20211001

  • Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here - The Washington Post

    They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.

    As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind.

one would think that the adherence to “traditional values” and placing their trust in religion would encourage the “christian” behavior towards their fellow man, but hey …

20211002

20211003

20211015

  • Religious Exemptions for Vaccine Mandates Shouldn’t Exist | WIRED

    if there were a shred of intellectual honesty to any of this, this would have conservatives twisted in all sorts of knots. but ‘murica.

    opening salvo is delicious.

    In 1990, the Court tightened things back up. In a case involving members of the Native American Church who took peyote, an illegal drug, as part of religious ceremonies, the Court held that religion doesn’t give someone the right to challenge a “generally applicable” law. Ruling otherwise, wrote the conservative Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia, “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.”

    One example of such a civic obligation that Scalia cited for his slippery-slope argument: compulsory vaccination laws.

    irony points:

    • explicitly religious, conservative justice
    • citation of vaccinations as civic obligations in opinion

    the article nicely cites the craziness that’s ensued leading us to where we’re at today with a hodge-podge of attempts to reconcile crazy with “liberty”. noting that even the christian science folks think things have gotten out of hand.

    then there’s this little gem.

    Dorit Rubenstein Reiss has proposed letting believers and nonbelievers alike claim a general exemption for personal belief—but making it very hard to get. This might look like forcing people to sit through extensive education programs, write a letter explaining their objections, and get it notarized by a notary public. The goal would be to make it such a pain in the ass that only the most die-hard resisters would go to the trouble,

20211016

20211022

  • We’ll Return, After This Message

    i don’t know how i ran across this short story, but the tl;dr is that some late 90s programmers turned their SETI tools against the “Net’s” corpus and discovers a message from aliens encoded in human DNA. we were the messengers.

20211024

  • Securing Internet Applications from Routing Attacks

    a nice rundown on various BGP attacks and their impacts on endpoints (and by extension applications). the interesting thing here personally was the run down on attacks against BTC infrastructure. the punchline, however, seems to be you can’t trust the underlay (read, the Internet). for some stuff, particularly in a world of well funded state actors, you’re likely going to need to create an application level overlay network.

20211028

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20211031

this was coughed up into my readinq queue. the march-2021 issue of the atlantic was incredibly dense and at times hard reading. but definitely worth the efforts.