I’m with Digby. This is just frightening. We have a hallucinating, dementia-ridden sociopathic moron in charge of the country and our military. This IS the worst case scenario.

If I were a believer I would pray. Short of that…it might be time to break out the good bourbon. Holy shit, he’s demented.

My posts have fallen into a dark place again, documenting the things that bother/depress me (mostly politics) and ignoring the positives in the world. It’s a big world, and there’s always something to feel good about if you look around. Here’s something new that’s really inspiring to me as a liberal and a geek. HDRAG, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.

Admittedly, this won’t float everyone’s boat. But the world needs a trusted source of information that documents what’s going on with human rights in a scientific, methodical, unimpeachable way. We live in an age where opinions seem to outweigh facts, so anything that puts more weight behind facts is a good thing.

I’m interested in one HDRAG project in particular, their Technology Freedom Cooperative which addresses the problems of privacy, accountability, and trust rampant in US big tech. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta…the usual suspects, have demonstrated over and over that they can’t be trusted to stand up to lawless and autocratic orders issued by nations run by despots – the US, for example. The laws that you hope will protect your personal information, your finances, your health data, aren’t reliable any more. Even if the law says you’re protected, all it takes is for someone like Convict Donny to decide that the state needs to capture or disappear your data and poof, it happens. Privacy laws be damned.

So what can you do if you’re a journalist and don’t want a corrupt government to use your information against you and your family? The answer is to host your systems and data with something like the Tech Freedom Coop. They’re creating resilient tech infrastructure (networks, servers, storage, encryption vaults) in rights-friendly havens like Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico and some European countries. That infrastructure sits beyond the reach of any despot-run country and will safely store your personal and organization’s data, even in times of war and legal conflict.

It’s an esoteric thing for most people, but it’s really needed in a time when the world’s previous leading democracy is sinking into autocracy. I find it fascinating that it’s a play straight out of science fiction – life imitating art. Neal Stephenson wrote about international data havens in his 1999 book Cryptonomicon, and HDRAG may have taken their template for the Tech Freedom Coop directly from that novel. That’s wild.

I’m not doing anything subversive or likely to cross an enemy threshold for the wannabe dictators currently running the federal government, but I’m still going to explore hosting my mail and data services via the Tech Freedom Coop. It makes sense to support them, and it beats giving more money to the Big Tech asshats who donate millions to Convict Donny hoping that he won’t tariff them or rescind his billionaire-friendly tax laws. Every little action has to count for something, right?