I am voting Biden and this is why you should too…

Introduction

I’m going to use headers to make this easier to read and digest, because it’s going to be a long thing. Election 2024 has officially swung into General Election mode as Super Tuesday has made it clear that this will be a rehash of 2020. Nobody wanted this election, but here we are. And here’s my thoughts on the matter.

It’s Trump vs. Biden in 2024…

Nobody wanted this election. But here we are, and the very election we didn’t want has been thrust upon us by the voters of the two major parties. Before we get started, no, it’s not Biden vs. Trump vs. Minor Left Party Candidates vs. Minor Party Right Candidates. I have a whole paper devoted to that. The short version of that paper is by voting for the minor left-wing party candidate, you increase the chances Trump wins while not moving the needle on your minor left-winger. And while this is true on the Right side of the aisle, I’ll encourage that because every minor party right-wing candidate vote increases the chance of Biden in 2025. So, if you don’t want Trump to win, your only feasible vote in the General is Biden. Nothing else will help.

I don’t like Biden…but he’s got my vote…

No. Really, I don’t. He wasn’t my first choice in 2020 (Elizabeth Warren then Bernie Sanders were who I wanted), and his policies aren’t ideal. He’s trying to solve 21st Century problems with 20th Century solutions. He’s enabling a strong-man dictator in Israel while he is ineffective at containing another in Russia. The Democrats as a whole are lousy at messaging, and he’s more lousy than your average Democrat at this part of the job.

The Democrats have a huge problem in refusing to manage the messaging. They always have had a problem with this, and frankly, don’t look to be fixing the problem anytime in the near future.

Biden has a lot of problems, but aging isn’t one of them. Pro-Tip: Biden has been a gaffe machine his entire life. His missteps and wrong words and awkward language isn’t a product of his advancing age. It’s a product of a speech impediment that Biden has fought with his entire life. I think the man is still as sharp in 2024 as he was in 2008 when he started as VP, and while he’s not the best voice for the Democratic Party, he’s the safe choice for people who are not sold on either the Hard Left or the Hard Right.

While aging isn’t a problem I see with this administration, I do see plenty of problems I could point to.

• Biden may not be losing a step, but he’s still stuck in the past. He advocates for old, tired solutions to modern problems. This is a problem in my book, but it’s one that I can find justification for. People are fundamentally about dollars and cents, and sense, and pie in the sky promises like UBI and universal healthcare and free college turn a lot more people off than they turn people on. Being told that things are changing is something people are afraid of, and you’ll get a whole lot of people who jump to ‘the other guy’ if you put too much change in. Thus Biden has to walk a tightrope between not doing enough for the Left and doing too much for the Centre and Right.
• Biden’s approach to Israel leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I won’t go to the extremes of saying he’s participating in genocide, but there is definitely room to say he’s looking the other way while Genocide is happening. However, even here, there’s some realpolitik we have to deal with. Russia is looking VERY closely at ways to erode American foreign policy and relationships. Netanyahu is a strongman dictator cut from the same cloth as Putin. If we cut off foreign aid to Israel, I guarantee you Putin will start floating the ‘America has been taken over by Nazis’ canard and be RIGHT there with oil and weapons in hand. And here in America, Right-Wing created and Russia-amplified propaganda will be disseminated far and wide, claiming that Biden gave into the “Jihadest” elements of our congress (Omar and Tlaib). The question you need to ask is: Where can Biden lose more votes: Pro-Palestinian voters, or Pro-Israel voters? I am going to hazard a guess and say Biden looked at the numbers and realised being dropped by the Israel backers was a worse outcome for him politically, especially since Trump is outright catering to Pro-Israel voters.
• Biden, like Obama before him, doesn’t use the bully pulpit nearly enough. Biden should be hitting Republicans DAILY over the aid bill. He should have come out after the vote failed for the aid funding and border enforcement and repeatedly said that the GOP won’t vote for its own stuff if they think that it somehow helps the Democrats. The Democrats as a whole, and the President in particular, should be screaming from the rafters that the Republicans are working to enshrine hits against not only abortion but contraception and IVF after the Alabama fiasco. He should be singing the praises on the number of jobs he’s created, and the increase of pay, and the reduction of inflation, even as he states that there’s still more work to do. And he should be pulling out all the stops to criticise people like Boebert — the shit with the Beatlejuice concert should have been called out repeatedly, not for her whole ‘get felt up in a family event’ bit, but more generally as ‘the same woman who wants to regulate what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom feels free to subject everyone around her to her impromptu r-rated performance in the middle of a G-Rated event.’ The only reason the Republicans are still in this is because the Democrats are lousy at messaging.
• Biden is beholden to the moneyed interests far more than I care for. $93 million from Bloomberg Lp in 2020, followed by 61m from Future Forward and 46m from Asana. That’s a lot of money, and Biden, for as much as he’s tried to make things easier for the Middle Class, is still a very pro-capital President. This goes hand in hand with my first complaint about him being stuck in the past, and much like that complaint, is sort of justified by the realities of the United States. We’ll need a groundswell effort to deal with the issues of money in politics, not changing out the President for a guy who will surely make it much worse.

Mind you, there are things I like about Biden. He got a lid on COVID, then on Inflation, and has managed to navigate some seriously choppy international waters in regards to Russia and China and everything that Russia’s invasion has brought on. But this should make it clear that Biden isn’t ‘my guy’. He’s just a guy, and in another time, I might have been convinced to sit the election out, like I sat out Bush vs. Gore.

