Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Information As Controlled Substance

The FCC is assuming regulatory control over the internet amid worries from across the political right that this will lead to politicized censorship.

Considering that every other medium that the FCC has assumed control over has come under politicized censorship, that result would not be that surprising. I’ve already expressed my opinion about whether or not I think this is something to worry about, but I’ll expound on that some more here.

While the current move is purportedly about ‘fast lanes,’ the more important detail is the expansion of the agency’s authority. This will make it much easier for new regulations to go through which impact content — like the reviled ‘SOPA’ and ‘PIPA’ which astro-turf activists paid for by the tech firms believed that they had delayed.

The hilarious part of this is that by attaching the FCC’s expansion of authority to the long-beloved-of-nerds net neutrality issue is that foundations like the EFF were happy to support it, despite it inevitably leading to the same sorts of regulations that it has agitated against for years.

We don’t know how quickly the FCC will proceed in regulating internet content. We don’t even really know the details of what the current plans are. My guess is that the regulatory administration will take a gradual approach. The Republicans will do what they can to serve the interests of the ISPs, but won’t care all that much about the content side of things.

“Regulate as a utility” is a phrase that makes leftists very happy, because it means political jobs for the orcs, trolls, and goblins of their coalition. They use this particular phrase with banking, also — especially commercial banking.

If you work in or around tech, and you are at all familiar with what working in commercial banking is like, the thought of that sort of Soviet business culture should make you want to raise the black flag and cut throats.

This will probably be bad for the corporations that elected to lobby for it — particularly companies like Google that will contract and die without a growing web economy. They are shooting themselves in the balls by handing over the keys to the FCC.

The unregulated internet is the smartest thing that Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton put together during their administration. It even created a new class of billionaire supporters for Democrats. Blowing that up is more stupid and self-destructive than it is conniving and Machiavellian. Give me well-executed conniving any day over looming Zimbabwe-ism.

On the content censorship side of things, it just means that accurate information will become a controlled substance, and most of what will be sold by licensed providers will be either completely inaccurate or misleading. So, not that much different from the way it is today, but with less legal competition and more illegal competition.

Information is much more important to the ordinary functioning of society than drugs are, so what you would expect to see is for people to start hunting for more real-talk, because it’ll be more obvious than ever that the information they’re getting is not accurate.

In anticipation of this, it’s time to get started on building informal and formal networks which interpret FedNet as damage and route around it.

The solution to the problem will be some part human and some part technical. It wouldn’t be surprising to see more regulation of computer hardware, also, as tensions between  nations regarding snooping devices on consumer hardware are becoming more acute.

So the solutions will have to be partly hardware, also, since it’s possible that we’re going to see more locked-down devices which break rapidly and get filled with lots of spying cruft — this should be easy to see just extrapolating from current trends. Your iPhone will only connect to FedNet, and it’ll break every few years. It’ll be a gradual change that most people won’t notice.

On net, FedNet will be terrible, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the international nature of the internet become impeded by its establishment. The plus side is that the general crisis which it precipitates will also bring with it a lot of opportunities, especially as the informational infrastructure that society has come to rely upon breaks down.

What can’t be stopped is the regulatory move. What can be done is to adapt effectively to the new legal regime.

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Millennial Woes Reads “Kill the Kulaks”

This reading turned out well.

It’s taken from this post from late January.

If you enjoyed the video, you can donate to his Patreon or to some other alternatives, including Bitcoin. If you’re tight on cash, just go ahead and subscribe to his channel.

Going forward, if anyone wants to do readings of my material, I would be happy to furnish an edited version that makes sense without hyperlinks.

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Book Review: Top Ten Reasons We’re Fat

Americans are incredibly fat by historical standards. Genetics alone can’t explain why obesity and other health problems related to the condition have become endemic.

Over the last decade or so, a major source of skepticism towards official narratives of all kinds — especially that of state science — has been in the area of nutrition, diet, and exercise. The discrediting of the notion that diets which are high in fat cause obesity has made it into the New York Times repeatedly, and official guidelines are being ‘revised.’

This book, written by P.D. Mangan, explains ten causes of obesity and what to do about them. It’s a slim book that weighs in at $0.99, and you can probably finish it over the course of a couple lunch breaks.

One passage grounds some of the more recent low-carb dieting advice in the case of an English undertaker from the mid-19th century who wrote a best-selling tract about how he lost weight:

Banting lost 50 pounds in his first year on the diet [consisting mainly of meat, vegetables, wine, and… a generous allowance for other forms of dry liquor, like gin and whiskey…] Naturally, the mainstream medics of the time despised a layman figuring out something they should have figured out for themselves, and denounced him at every turn. But many people bought his book because his diet was effective for weight loss.

Another curious historical observation is that, before the 20th century, standing desks were ubiquitous in offices.

The general outlook of the book is that, while exercise doesn’t directly help people to lose weight due to the practical difficulty involved in resisting hunger, exercise which increases muscle mass (like high intensity interval training or weight lifting), thereby improving your base metabolic rate.

Changing the composition of what you eat, favoring proteins and fats over carbohydrates and sugars, also makes it into the book without relying on too many trendy diet buzzwords.

This is further grounded in observations of how diets of different compositions affect different species of animals. This was even observed by naturalists and epicureans in the late 18th century. Quoting from a book titled The Physiology of Taste:

…carnivorous animals  never grow fat (consider wolves, jackals, birds of prey, crows, etc.) Herbivorous animals do not grow fat easily, or at least until age has reduced them to a state of inactivity, but they fatten very quickly as soon as they began to be fed on potatoes, grain, or any kind of flour… The second of the chief causes of obesity is the floury and starchy substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment. As we have said already, all animals that live on farinaceous food grow fat willy-nilly, and man is no exception to the universal law.

Like Mangan’s previous book on supplements, this is packed with citations for other books that you can follow. His stated motivation for writing it was because he was tired of the enormous number of faddish diet books which are not well grounded in either realism with respect to compliance (few people can ignore hunger pangs) or a good assessment of what actually makes people fat.

Both of his books are on Kindle Unlimited, so you can grab them both at no extra charge if you’re a subscriber.

The other pleasant aspect of it is that it gets straight to business, without coming up with any cute buzzwords, imaginary characters, or non-representative case studies involving fictional characters that the author has concocted to make the book more interesting.

While there is a lot here that you might already be familiar with if you have read other books involving paleo or low carb dieting, this is a good concise, realistic source of information that you can keep for yourself as a reference or hand off to someone who might need it.

Mangan is also a jolly fellow who speaks often with other figures in the Dark Enlightenment (especially on the topic of human biodiversity), so your dollar will be going into the pocket of a fellow traveler if you choose to buy this book.

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