NC Renegades

All the media attention and the pundit’s commentary seem to be centered on the rift between Trump and the Republican establishment. While this may be a problem, it might pale in comparison to what could possibly happen if Trump and Sanders both get a bad taste in their mouth.

Mr. Trump and Senator Sanders have tenuous ties to the political parties in which they are running for nomination. Senator Sanders represents Vermont as an Independent and Trump has no past history which would align him with the Republicans.

The Democratic selection primary (as opposed to election primary) fairly well assures Mrs. Clinton the nomination no matter what the people who vote in the primaries may want; e.g., Sanders won Wyoming and Clinton got more delegates. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that Senator Sanders could run the table of the remaining primaries and still be denied the nomination because of the super delegates controlled by the Democratic Party bosses. Continue reading →

Lifetime is Back, Bigger and Better than Ever

We listened to you, many of our users and customers had requested additional lifetime accounts and now it’s back.   The new Lifetime 5 Accounts come with FIVE email accounts and 10gb of space for only $99 USD.  That’s actually an amazing deal and it’s designed for families, businesses and small groups.  If you have an annual account, or even the old Lifetime 2 Account, it’s only $50 to get upgraded to the new Lifetime 5 Account.  Our new 5 Account Lifetime is also a great way to communicate with your friends, family and business associates, with security and privacy.

Get started right now and be sure to share this link with your friends:

https://unseen.is/payment.html

When you buy Unseen premium, you are not just getting some great features, you are helping us support good people around the world who are being persecuted like Falun Gong in China and journalists, who rely on Unseen to get important information out to the world.   

Email Migration Tips

Nearly everyone is over on the new email servers, but there are still a few reports of people who use email clients having a difficult time connecting to the servers.  Most of these issues are because the settings in the email client were created several years ago and those are no longer documented or supported with the new system.  Please look in this online help page to find your client and the recommended settings:

https://oldmail.unseen.is/webmail/help/index.html

If you are using Thunderbird and you still can’t get it to work with the updated settings, you might try to delete the Unseen account from Thunderbird (inside the client) and then recreate your account in the client.  Thunderbird has been a little funky of late and that seems to clear up any lingering problems.  Be sure to use your entire Unseen user name, i.e. thor@unseen, not just thor.

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Those that were hoping for an “economic renaissance” in the United States got some more bad news this week.  It turns out that the U.S. economy is in significantly worse shape than the experts were projecting.  Retail sales unexpectedly declined in March, total business sales have fallen again, and the inventory to sales ratio has hit the highest level since the last financial crisis.  When you add these three classic recession signals to the 19 troubling numbers about the U.S. economy that I wrote about last week, it paints a very disturbing picture.  Virtually all of the signs that we would expect to pop up during the early chapters of a major economic crisis have now appeared, and yet most Americans still appear to be clueless about what is happening.

Even I was surprised when the government reported that retail sales had actually fallen in March.  Consumer spending is a very large part of our economy, and so if consumer spending is slowing down already that certainly does not bode well for the rest of 2016.  The following comes from highly respected author Jim Quinn…

The Ivy League educated “expert” economists expected March retail sales to increase by 0.1%. They only missed by $6 billion, as retail sales FELL by 0.3%. They have fallen for three straight months. At least gasoline sales were strong, as prices have risen 22% since mid-February. That should do wonders for the finances of American households. If you exclude gasoline sales, retail sales fell by 0.4%. As the chart below reveals, the year over year change in retail sales has been at or near recessionary levels for most of 2015, and into 2016.

You can view the chart that he was referring to right here.  In addition to a decline in retail sales, total business sales have also been falling, and this is another classic recession signal.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

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FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

There have been some important public debates about cryptography recently, and, unfortunately, the loudest voices have understood the problem the least. So, I’m very pleased to post a paper on the subject by someone who understands the fundamental issue: my associate at Cryptohippie, Jonathan Logan.

If you have any interest in this subject, please give this paper your time. And if you know others who are interested in the debate, please send them the link.

Thanks.

Introduction

A battle is underway about the limits of cryptography. On the one side are people who want to break into iPhones, tap into conversations and decrypt our backups. On the other side are those who want to prevent the government from mass intrusions but accept targeted attacks. And then there are those who take a so-called “extremist” position that government shouldn’t be allowed to undertake even targeted attacks on cryptographic systems.

