message stays for at least a month, not one day like a newspaper ad or a few seconds like a TV spot
• Unavoidably visible to millions of drivers and passengers in good locations; you can’t miss them
• Local – donate to one in your area
• Makes a statement
• Sound-bite size – easy for MSM to briefly cover…while repeating the message

Suggested messages:

• “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”  - Thomas Jefferson
• Let Freedom Ring – subtitle: Support WikiLeaks
• The truth will out – support WikiLeaks
• It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Looking at you, Koch brothers.
• “A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality.”  - Winston Churchill
• “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.”
  – Luke 12:2-3  - Love this one; found it on Daniel Ellsberg‘s (the Pentagon Papers leaker) site.

As someone on Reddit said today, he just realized we are witnessing history in the making. Wilileaks has exposed our governments, and they don’t like it.

But the true historic event that may come of Wikileaks is that it’s something a lot of young developers can do. Easily. They can become Leakers. Destroy Assange and WikiLeaks and you will move the young, disaffected, and technically savvy, who have realized voting changes little of importance, to start another site to host the files. In fact, probably a peer-to-peer filesharing site, so that there are thousands – millions – of sites.

The cats out of the bag now. Knowledge is power, and suddenly the big guy just lost some to the little guy. And the harder he tries to grab it back, the worse he’s going to look and the more legitimate the Leakers will seem.

UPDATE: And I forgot the obvious next step – attacking the attackers. Fighting fire with fire. Young developers can – and now are – hacking the sites of those who attack WikiLeaks: http://www.antemedius.com/content/payback-bank-froze-wikileaks-funds-hacked.