The switch to Blogger 2.0 crashed on my old site and I can’t get access anymore. I don’t like the new privacy policy that Google uses, so they can forget my writing.

What I may do with cannablog.org (which is hosted for me now) is transfer everything and then periodically update the cannablog.wordpress.com. The export format is XML and should be compatible between the versions, apart from plug-in customization differences.

I stall on making updates until I have down time, but have traps in place that hold off most of the known highjack attempts.

Fortunately, other people have already paid for my dip into PhP and MySQL, and I let the host deal with the settings. If I was hosting myself, there would be a lot of administrative work that would cut into my billable hours.

I get visits from .gov and .mil but I don’t sweat them. Coming after me would be an incredibly stupid move for local reasons, and there are enough public records about my skills and abilities that it would have to be an amazing plot to make it through a preliminary hearing.

I agree that most of us are not big enough fish to really be censored, ‘Tux, but I’m truly pissed off that I even have to think about it.

I had to wait two months for a change in the law before I could legally install a wireless router on my DSL line that I didn’t lease from The Phone Company.

Does this mean the possibility of censorship? Maybe, sorta, kinda. But frankly, the Hegemony has no desire or need to censor those of us who are preaching to fellow believers, because our shouting words heard only by our fellows into the wind has no practical effect.

When I talk to my Chinese counterparts, we do not talk politics because, frankly, our own society is just as controlled as their society is. If we did talk politics, it would only be for me to condemn their government’s heavy-handedness as being counter-productive. The best form of control is the kind of control where the person being controlled has to look to know that he’s being controlled. The best form of control is where the person being controlled believes he is free. We are licensed, herded, numbered, and worked like slaves by our masters, we live in a nation where more of our citizenry is enslaved behind bars than in any other nation on the planet (with the exception perhaps of China), but we are given various meaningless choices so we believe we are “free”. One of those meaningless choices is to have blogs like these. It is no threat to the Hegemony, but it allows us to cling to our precious delusion of freedom, so it is of more value to allow us to rant than to shut us down.

I have no doubt — zero doubt — that if any one of us were perceived to be any threat to the Hegemony, we would be splatted like a bug. The evening news the next day would have breathless prose about a “terrorist” who was arrested for “planning deadly attacks against XYZ” (pick your XYZ, it doesn’t really matter whether XYZ is the Brooklyn Bridge, an airport, or anything else). But the apathy and ignorance of the majority means that we pose as much a threat to the Hegemony as a mosquito buzzing at a window screen. As long as the majority believe they are free, there is no threat to the Hegemony. And as long as preserving our voices here in the wilderness helps foster that illusion of freedom, we will be allowed to buzz as much as we wish, free to buzz meaninglessly in ways that will never change a thing.

– Badtux the Orwellian Penguin

Large network providers cannot be trusted to use fairly the power to discriminate regarding content without meaningful regulation… any more than the Executive branch of government can be trusted to use the power to spy without meaningful oversight. Large, powerful entities will serve their own interests, or at least serve their perception of those interests, to the detriment of the public, unless there are checks and balances. In this respect, corporations are no more to be trusted than governments.