Stop Me Before I Vote Again

That image above shows St Dominic presiding over an auto-da-fe-- a public burning of heretics. This is a little unjust to Dominic himself, who never, as far as I know, did any such thing. (The insignificant victims are down in the lower-right-hand corner of the image.)

Paypal has joined the Inquisitorial campaign against Wikileaks. How far have we come, and in what direction, since Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to The New York Times, and the Times printed 'em? Ellsberg didn't get rounded up and extradited on laughable charges of Inconsiderate Sexual Activity, and nobody tried to shut down the New York Times.

Now, however, in the time of Good Emperor Obama I "Lightbringer", the land of the free and the home of the brave has put in place, with admirable dispatch, its own version of the Great Chinese Firewall. North American DNS, at least from where I sit, will no longer resolve the name wikileaks.ch. One of the numeric IP addresses I have (http://213.251.145.96/) appears to be no longer routable from an armchair in New York. Another (http://46.59.1.2/ ) appears to be live, but I wonder whether it's the real site, or a spoof. There are elements that don't quite add up.

Paypal has obviously heard from The Man, and has predictably caved in. I encourage everyone with a Paypal account to cancel it, as I have done with mine.

Oh yeah, I know, it's just a pinprick. But it will make you feel -- and rightly so -- like a better, cleaner, more honorable person. Think of it as saving what little you have for a better day. If you're not an utterly abject slave, then when the better day comes, you'll be that much more ready for it.

At the moment, we're scattered, disorganized, powerless. They can come with their guns and flak jackets and take over our server farms, or kick in our doors and confiscate our laptops, or whatever else they might be worried about that day. Our feelgood corporate false friends, like Paypal, will be right there to lend a loyal obedient hand.

But there are still, and will always be, more of us than there are of them.

Why Apple Removed a WikiLeaks App From Its Store

Apple on Tuesday confirmed that it had removed from its online store an iPhone and iPad app that let users view the content on the WikiLeaks site and follow the WikiLeaks Twitter account.

Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said the company had removed the app “because it violated our developer guidelines.” Ms. Muller added: “Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way.”

"Comply with all local laws." So an app could not, for example, show a picture of an unveiled woman in Saudi Arabia?

I've always hated Apple. I recall years ago taking apart some of their machines and disassembling some of their code, and confirming a long-standing suspicion that their stuff was just as crummy as IBM's and Gates' -- Bill, I mean -- but with slightly more hip packaging.

All that's just aesthetics, though. The more interesting point, which hardly needs underscoring for the readership here, is that large monopoly corporations who have copyrighted "alternativeness" are still... large monopoly corporations. Such institutions have become so mutually interdependent with various categories of police that it's become a little difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. They're lichens -- half fungus, half alga, and you can't have one without the other.