This isn’t the first time this battle has been fought, and it won’t be the last. But it’s our turn to fight it right now. And we had better fight it well.

I will begin by admitting that I am an ‘extremist’ in this debate. If my wishes came true, no government or any other uninvited third party would be able to break cryptographic protections.

This is not the first time I’ve been involved in this battle. My job involves designing, writing and deploying cryptographic services.

I wrote my first PGP-encrypted email in 1991 or 1992, I’ve been using OTR since 2005 and all my Internet access has been routed through VPNs since 2000. (Yes…. that early.) I never access the Internet unencrypted, out of principle. I’ve been using Tor since its earliest days, have been surfing Freenet and run I2P eepsites.

If you have no idea what these terms mean, please don’t worry; I’m just mentioning them to emphasize that I am very much in favor of the daily use of good cryptography. I won’t use most of these terms again.

So, while I am a crypto extremist myself, honesty compels me to point how wrongly the “pro-cryptography” side in the current debate has made their case.

The State of the Debate

If you search the arguments made in favor of strong cryptography and against government “backdoors,” you’ll come up with a collection of statements that are uncharitable and shallow.

Proponents of crypto accuse politicians of not understanding technology or cryptography, of wanting to fatally undermine the security of digital systems, or to implement a global surveillance grid without checks and balances. The picture drawn is that the operation of cryptographic systems is binary – they either work completely or not at all… that anybody suggesting a middle ground is stupid.

Yes, politicians are often stupid and uninformed. That’s why people who know better must actually argue in ways that are truthful, well informed and balanced.

Educating the people who will be on the business end of new government regulations must be more than emotional whitewash. If you don’t trust your fellow humans to make good decisions, based on good information, your arguments will quickly degrade into bullying.

The point I hope to bring home in the remainder of this paper is this:

This debate should not be about cryptography. Rather, it should be about government’s regulatory powers.

Let me state this clearly: Continue reading →

by Robert Gore

Human progress has been three steps forward, two steps back. That a non-fringe candidate of a major political party in the United States can call himself a socialist constitutes a leap backward. That it can happen after a century of socialistic horrors: impoverishment, ruination, tyranny, war, and tens of millions dead, bespeaks not just deadly ignorance and delusion, but depravity.

Socialism is a political system whereby the state owns or controls the means of production for goods and services. It can be partial—government control of some industries, or total—government control of all industries. According to Marx, who advocated the total version, the goods and services would be produced by each according to his or her ability, and distributed according to each individual’s need: production severed from distribution. No particular acuity is necessary to see the fatal flaw. The “needy”—and those who garner political power by distributing goods and services to them—are all for this system, but what’s in it for the able? They have to be coerced to produce, and something has to be done with those who object or refuse to submit.

Coercion sounds like slavery and that something has to be done sounds like repression. That is what socialism has produced—slavery, concentration camps, and slaughter—on a scale unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Once you reach 10 million killed you’ve plumbed the depths of evil. Additional deca-millions are redundant blood on your hands, but the Titans in the Socialist pantheon—Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—killed around 100 million between them, while lesser lights like Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty in North Korea killed single digit millions. The numbers are exclusive of war dead.

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Elections.  For the love of God, if you don’t hear anything else I say for the rest of the evening, listen to this.

Elections are no longer free.  They are staged theater, designed to maintain the illusion of representative governance and to enrich the political class.  This is despotism.  If after this mess that we just went through, if you do not understand this, you are beyond hope.  My God.  He threw that even worse than McCain threw it.  I mean, Obama – how many different angles of attack could you have just rhetorically destroyed Obama on, and what did Romney do?  NOTHING.  Obama didn’t even prepare for that first debate.  Romney didn’t say anything.  Romney didn’t say anything about Benghazi.  He didn’t say anything about any of it.  I don’t understand how it is that anybody can not fully comprehend that that was all theater.

And then you have election fraud on top of it. Here in Colorado ten counties had voter turnout in excess of the total adult population of the [county]. Not just the registered voters – the total adult population of the county, excuse me, the county. And what did Romney do? Roll over.  How can you not see this? How can you not understand?  Do not talk to me anymore about elections.  There are no elections.  There are no more free elections. Just stand over that dead horse and beat it – it is never going to get up.  For the love of God.

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h/t Concerned American