Trump is Worse

The problem is that Biden is the best choice we have in this country right now for President. While I’ll get into the reason Biden’s the only choice down below, all I can say is that the goal is to ensure Trump never gets into office, because he’s a horrible man who will hurt people I care about and he’s a buffoon who will run this country into the ground with his bull-headed stupidity. The only thing worse than a dictator is an idiotic dictator, and Trump is the most idiotic dictator I’ve ever seen idiotically dictate anything.

As of the writing of this article, Trump has launched into General Election mode. He’s already threatening doom if he doesn’t win, saying “there will be a bloodbath for the country” in the event he loses the general. He says he will “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live live vermin within the confines of our country,” that he will require ‘civil service tests to demonstrate understanding of our constitutional-limited government including due process, equal protection, free speech, religious liberty, federalism, and Fourth Amendment rights (where he calls out the lawsuits against his retention of classified documents), and a whole host of other frankly unamerican pronouncements by Trump.

Four short years ago, Trump came up with the bright idea of somehow injecting light or bleach into the human body. I know there are weaselly fact checks that say Trump DIDN’T say to inject bleach, so I provide the quotes in question:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronavirus-press-conference-transcript-april-23#:~:text=A%20question%20that,powerful.%20Steve%2C%20please.

Here’s just a short list of his ‘accomplishments’:

• The economy lost 2.9 million jobs, increasing unemployment rate by 1.6 ppoints to 6.3%
• The trade deficit was the highest since 2008, and went up 40.5% from 2016.
• The national debt increased from 14.4t to 21.6t USD, a 7.2t increase.
• 3 million more people were uninsured in 2020 compared to 2016.

We can remember also the following things:

• Unmarked vans that abducted protesters in 2020
• The attempt by the Department of Homeland Security to block American citizens from leaving the country in 2019
• The widespread administration of ‘psychotropic drugs’ to migrant children back in 2018
• splitting of parents and children at the border
• Treating Puerto Ricans as foreigners rather than citizens of the US after their island was devastated by Hurricane Maria
• Treating children like literal animals and caging them

I could literally go on and on and on about Trump’s admin’s literally hostile approach to civil rights, ranging from one’s right to not get poisoned by megacorps through attacks on transgender and gay people in this country, and of course their treatment of people who protested for minority rights. If I were a man of faith, I’d probably be really irate over how the bible was treated, as well, from the holding the bible upside down during a photo-op through selling bibles for $60, too.

Well, what about {Insert Third Party Candidate Here}? Why vote the lesser of two evils?

There’s a reality in the United States of America right now, and that’s that if you’re a minor party candidate, either you are working to get into the political machinery of the major party closest to you, or you’re on the outside looking in. Whenever you see someone telling you ‘don’t vote for the major party candidate’, you should hear that as ‘vote for this minor party candidate so that the major party closest to your position loses and you get governed by the opposing major party.’ How does that work?

Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re picking Class President at USA High School. There are 100 classmates picking between two candidates. Candidate 1 has 51 votes. He’s a nerd and a geek, but he’s affable to most people and actually has a good raporte with the student body. Not everyone in his vote block is on his side, though, because he’s slightly autistic and definitely nerdy, and a decent fraction of people are voting for him because of Candidate 2. Candidate 2 is a cheerleader, a popular but bratty girl who belittles everyone nerdy at the school. She’s got most of the Jocks and Cheerleaders on her side, as well as all the dumb kids who hate nerds. Her numbers girl, one of the few smart people on her side, tells her if the election happened today, she’d lose 51 to 49 and the nerd becomes class president.

She knows she’s not going to swing any of those 51 voters to her side, but she also knows the nerds are easily manipulated and not every one of those 51 people really like the nerd. So she convinces her numbers girl to run as an alternative to the Nerdy guy. If she can convince at least THREE people to change their vote from nerdy guy to nerdy gal, then Cheerleader Girl can win 49/48/3. And while this wouldn’t work at USA High if the administration put in Ranked Choice Voting, they want to make the kids experience an election like the types in 1980s America, so they used FPTP instead, and Cheerleader Girl wins the election.

And so it is with the USA, with much higher stakes than USA High. At least Cheerleader Girl was just going to appoint her friends as VIPs. Trump plans on doing that AND dismantling the democracy so nobody will ever beat him again. And third parties are the way he’s going to win.

And while I’m happy to let that foster on the Right, on the Left, the only way to ensure we don’t get Trump is to vote Biden.

But we can even look deeper on this.

Why not Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?

RFK Jr. is far from an ideal candidate. I’d rate him somewhere between Biden and Trump. Ignoring Trump for the moment, let’s have a look at Kennedy’s stance on various things.

Vaccines

RFK Jr. is notorius for not only his stance on vaccines, but also his two-facedness around vaccines. Back in 2005, Robert wrote a missive for Salon.com and Rolling Stones about his belief that vaccines cause autism. Remember, before the Trumpers got on board the anti-vax train, that train was painted blue and filled to the brim with liberals who insisted that vaccines got you sick to keep Big Medicine nice and fat. The articles from Rolling Stones and Salon were since removed due to the huge inaccuracies present in those articles, but RFK Jr. never stopped believing. However, when it started becoming politically inconvenient for him, he backtracked on this stance and falsely claimed he never said not to take vaccines. This alone disqualifies him in my book for POTUS, but there’s more!

