Rad Geek People's Daily

Hey everybody. If you notice some unexpected posts popping up and around, pardon my dust. This weekend has been spent largely in coding and gardening. (Right now, clearing up planting space in the courtyard, and putting down some okra and hot peppers.) The dirt under my fingernails is largely the result of the latter; the dust around the blog is largely the result of the former.

But whether gardening or coding or inciting revolution, we all must have a day of rest. A day of communion. A day of Shamelessness.

It’s been a while — due to my travels one weekend after the other. So let us come together today in our Shamelessness. What have you been up to these past few weeks? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Corporate Land Grab in Africa. Free Association (2010-03-27):

Much of the modern world has been shaped, alas, by governments’ grabbing land from peasants and yeomen, whose families had worked it for hundreds of years, in order to give it to the nobility or other privileged interests. As a result, many self-sufficient farmers became tenants of politically created absentee…

No doubt 40 years from now, if agribusiness dominates Ethiopia and the dispossessed majority has to rent their lives away in factory labor or other forms of corporate-controlled mass labor, some “pro-globalization” type will come along to tell us all about the neoliberal revolution and how the market outcome is obviously the result of market efficiencies, the division of labor, comparative advantage, and economies of scale.

In reality, this is just another round of privateering, and a massive, corporate-engineered, government-inflicted violation of poor farmers’ property rights. Carried out largely with the purpose of enriching foreign corporations and the domestic political class, on the excuse that the folks being stolen from are just too stupid to know how to “develop” their own land or the fruits of their own labor. Genuinely free and equal exchange — the consensual social order that would emerge from free trade among working people when they are freed of existing government restrictions and government borders, and also left in possession of their own, without massive dispossession in the name of forced modernization — would look absolutely nothing like the rigged markets we have, and nothing like gigantic screwjob that is passed off as “freedom” by modern neoliberalism.

InjusticeNews: Washington State trooper accused of driving off road while drunk then calling rookie trooper to help him cover it up: http://is.gd/b2G3q. Twitter / InjusticeNews (2010-03-27).

Cops are here to keep you safe. (Cont’d.)

The Alternatives Expo is an agorist confab, marketplace, and series of workshops that’s held in parallel to Liberty Forum. (It’s actually where I spent the majority of time while I was in New Hampshire.) Here’s one of the talks I had the pleasure to attend, from New Jersey ALLy (and all-around rad dude) Darian Worden, talking about libertarianism as a form of radical Leftism:

Popular Science Puts Entire Scanned Archive Online, Free. Wired Top Stories (2010-03-27):

Gadget nerds: Prepare to lose the rest of your day to awesomeness. PopSci, the web-wing of Popular Science magazine, has scanned its entire 137-year archive and put it online for you to read, absolutely free.

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)