L is for four things.
L is for well… uh… long post! This is going to be pretty long, because I have four things to write about. I had five, but I decided to take one out, and put it into another post coming up next week. I’m going to start with a list, I think that would be the easy way of doing things. then, I’ll take them, in the order I listed them. 1. Lavabit. 2. Libertarianism. 3. Life-long learning. 4. Lists. I’ll start with Lavabit, I think I’ve explained here before, so I don’t really want to go into the really long case explanation. It was Edward Snowden’s email service in 2013. It was shut down by it’s founder, in order to avoid turning over private encryption keys to the government. After the service was shut down, Ladar Levison, Lavabit’s creator, was found in contempt by a district court judge for not complying with the court orders to turn over SSl keys. I will link to the article from Wikipedia here so that anyone reading who isn’t familiar with the case can get a better idea of what I’m talking about. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit] April 16th, is the tenth anniversary of the Lavabit loss. It is the tenth anniversary of the fourth circuit ruling. I didn’t particularly like reading that document. I went back to read it in 2016, when quite a tranch was unsealed in that case, there were two one in 2013, and the big one in 2016. The redaction error in 2016, was when Snowden’s email got left in. I’m pretty sure I saw it before everyone else, and I have the tweet, because that’s what it was called back then, to prove it. I couldn’t tweet anything, because I was so shocked at what I was reading! I just tweeted, “I saw the confirmation, the thing that confirms it. Unfortunately I just spent a whole lot of time trying to find that particular thing, but the way X works now, it’s impossible to find anything there. After the Lavabit case was lost, I began to study libertarianism. I never consider myself libertarian before. If anything, I was slightly left of center. However I was starting to become a bit more conservative at the time. I find that in the past decade, the two major parties have merged more, and become more like each other. Of course this isn’t something they’ll ever say when they’re campaigning. However it’s something they do when they’re on the floor, legislating. Just yesterday, we all got stuck with FISA again, because a lot of people in the house seem to vote down all the good amendments, and like all the bad ones. OK OK, most of the bad ones failed. There was a tie vote on an amendment requiring a warrant, and unfortunately, the speaker decided he just had to break the tie. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/12/fisa-surveillance-house-republicans/] [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/tyranny-house-passes-bill-renew-fisa-warrantless-spy/] Explaining libertarianism would take me a really long time though. Here’s a fairly short article on what it is: [https://www.cato.org/commentary/key-concepts-libertarianism] I’ve always considered myself a learner. School wasn’t always easy for me, because between my teachers and parents well… the correct term is placing demands on me, but I was about to write giving me orders, all! the! time!!! It seemed like I never really got to do much kid stuff. I did like certain subjects in school though. I really appreciated biology in high school. I also liked high school history, and definitely government class. When I was younger, I liked art a lot. I did a lot of pottery. Today, I like to do a whole lot of research. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is either. Well I mean, there are certain subjects that may not interest me, but if you can get me interested, you probably won’t get me to give it up anytime soon. I kind of think that’s how school should be, actually. Just learn what your interested in, and discard the rest. I mean, if your really interested in something, things will come naturally. I wasn’t interested in reading children’s literature in school, like we did in the 90s, in like 3rd or fourth grade. However when we got to high school, and I got to read books on 1st aid, it was more interesting to me. When I was growing up, I didn’t have access to the internet, until like 2000. When I finally did, it took me a bit to understand what was going on with everything of course. Not too long, because in hopes of me having access to the internet, I was already preparing for that eventuality. I was doing so, by consuming TV programs on internet-related things, yeah, those were a thing back then, and reading articles that my teachers had prepared for me. I really enjoy making lists! I probably like it too much! I think I have one for most everything, well not everything you could ever come up with, because I haven’t thought about it all yet, that’s God’s job. My thing is, where do I keep the lists? I would rather not keep a whole bunch of files cluttering up the documents folder, I’ve tested a couple things, and I really liked the micro.blog notes feature! I like to do an extensive amount of testing too though, so I’m open to any suggestions. I can’t use things like notion or obsidian though, or at least I haven’t tried with obsidian. I’ve definitely looked at some notion things, and I would say that I probably wouldn’t be able to. Also, I just need a place to drop lists with automatic ordering. I’m starting to use more reminders in my phone, but it’s not the most efficient thing in the world for me. I mostly use it for texting, some music here and there, to set timers, and as a phone hah.