Category: Scarred Brain murmurings

I didn’t write this week, though there definitely was temptation. Obviously, it was a horrible week.

Obviously the big story of the week is the disaster that is Afghanistan. Obviously, I’m connected to the military. My entire childhood was spent as an Army Brat. My dad would talk about the thing that brought him closest to resigning his commission was Operation Eagle Claw, which he referred to as “Desert One.” What happened in Afghanistan was a modern equivalent.

I have ideas about what happened, but I don’t know that any single person is to blame.

But it doesn’t really matter.

It’s over. They failed. Move on.

In the background, however, unscrupulous politicians are at work trying to capitalize on the situation. (I get that they would like a different word that doesn’t include “capital,” but…)

I just want to go somewhere else.

Late writing today, but it’s Saturday, so I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do…..even if I did write yesterday.

So, what have I done already today?

• I messed around, more, with figuring out the mess that is Mailman3. When I updated ^H, Mailman2 was deprecated. Getting things back up and running has been a real pain. This is even more true with a completely headless system. What to do, what to do…..
• Switched away from Apple Podcasts. New player is PlayAPod. H/T Todd Moore. Apple really screwed up with the last update; the app takes about five minutes to load after being off for a while. Nope. Not doing that. But it’s a question of what I should subscribe to, mainly. Oh! I forgot that one. *search* Subscribe.
• Fantasy Football. Sent pings to some folks who’d previously been in leagues prior to the disaster that was 2020. Not a disaster with the Fantasy season, but just with everything. If anyone is reading here, too, please send me an email if you’d like to join.
• I still need to figure out the rest of my prompts for this summer’s writing period

Time to keep dragging along

Got a call today from a push polling outfit.

When you don’t really think that government is the answer to, well, much of anything, questions about whether you think your representative in the state capitol is doing a good job by pushing the government-enforced monopoly to lower prices.

“Has your impression of $Local_Democratic_Delegate improved because his effort to have electricity savings sent back to residents?

“No.”

“Has your impression of $Local_Democratic_Delegate improved because he’s trying to lower prescription drug prices for Medicare recepients?

“No.”

*confused silence*

Have a nice day!

Local communicatees should be handling electricity; maybe individual neighborhoods/developments/etc…

Why would increasing the amount of government influence over any of it raise my impression of a particular politician?

And this is what I call my last Saturday before going back to work….

But I’ll put in for the Monday after the Comedy show I’m seeing next month off. Even if it’s only in DC, I have leave I need to burn.

Busy week. Lots of discussion about some of the things I heard towards the end of last week.

Still keeping my thumb on the pulse of the tumult with the LP, and becoming increasingly convinced that there’s lots of folks with exactly the wrong approach to well….just about everything.

That was definitely a left-handed compliment. You can find the sarcasm by clicking on MyProfile, and selecting Insight.

But the tweet speaks to the push on messaging. He was talking in the podcast about focusing messaging to individual personal benefits.

It’s all about you.

That is exactly the sort of messaging that was aimed at the Baby Boomers.

Run a survey of your friends on your My Yahoo.

That’s tack B. So much has gone in to focus in super-serving what used to be the biggest segment of the US population.

Tack A is a refreshing of the RON PAUL 2008 campaign.

Let’s ignore the fact that it didn’t work back then. Or in 2012. But if we do it harder, it’ll be done correctly this time.

Something else I was listening to recently was talking about the Socialists’ push on Socialism. They wanted Sweden or Denmark. They got Venezuela.

But if they’d forcedconvinced one more book more ardently, everything would be A-okay.

Nope.

So as people exhale more-urgently into the sails of a potential campaign, the less attention and support I can muster.

Maybe that makes me

Nope, I’m not supposed to say that sort of thing.

---

What else is on tap for this week?

I am off work from tonight until Thursday night.

I will be turning my work phone off.

My corporate email account will get checked because I have the account on my personal iPhone.

I will kind of be marooned, but that’s part of what I want.

(And the other part is Waffle House….)

Maybe I’ll get around to getting Mailman fixed on this VPS.

Maybe I’ll figure out what to write about this summer (Yes, I’m going to do that, even though it’s contrary to doctor’s orders…..)

We’ll see.

That’s kinda what I’m up to this weekend.