“Weaponisation” of government…

We all saw the events of 6 January 2021, on live TV in some cases. A swarm of conservatives, stirred up by Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him, surged their way into the Congressional building and attempted to take politicians hostage. They were threatening to murder their own VP because he refused to actually steal the election on Trump’s behalf. As of January of this year, over 1200 people have been arrested and over 700 have been found guilty. But last year, RFK Jr. went to bat for the Republicans and suggested that these charges were bogus and politically motivated. While I’ll agree with him that these people didn’t get the sentences they deserved, I’ll say it went the other way and too many of them have gotten off easily. However, Kennedy has thrown his weight and his name behind the GOP’s accusation that the government is being weaponised against the Republicans, with little to no proof of sead weaponisation. What was supposed to be a meeting about social media companies working with government turned into a discussion about COVID being gengineered, more drivel on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, and, of course, anti-vax conspiracy theories. Much like the Republicans he supports with this nonsense, he’s claiming that the Big Bad Evil Media companies are stopping him from ‘bringing the truth out’.

Why not Jill Stein?

There are several reasons I won’t pick Jill Stein either.

Her Ties with Russia

Anyone who gets legitimised by RT has three strikes in my book. You don’t go to a nation you later claim is just as overly militant as the nation you’re criticising and allow them to use you as propaganda. That picture of her sitting next to Putin should be played far and wide. She also echos Russian propaganda, specifically about NATO and Russia’s justification of invading Ukraine.

Conspiracy Theories

Stein is a veritable font of conspiracy theories. Like any good conspiracy theory, her theories are based in a kernel of truth, such as the idea that unemployment is being underreported and is actually worse than the reported number, and dials them up to 11, such as making the claim Unemployment is really in the double digits. And many of her conspiracies are really really close to Trump’s.

• Jill Stein pushes the meme that an average 1 watt Wifi transmission causes cancer.
• She pushes the notion that GMO is bad, without specifying how exactly GMO fails, and uses that to justify a blanket ban on ‘new’ GMOs.
• She makes the claims that vaccines are unsafe, amplifying distrust by scientifically illiterate people for vital preventive healthcare.
• Calls for a new 9/11 investigation because supposedly Bush hid the truth. Note that this was in 2016, 15 years after 9/11, and feeds the 9/11 Truthers, another conspiracy theory movement.

We’ve been down this road before…

Go have a look at the election of 2016. Note that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were decided by fewer votes than those cast for Jill Stein. Had those Stein voters used their heads and not their hearts on election day, Trump wouldn’t have been able to appoint his three Justices (instead, Clinton would have had that), and we might have never see Roe v Wade fall.

Conclusion

I’m asking you to hold your nose yet again and vote the Lesser Evil. Cthulhu is just going to have to wait this year because he’s not the most evil in 2024, like he wasn’t in 2016 or 2020. Trump’s got the Great Cthulhu beat in that metric. This year, I’m asking you to vote your conscience in the Primaries and in your local races, especially if you have RCV like Maine and Alaska do, but use your brain and vote tactically in the Presidential election. Any vote besides Joe Bien for the General Election risks us experiencing ‘I am your vengeance’ and Project 2025 next year.

Net Neutrality: What Does It Mean?

In the next few days, Comcast will get the assurance from the FCC that it’s now in the drivers seat and we are just along for the ride. So will AT&T, Verizon, Cox, and a whole host of other Telecomm providers. For the rest of us? Well, get ready to see your experience on the Net degrade.

The typical horror story is that you’ll pay $89.95 for your ISP, plus $4.95 for Youtube, $6.95 for Facebook, $14.95 for Netflix, etc, etc, etc. This story is not likely to pass, and the big media companies and the memes saying it will won’t do us any favors. Let’s stop and think about this a moment. If Comcast starts charging $14.95 a month for Netflix access, then Century Link can easily say, “We don’t charge that, come to us!” and Comcast will lose customers. In the Wireless space, it’s even more extreme. We like to upgrade our phones every 2 years, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to AT&T if they start charging for Skype, customers flee in droves to Google, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and so on. With this in mind, I don’t expect this to happen. Instead, I expect that the anti-NN folks will hold up the articles written breathlessly by media organizations and the memes passes by gullible people and go, “See, they blew everything out of proportion, you’re not paying $14.95 extra for Netflix to Comcast!

Except you will be. Because the secret is that Comcast won’t bill you for Netflix access. They’ll bill Netflix, who will then turn around and bill you, and Netflix will become the bad guys. You’ll notice this when Netflix raises your $14.95 charge to $29.95, and while they might say that this is because of Comcast, but you’ll see the $29.95 charge from Netflix, and this charge will stay the same even if you switch to a company that doesn’t charge more for Netflix to reach you. Win for Comcast. Lose for Netflix. Lose for you.

This is why we need Net Neutrality.

New Word of the Day: Enshittification

In the wake of the Reddit experience, there’s a new word I’ve encountered that I want to introduce you to. It is “enshittification” (possibly also spelled enshitification). This is a term for how the modern internet is screwing us over. Let’s talk about it some.

Cory Docterow, a rather well known figure in the Internet, defines enshittification as the seemingly inevitable process of a platform starting off making a service that served its customers efficiently and valuably, so that many customers would flock to the service, then roping in plenty of vendors and contractors to provide additional services on the platform, and finally sucking all the money out of both contractors and customers.

To get an idea of the first step, think the early days of Amazon, when you searched for Obscure Item X, and you got listings that only contained Obscure Item X. They’d rope you in by making an actually good service that you would use in favour of the others. Likewise for Google’s search. Remember the day when you could plug in a mysterious part number and get the make and model of that part, what thing it was a part of, and even a hint of where you could buy it? Or put in a search term like “red hot chilli-peppers” and actually get the band as the first result?

