Make it rain, baby girl. Geodesic Culture Robert Hettinga Seafeathers Bay, Anguilla, BWI November 22, 2020 A long-time friend and I have lunch every Saturday. We go sit in a beach bar here -- these days the beaches empty, the views as preternatural as ever -- drink fizzy water, no, really, decrepit diabetics like me like fizzy water, and, as I used to joke when we started this, well, tradition, plot world domination. We talk about business, mostly, current projects in general, making, hacking, and otherwise. Hardware, software, wetware. Guy stuff for geeks. Wetware as in the stuff between your ears. Mind outta the gutter. Perverts. In these days of pandemic-panic-porn-induced incipient global collapse -- both the empty beaches thing in what used to be the kickoff of high tourist season around here, but also what could fairly be called a US electoral fight for the survival of western civilization -- one can say ‘world domination’ with a tinge of anger in one’s voice about the other side, so the joke isn’t very funny anymore. Besides, both of us are way too old for that world domination shit anymore. We’re lucky if we can hobble off to a beach bar, have a chicken caesar for lunch, and get home in one piece. Well, I am, anyway. He seems to be doing better. I need some new knees, among other things, which I’m not likely to get anytime soon here in formerly-libertarian paradise, and short of an unaffordable medical airlift to the States, practically impossible in any case with the quarantine, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. So, at the moment, my friend is desperately trying to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head. Because he’s driving. I’m trying to explain to him, in as much detail as I can muster as he swerves his not-quite-a-pickup around a pothole, the current state of play in this whole business with the Universal Voter Fraud, and the Soros guy who’s now a life peer, and Chavez standing over the guy with the keyboard changing the numbers on a constitutional referendum giving him absolute dictatorial power, and... Wait, he says, these machines are hooked up the the net?? Well, yeah. I think, anyway... That’s bullshit. I can’t believe that for a minute. Nobody’d be that stupid. Well, anyway, they did a rush software update the night before the election, so, what, FedEx and flash cards? And it’s running on, what, Windows 7? Oh, come on. No, really. Pretty sure... I mean, I’m not even sure Windows 7 had internet sockets in it, or whatever, I’m a Mac guy, bleed in five colors and all that, no, not those five colors. Pervert. But that’s how fun things here in the Year of Our Lord 2020. As John Batchelor, The World’s Last Gentleman, no, really, look at his little videos on Instagram these days, liked to say during the once-and-future GWOT, “In war, the first three reports are wrong.” And we’re only two reports in. Maybe one and a half. My friend and I are old-school cypherpunks, you see. And no, crypto doesn’t mean “cryptocurrency”, it means “strong cryptography”. We even started a conference here on what I called “financial cryptography” a few decades back, so we even get to claim at least passing familiarity, if very dated in my case, and fuzzy at the best of times, with the idea of machine security in the presence of a, cough, global geodesic internetwork. On cypherpunks, back in the day, it was all about spooks, crypto protocols, financial and otherwise, rubber hose attacks, more spooks, actual fucking Rothbardian anarchy, not that statist commie black-block crap that passes for it these days, and, well, world domination. Punks these days give millennialism a bad name. Get off my lawn. So, I’m very prepared to believe Sidney Powell. I just saw a NewsMax clip on YouTube(spit!) where she says she’s gonna kick off the fun in Georgia, and, she says, it’s going to be biblical. Make it rain, baby girl. Make it rain. The fate or Western Civilization is in your hands. No pressure.