One of the benefits of living in a security-state aka mass surveillance state or Big Brother State is that one is constantly under the threat of being put under the microscope and dissected. Benefit? Nope. For those who love freedom, mass surveillance is a cancerous evil that should be resisted.

I came across a May 2015 article You’re a Criminal in a Mass Surveillance World – How to Not Get Caught by David Montgomery. It’s immensely long. But its length is absolutely required to get across the important issues it deals with — how to live in a society where mass surveillance is the norm. I am extracting a bit from that article. A small step toward freedom from Big Brother is to get a secure email channel. Here’s how.  Continue reading →

Leaders Emerge

Leadership is endogenous to the system which selects them. Leaders emerge from within the system and gain legitimacy through the acceptance of the people within the system. Thus there are two components: the people and the system. Both are causally related to some extent but can be considered separate for analysis.

​Bad leadership cannot emerge out of a good system with good people in it. Conversely, good leadership cannot emerge from a bad system and bad people.

That leaves two other scenarios: good people, bad system; and bad people, good system. My conjecture is that in both of those, bad leadership is very likely to happen.  Continue reading →

The lack of basic competence among those who hold political power is very likely one of the primary reasons that some nations suffer needless poverty. The recent cabinet reshuffle (is it a deck of cards in a game of chance that it needs periodic reshuffling, I wonder) in the Modi government prompted this line of thought.

Continue reading →