The second step of enshittification relies on the fact that where people gather, businesses want to follow. There are many reasons for this, ranging from a captive audience through flaws in the design of the platform, to just plain easier marketing. For example, in Reddit, people joined because the conversation was useful and meaningful, which prompted software developers to use the low-cost, easy to use API to improve on Reddit’s many flaws, such as a lack of a mobile portal, lack of moderator tools, lack of accessibility tools, and just a poor design of the Reddit site. Another example was Amazon’s attracting 3rd party sellers to its platform, so it could become the One Stop Shop that we all know and… maybe love. This amplifies the desire of users to flock to the platform, reducing traffic to other platforms in the same space.

The third and final phase of enshittification is the cash grab. Once you and I are roped in as users, and companies are roped in as providers, the platform is heavily monetised, sucking value out of both the vendors and the end-users. Google serves you page after page after page of ads with little to no relevance to what you searched for, ignoring your AND and OR and ” keywords, requiring you to do tricks like site:reddit.com to find the things you’re looking for, while submarining vendors you MIGHT want to interact with because they didn’t pay enough cashola to the search giant. Amazon searches bury the item you want on the third or fourth or fifth page, serving their own favoured partners or their own brands FIRST in a bid to extract value from you (and when was the last time you found a killer deal on Amazon?). Google notifications on your phone used to be in the order in which you received them, so if your phone buzzed at you, you could tell at a glance what it buzzed about. Now the actual noise-causing notification is listed after 5 or 6 other notifications that Google wants you to look at FIRST for some odd reason or another. The list goes on and on and on.

A good example of the enshittification process can be found in Facebook. For those who have not been with Facebook for as long, or never got on the platform, Facebook’s founding was a result of the enshittification of MySpace. Facebook started off as a clean social media platform, especially compared to the MySpace of the time. For those of you who remember MySpace, it was definitely an eye-opener when Facebook started up. MySpace was overrun with bullshit, with glitzy backgrounds, people we didn’t know ‘sliding into our DMs’ and our feeds uninvited, our friends being submarined under bullshit, and a complete lack of control over who saw what. Facebook next to that hellscape was a tightly designed, easily configured system that allowed us to connect to those old friends from High School or College (remember Classmates.com?), our friends and family, and of course our buddies locally and internationally. The service made pen pals much easier to have and converse with!

But then ads started drifting in. We told ourselves this was the cost of service. I mean, somebody has to pay for the servers, and we already demonstrated that we were damn well not going to pay to talk to our friends overseas and our parents and so on. So, we said, “Hey, this should be like broadcast TV and the advertisers could pay for it!” And pay for it they did, because unlike Broadcast TV, this allowed for very targeted advertising. Search for a car part? Suddenly the ads are all about cars. Post a Conservative Meme? Suddenly, Mike Lindell is sliding up in your ads trying to sell you pillows, shoes, and a bogus theory that the election was stolen. Share a Pride flag? Suddenly all sorts of ads from supposedly Pride-friendly orgs looking to get you to send them some of your hard-earned cash for useless baubles and trinkets. The Algorithm knows who you are, and what you like, so it makes sure that nothing that challenges your thoughts enters your little bubble, and directs the ads to the area most likely to make you buy buy buy.

Companies became as addicted to your data as you were to connecting with your friends. So once Facebook sank its claws into both of you, it started extracting value for its shareholders. The Algorithm started altering your feed. Gone are the days where you see feeds from your friends first, with a few ads thrown in ‘to keep the lights on’. Now, it’s a horrible mismash of posts in no sane order whatsoever, with ads mixed in in no rhyme or reason, the entire process of using Facebook shitty for both users and advertisers. Want your post to be more likely (note: “Guaranteed? Best I can do is more likely” – Facebook, probably) to be seen by people who literally subscribed to you to see your posts? You best “Boost” it by paying FB cold hard cash! Otherwise their feeds are filled with things that the Algorithm thinks are most likely to drive engagement and thus $$$$, and you get submarined.

Hopefully this clarifies what Enshittification is. I just wish we could actually do something about it.

Recovering From a Cyber Incident that Takes Over Your Life

Hi. I’m guessing you have recently had an incident that has basically resulted in the utter and complete take-over of your online life. You’re in a bad place right now, so let me help you get into a good place. Understand that this is both a fix for your immediate problem, and a fix for what got you in this situation in the first place. If you’re not willing to change your life, you’re not going to get anything out of this and should move on to the next self-help guide.

First of all, you need to stop using your infected devices until you can clean them. Power them all off. Hopefully you’re willing to pay money, because this won’t be cheap if you don’t know how to do this all yourself. If your phone is more recent, either factory reset it yourself or take it to a reputable service centre near you and ask them to reset it. If your phone isn’t recent and has stopped getting security updates (about 3 years, though maybe increasing to 5), it’s time to buy a new one.

Next up, you’re going to set up your device to reclaim your online life, but before you do that, you’re going to need to lock down the main means of access to your life, your primary Apple ID or Google account. Before you start putting your accounts on your phone, go to your main account online (from a browser) and reset your password. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication, and set up one-use codes. Write them down and keep them handy. Now that your account has been reset, configure your phone to use that account, then configure 2FA to use that phone. At this point, you have a working security system. Go into your account and remove all other devices but your phone from your account. This will force them all to go through the same process to access your account.

Next, we’re going to solve your online access dilemma. If you do not have a password manager, I am going to recommend Bitwarden, though you should research other password lockers as well. You need a system that will generate complex passwords for you, and lock them behind a password you know. This password should be nothing you’ve ever used before, but one that’s easy for you to remember and hard for hackers (or their computers) to guess. This one password will be a gateway to the rest of your life, so it’s critical you make it memorable but hard to guess. Rather than passwords like ‘P1@typvs1993’, you probably want something like ‘I was born in 1993 and really like platypuses!’ (this is a passphrase and should be harder for bad guys to guess). Be careful with security questions. There’s something called Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that allows bad guys to find out what street you were born on and what city you lived in and what your first job was. If you MUST use cognitive passwords because a poorly designed site insists on them, put bogus information in them and store that bogus information in your password locker for that site. Make sure that your password locker is properly configured, locked down, and made nice and secure. Make sure to use your password locker’s feature to check to see if a password has been included in a breach! One of the first things I’d do as a pentester is enumerate usernames and then ‘password spray’, or try the most common vulnerable passwords with every username I have enumerated. Remember! 12345 is the kind of combination an idiot would put on their luggage!

Now that you’ve reclaimed your primary account and your password locker. It’s time to get down to business. For EACH account you use, decide if you still need it. If not, request the account be closed down. If you do, change the account’s password to a random password from the locker, reset your e-mail for account recovery to your primary account, and lock down the service with 2FA if available. You should start with your bank, your Amazon account, and any other services that have access to your bank account. Then move to less essential accounts, until you have all of them in your password locker and secured to your primary account. Additional Google or Apple or Microsoft accounts should also refer to your primary account.

Once you’ve gotten these accounts all locked down, it’s time to look at your other devices. The first question is are these devices new enough to be used in a hostile environment? Really old devices (think more than 3 years old for cell phones or more than 10 for computers) are likely no longer being maintained. If you are technically literate, you can look up each software/Operating System’s End of Life and determine if you can update or replace the software. If you’re not, take it in to that same service centre and ask them which devices are out of support. Replace those devices and discard the old ones, if you still need them. Newer devices are more protected from exploits, as long as the user is mindful of how they are used. These devices should be reimaged to factory default, checked for rootkits, and ensured that they are nice and clean before your life goes back on them. I would consider a solid software firewall and antivirus tool essential at this point. Once you get them clean and back up running, you should be mostly back to a liveable online life.

NOW we need to talk about you. MOST infections happen because the user isn’t practicing ‘safe hex’. Visiting dangerous sites. Opening unsolicited attachments. Using ‘warez’. Badware can sneak on a system in many ways, but if you start thinking cautiously on the ‘net, you close down many avenues of infection. You may think a VPN makes you invincible. It really doesn’t. Understand why you need a VPN before you get one. If you’re trying to hide your browsing from your ISP, sure, use it. If you’re trying to get to free software without being caught, understand that’s where you get malware from. Change your habits or everything you’re doing right now to recover from this will be for naught and you’ll be doing this over and over again.

Facebook and its approach to moderation

A year ago, I made a comment that Facebook decided to hide even from me, for supposed ‘bullying’. Despite my appeal of this, I’ve heard nothing back on it thanks to ‘COVID’. A member of my extended family has been put in Facebook Jail, and a close friend of mine has been banned from commenting on Facebook for a day, from commenting on posts for 3 days, and has had their comments downranked for 30 days. Why? Well, he responded to this:

Douchebag pushing Replacement ‘Theory’

…with a desire to bring harm to the douchebag.

I agree with Facebook on the surface of this. If you threaten to get you and your buddies together to pound the shit out of someone, that’s a pretty clear cut case of threatening violence. Facebook doesn’t want that on their service, and besides, it’s a dick move and violates the Wheaton Principle (“Don’t be a Dick”). But here’s my big question to Facebook? Your community guidelines also say that peddling misinformation is against the standards. Where is Louis’ ban, and why can we still see his comments?

Facebook obviously has picked a side here. They’d rather back the Cons because the Cons will allow them to make metric fucktons of money long as they toe the line. So we get the full force of the ‘regulation’ — you know, some tiny quibble about wording gets our posts tagged with a fact check line, while Conservatives get a free pass to pass bullshit like Whites are being replaced by minorities and will be oppressed.

Just calling that bullshit out.

An Open Letter to Elon Musk

Elon Musk Planning to Vote For Republicans

So, Elon Musk has made the pronouncement that starting next election, he will be voting Republican. This is my response to him.

My Response to Elon

Hi, Elon. You don’t know me from Adam, but hey. I viewed you with a hope for the future tempered by a healthy skepticism of someone who thinks it’s professional to refer to a professional in another industry as “pedo guy” when that professional dismisses your opinion on his job. SpaceX would do what no other rocket provider in history could do, cheap access to space. StarLink would make internet access easy for anyone on Earth, regardless of ground-based infrastructure. And Tesla made electric cars accessible to the common man, helping correct our world’s overreliance on petrochemicals. And all three of these were accomplished when everyone else was saying it was impossible. But Elon the Engineer and Elon the Twitter Personality clashed so much that it became harder and harder to take the former seriously.

Once upon a time, there was an old saying that said: “Do not discuss religion and politics among polite company.” There was a good reason for that old adage. Politics and religion are topics that divide us, topics that we have strong feelings about, and topics that we’ll never see eye to eye on. Many people today have lost sight of that wisdom, to the detriment of our society. I guess it needs to be made clear why this adage was so important, and you’re about to get that lesson in spades.

Any time you offer a political opinion, you turn off 50% of the American public. I don’t care what that opinion is. Lefties hate Righties. Righties hate Lefties. If you side with one, you lose the other. I was an optimal candidate for a Tesla. Conscientious about my impact on the world. Mindful of what I’m using. Interested in doing better. Living as an environmentalist, keeping the lights low, keeping the temperature up in the summer and down in the winter. Even giving up my guilty pleasure of long soaks because hot water is doubly expensive. Walking when I could walk, biking when walking was too far, using public transit when biking was too far, and only using a car when public transit couldn’t work. We were interested in Teslas because those could get us to where we needed efficiently and cleanly. We’ve talked a lot about buying a Tesla, and live in an apartment where EV charging is now a thing. We should be rushing out to put a down payment on a Tesla now.

But we won’t. When or if we buy a car, it’ll be someone else’s EV. You played a stupid game by saying you’re going to vote for Republicans, and this is the stupid prize you won. And 80 million people voted for Biden in the last election. You pissed them off as well, and many of them are of the demographic of ‘will prefer electric cars to petrol cars’. Good job!

So, now that you’ve brought your politics into the daylight, let’s talk about them.

You say you’re moderate. But you are voting for the party that will prevent my wife from getting necessary medical care because an imaginary man in the sky says all the babies must live. That’s not very moderate to me.

You say you’re an environmentalist and want to make sure our children have a world worth living in. By you are voting for the party that wants to Drill, Drill, Drill regardless of the consequences. The world can turn into a scorching hot hell-world for all the Republicans care, as long as the last Petrodollar is extracted from the ground. Doesn’t sound very environmentalist to me.

You say you are pro-science, but you are voting for the party that screams that lockdowns and vaccinations are bad and we should risk death or long-term disability by exposing ourselves to a preventable disease. Doesn’t sound very pro-science to me.

You say you’re pro-rationality. But you are voting for the party that pushes the belief that Democrats and Celebrities are baby-eating, baby-f**king Satan worshippers and says that Covid comes from 5G and not a virus and that it’s a huge Chinese hoax to harm their God Emperor. Not very rational, in my estimation. In fact, the term I’d use for this party’s position is ‘batshit insane, bordering on brainless.’

Can we criticize the Democratic Party? Of course we can! Biden has done a shit show managing inflation, both in terms of actually fixing the problem and of calling it out for where it’s coming from. And I’ve dished on the Progressives who have a HUGE habit of taking their ball and going home when they don’t get the shiny alicorn that farts rainbows that they swore they were promised. And I think Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to lean on their rhetoric for supporting minority rights when they continue allowing our manufacturing to be done overseas in China for cheap, putting American workers of all stripes out of work. Democrats are feckless for sure. But if you think Republicans are the answer, you’re basically going to shit on all of us and on the things you call important.

Welcome To My Home On the Internet

Hi, random Internet visitor. Welcome to my home on the Internet. Much like my physical home, your arrival is welcome as long as you stay civil and agreeable. But the moment you become a shithead, I kick you out. You are free to post your own thoughts and your own opinions on your space on the Internet, but if you show up here to peddle bullshit conspiracy theory nonsense, don’t think that calls of ‘muh free speech’ will prevent me from scrubbing your comments and ejecting your sorry ass. It works the same in your space, so you shouldn’t be surprised when I stick up for my home here.

An Ode To What Could Have Been: Alternate Universe Daughter Tory and I never had

She’d be turning 18 this year, had she been born. Who am I talking about? A hypothetical daughter born to me and my wife Tory, sometime early in 2005. Let me track her life here, and explain exactly why we did not have kids. It’s a walk in both my life and my wife’s life, as well as the world at large.

It’s Spring of 2005. I have been working at Qwest now for a few months, and man, is the pay faaar better than anything I’ve earned up to this point. The job started at $20 an hour, which is a HUGE amount of money for someone used to earning less than half that, and life was starting to look up for me. My wife, meanwhile, was making a decent wage at CompUSA as an RTV coordinator. Our monthly clear was easily over $3000 a month, with an apartment that only ate 20% of that, and more than enough left over. We’d lived in Colorado for 2 years, and despite some struggles from 2003 through 2004, we were finally in the ideal place. I was 32. She was 27. We were at the idea child rearing age. In another universe, we said, “Bush is still President and lots can still go wrong, so let’s wait a little while.” But in this one, we said, “You are only 27 and 32 once in your life. So we dispensed with the protection and got it on sometime around late March. As hoped, T got pregnant. At least her fear didn’t come to fruition and she didn’t have twins. 9 months later, our daughter…let’s name her Victoria… was born by c-section.

Her life started with a struggle. We had to get help from the State Healthcare Program because my job, with those nice health benefits, ended in August. Why, you ask? Well, despite Colorado being thousands of miles from the storm, Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans was blamed by Qwest as they systematically shed all the workers on my floor, finally ending with me in September. The decision made in March would see Vicky come into the world in a Christmas where, instead of celebrating Baby’s First Christmas, our plans were all derailed.

In another timeline, I’d have found shelter in the Education system, correcting a mistake I made 10 years before and getting my degree with a good GPA. In this one, I’d be right back at work, trying to find a job in a hostile job seeker environment. My wife would be laid off soon afterward, and a dire situation would go horribly bad. Vicky would grow up in an environment where mom and dad were struggling to find work, earning minimum wage because they were desperate enough to take anything they could find. By age 3, the Great Recession may well have pushed all three of us into poverty.

I don’t doubt Tory and I would do our damndest to give Vicky a chance in this world. We’d raise her as best we could, with help from our families. Maybe we’d move back to Louisiana so Mom and Dad or Tory’s Mom and family could help us. It would shatter Tory’s heart to do so, and piss me off as well, but I don’t have a single doubt that if that was the best move for Vicky’s life, that’s what we’d do. Not having my degree, I’d never have gotten the job with CU Health or USGS, nor would I be working for the State right now, and Tory would not have the luxury of staying home. Would Vicky be raised by family? Or would we have her raised by teachers and daycare providers?

When Obama was elected in 2008, at age 3, our half-White, half-Black daughter wouldn’t understand the moment in her life, but we’d celebrate it with her, letting her know that that half-White, half-Black man on TV proved that she could do anything she wanted in life. Sadly, the message would be muddled by the extreme amounts of racism she and her mom would face over the next 12 years.

She would be 4 going on 5 when Deepwater Horizon blows out and creates the largest oil spill in history. Given she’s my and my wife’s daughter, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her do a hand-drawn postcard asking Transunion to fix their mistake and save the birds. The Arab Spring occurs as she turns 5, and she gets however much explanation our likely very smart daughter can handle.

In 2011, we might explain what happened 10 years before and why our government killed a man. A hard discussion to have with an almost 6 year old girl, but it’s important for children, especially those as intelligent as Tory and I were as kids, to understand the world around them.

Given the state of the economy in 2008 through 2010, it’s likely those years were years of struggle, taking whatever minimum wage jobs we can get, with whatever aid we can find. 2011 probably marks the year that things get stable, and over the next few years, we and our daughter’s relationship grows even as our daughter grows. In 2012, our daughter would get to view the next election for President. I’d expect lots of questions about why people are so cruel, and yet why Obama won with so many votes. We’ll tell her that people are complicated, and best avoided unless absolutely necessary, as we try to give her her best life.

Her 10 year birthday would happen around Christmas of 2015. By now it was becoming clear that Trump would represent the Republicans in the Election of 2016. Imagine explaining to your half-Black daughter that the man running for the highest office on the Republican side of things once wrote an article stating that four black kids should be executed despite no evidence they were guilty of any wrongdoing. I suspect that she’d not be a Republican in THIS timeline. Just in time for her birthday, that chode would win office, and her 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th birthday would see the reputation of the USA tarnished. We wouldn’t be in a position to go to Canada as Skilled Workers due to a lack of education, but we’d definitely contemplate a mad dash to the border, if our finances could handle it.

Once again, our economic status would be tossed on its ear, just in time for Vicky’s 15th birthday. There would be no Sweet 16 for her — the Pandemic would be in the midst of its third major surge by then. Not to mention one or both of us would be out of a job and struggling to find employment in the middle of a surge. The Childcare Tax Credit and the enhanced Unemployment would help, for sure, but I can’t help but imagine that 2020 would be much worse for us with Vicky in our lives (and thus for her) than it was without. 2021 wouldn’t be much better.

Today, she’d just have watched her Sweet 16 pass, with a limited birthday with vaccine passes and possible school breaks. She’d be in the middle of her Junior Year, contemplating a loss of her Junior Prom, and a questionable Senior prom. I don’t see how we could live in Denver on our salary, so even if we’d not left in 2009, it’s likely we’d have to leave now, to a much older family much less able to help us, or elsewhere in the country.

Back in this timeline, I won’t lie. I do wonder what life would have been like with her or her brother (or both) in the world, but let’s get real. My wife and I are both ADHD and likely high-functioning autistic people. Our kids would inherit those genes and be high-maintenance kids. It was hard enough to raise kids in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. People who had kids in the 1970s got to experience the 1980s, but even that wasn’t so bad. After the year 2000, kids have seen the rug pulled out from underneath them so much it’s a wonder we don’t have more maladjusted adults today. Add that to our own genetic challenges, not to mention the high IQ that makes for an insatiable curiosity, and I fear what our kids might have turned out with everything that went on in our lives over the 15 years after that decision to wait just a little longer.

Something to think about if you ever tell us ‘why don’t you have kids?’

The Cycle of Inflation

Here’s something interesting for everyone to think about. Let’s take a typical lower-middle-class worker. He’s paying $1000 a month for rent, which translates to needing to earn $3000 a month to not be rent burdened (and thus eligible to most apartments’ rental criteria). This translates to $17.86 an hour.

Then the “Market” (which I define as a scapegoat to cover for market collusion) decides that $1000 a month isn’t enough, and now that apartment our example person is living in now should cost $1500 a month. Now you need $4500 a month to afford that apartment. “Hey, boss. Imma gonna need a $1500 a month raise because otherwise I can’t qualify for this apartment,” goes over SO well with the bosses, doesn’t it?

So, the consequence is that the employers can’t find people to work at $3000 a month anymore. One of two things happens here. 1) They bitch about how nobody wants to work anymore,

Breakfast King’s bitchin’ sign as captured by redditor u/STEMLord_Tech_Bro

or 2) They start paying $4500 a month to attract the workers who stopped working for $3000 a month. They might hire fewer of the people at $4500 a month, saying that they feel that if you earn more, you should do more, but they DEFINITELY notice the money burning a hole in their employees’ pockets, reason that that same money is doing the same thing in the consumer’s pockets, and they raise their prices.

Queue up articles talking about how businesses are making the most profit since 1950 despite inflation being the worst it’s been in decades, as if that’s a good thing. 😐

I’m no economist, but I can sure see the connections between all these things. Any actual economists want to comment?

Joe Manchin Will Vote No on Build Back Better

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/manchin-says-he-will-not-vote-for-build-back-better-this-is-a-no/ar-AARXSqT

So. The question becomes what can and will he vote for? This should have been the question on the table from day one, not still being hashed out almost a year into the new term.

There are a number of responsible actors here. Let’s take them one at a time.

The largest share of responsibility here goes to Biden, as President and Face of the Democratic Party. Rather than demand everyone get in a room together, emphasise that nobody will leave that room happy, extract promises and concessions from all parties, and push for a unified voice, Biden has played like he’s above the fray. Just like Obama, really, and like Obama, Biden is cruising for a thumping in the midterms that will utterly wreck his ability to get shit done. A well earned thumping because he thought that actions speak louder than words and kept quiet, while Team Red pushed a warped narrative.

But Biden isn’t the sole responsible party here. Let’s talk about Team Progressive now. In 2020, the People of the United States elected a starkly divided Senate and House of Representatives, even as it sent Trump packing. This is the Senate in which 51 votes is needed to do anything, and 61 votes are needed to do most things. Votes 50 and 51 turn out to be Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin, two very moderate and very in-the-pockets of corporation Democrats. Make no mistake. They are not Republicans! They would vex Team Red as much as they do Team Blue, stopping key things Team Red wants done. But they are corporatists and in the pockets of Big Business. And you’re talking about shoving new Consumer Friendly programs down these two very conservative Democrats’ throats, with there not being votes 52 to 61, and wondering why it’s so hard to get to vote 51? Hostage taking makes nobody happy. Here’s a hint for my progressive friends: Use what you already have. Push to get FCC members appointed to reinstate Net Neutrality. Staff the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. And push for things that would make them look bad opposing — carveouts for voter rights to prevent filibustering of people’s rights to vote, so you can get more progressive Senators in to make Manchin and Sinema (and frankly, other Democrats) less relevant. Legislating is hard work!

Of course, I do have some serious issues with Manchin and Sinema as well. What will Manchin support? Why string on the Progressives and the rest of the country if he won’t support anything? Go on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and so on, and just flat out say, “I can’t support this bill. No matter what is done to it, I cannot vote for it in good conscience.” If he CAN vote for it with changes, list those changes, in public. “We need to split this bill up, and each bill needs to pay for itself.” “10 years of charges should not be used to pay for a year of service.” Whatever his hangups are.

We circle back to Biden. From Day One, this should have been a transparent process, with Manchin being held to his word and that word given in public. Biden should be locking these people in a room together, and making it clear that nobody will leave that room happy. He needs to be more of a leader. But he’s not, and here we are.

Why Do Hackers Steal Worthless Accounts?

One of the most common refrains I hear from people dismissing my cybersecurity expertise is that “oh, there’s nothing I have that hackers could want.” This little article will attempt to dismiss this notion with some concrete examples.

There are a variety of ways hackers attack Social Media sites. They include phishing attacks (a message or e-mail tells you you need to click on a link to maintain your access, and of course the official looking link demands your User ID and Password), loading trojans (seemingly useful apps that contain unwanted code that steals your username and password and passes it to hackers) or worms (just plain unwanted code that does the same thing) on your PC, or examining your social profile for information useful for stealing your identity, which might include the social media account itself (Writer, 2017).

But that only addresses the How. It doesn’t address the Why. Let’s tackle that. Recently, China was caught by Facebook using fake accounts to attempt to track down Uyghurs living outside of China. They would pose as teachers, students, rights advocates, and community resources in order to get the confidence of these foreign Uyghurs, so that they could then trick the foreigners into installing malware onto their devices, which would allow the Chinese hackers to spy on the Uyghurs, according to a Japan Times article from 25 March 2021. Another use for social media accounts is to post pro-China propaganda, such as covering for their human rights abuses or spreading disinformation about the Uyghurs and other oppressed groups within China (Quinn, 2021).

On the Ars Technical article talking about Microsoft seizing domains used by Chinese hackers, the comments are overrun by posters, including one who has only posted once before, making pro-China posts. It’s difficult to prove this with certainty, but it sure appears that hackers will attempt to take over even comment accounts in order to leave what appears to be pro-China sentiment being expressed by non-Chinese.

Hacking doesn’t always make sense to those who are being hacked. Who would hack a HVAC supplier’s system, for instance? Worst that could happen would be the HVAC’s payment details would be compromised, right? Well, consider that in 2013, hackers breached the company Fazio Mechanical. But rather than only gain access to Fazio, they were able to use Fazio’s horrible cybersecurity practices (of relying on an on-demand anti-virus scanner!) and a misconfiguration of Target’s own network, which Fazio was tied into, to make the jump from Fazio to the real, ahem, Target of the breach. And a month later, we learned of one of the largest data breaches in history, up to that point, with 110 million affected end-users.

The moral of this story is that all accounts are vulnerable to hacking, and what you think may not be a useful target probably is in a way you’d never anticipate. Something interesting to think about as you set yet another password on yet another account.

WORKS CITED

Chinese hackers used Facebook to target Uyghurs abroad, company says. (2021, March 25). The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/03/25/asia-pacific/uyghurs-facebook-hacking/

Kassner, M. (2015, February 2). Anatomy of the Target data breach: Missed opportunities and lessons learned. ZDNet; ZDNet. https://www.zdnet.com/article/anatomy-of-the-target-data-breach-missed-opportunities-and-lessons-learned/

Quinn, J. (2021, April 9). The Chinese Communist Party Exploits Silicon Valley’s Useful Idiots. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-chinese-communist-party-exploits-silicon-valleys-useful-idiots/

Writer, Q. (2017, January 19). 10 Ways How Hackers Attack Your Social Media Accounts – Quertime. Quertime. https://www.quertime.com/article/10-ways-how-hackers-attack-your-social-media-accounts/

PS: This is a personal blog formatted as an academic paper. Just something to think about when it comes to cybersecurity!