1. Paying a little attention to some of the internal LP things happening with what went on in New Hampshire. Obviously, I’m not a party member, but what happened is fascinating. And wrong. It was resolved last night, I think, but I’m having trouble following the proceedings. I didn’t watch the livestream of the meeting; I was watching the HR Geeks weekly Jitsi get-together.
2. Speaking of that, I upgraded the software on the VM where all of this runs. I broke the mailing lists. Again. So on my to-do list for the next few days is figuring out how to restore the lists. The list I’d set up for ^H (Sup, dawg?) really didn’t have any subscribers, but there were more on the HR Geeks list. GNU Mailman 2 is gone in the latest Linux distro I’m using, so I need to figure out what’s up in version 3. It appears that they’ve moved past the weird Python database. What I don’t know is whether it stores all of the messages inside the DB backend. If so, that’d actually probably not be a bad thing. When I was younger, I was very opposed to having anything stored in a database. I guess I didn’t really understand the benefits then. Maybe too much reading DJB‘s evangelism about the technical correctness of UFS
3. I’m headed back to Tidewater sometime soon. Primarily to do family stuff with my Mom. But it’s largely to get away from work for awhile. I’m not taking my work laptop. I’m going to be off. I’ve really not done that at all since probably 2012. So, spend some time with my mom and her mean little dog, maybe go to Waffle House.
4. Seeing some of the stuff out of the NFL minicamps last couple of weeks has been interesting. I’m wondering if with some of the connections I’ve made over the past few years I can actually fill it with people who actually want to play. I do need to tweak some of the settings again, but I am still committed to points-per-reception, and points-per-completion. Last year I was running something like four teams in the league to make sure we had enough people playing to sorta make the league work. Maybe I won’t need to do that this year.
5. Summer writing. I’m kind of inclined to do it this year, though it is feeding one of my obsessions. Maybe it’d be better to just do it in July instead of doing the strange month-landing-to-my-birthday thing. Dunno. Writing is an obsession for me, part of OCD, so I’m supposed to try to avoid it. But…
6. The telemedicine stuff that’s really given me a lot of flexibility over the pandemic isn’t working properly. I can do telemedicine to the doctors I see in DC, but I can’t do the same for my psychologist in Maryland. What the actual fuck? I could ride the WMATA short bus around the Beltway to see her, but that’d be very inconvenient while I’m still working. I hope that, despite that, the days of what I saw going on years ago. Maybe the idea is that you’ll have to join a union, and your health insurance will come through the union pre-tax. We’ll see.

But that’s enough for the day. My mug filled with Lorenzotti Coffee is empty, the podcast I’m listening to is about finished, so I should stop.

Theme of the Week 89 – Where is the most inspiring place you have ever been? Why was it inspiring?

I’ve been mulling this one for a while today as I burn PTO to deal with the new Federal Juneteenth holiday.

I think the only place that’s ever really inspired me lately is inspiration to leave.

I think my wayfaring childhood plays a big role in that. Maybe there’s certain keys that remind me of unpleasant places I’ve landed, but I’m trying to think of somewhere

I really don’t think anything would give me positive inspiration now due to my limited eyesight. Inspiration triggered by something aside from visual stimuli seems tough. The auditory stimulations, maybe, is a route, maybe.

But the visual things I saw before I could really appreciate them might have desensitized me to things I really should appreciate.now.

Similarly, I remember as a kid marveling at the USS Alabama on a car trip over Mobile Bay. After living for several years near the USS Wisconsin, when I saw it again, the awe was missing.

Now with my vision basically gone, I don’t know that there’s anything that’s really taken me in more than a decade.

So I don’t know.

Part of the reason I’m under professional psychological care is that I think about doing risky things, knowing that there won’t be anything enthralling that comes out of it.

Most of what I think about doing is generally harmless. The things that I think about doing could be dangerous. But I don’t do any of them.

Normal people don’t have those sorts of thoughts.

Dunno.

As a fledgling programmer, there was a bit of sick satisfaction when some of my shitty code would actually destroy a piece of hardware by something it did.

Obviously, I was not trying to destroy that video controller worth a few hundred bucks, but what I was trying to do shouldn’t have caused it to almost catch fire. Or not. It’s all DC, so the caps did exactly what they’re there to do when fed too much juice. (I looked to see if I could find this now-obsolete item, but couldn’t. I can’t even remember the name of the vendor. I bet if I dug back through my archives, I could find it, but…..I shouldn’t have been doing RS-232 programming. Yes, I have a science degree, but it’s in a non-technical science. The same thing would have probably wouldn’t have happened had I sort of gotten commands to come out of the port using the hot-language-du-jour, and not the correct language for the job, C.)

Seriously, I just sent too many commands to this thing too quickly, and it started smoking. If I’d been connected with a RS-232 cable, and could type about fifteen times faster than I do, the same thing would have happened.

Writing about this was inspired by some of the topics I’ve been tracking. Probably there was some discussion of things that happened with cyber attacks against the Colonial Pipeline, and Iran in this episode of The Fifth Column. There was also something that Amélie linked on Twitter, and led me down a rabbit hole.

I was in the midst of the ^H VM migration (a bit of recursion, likely, if you click that link), and playing with the various mess that is the IPTables replacement on Linux.

As I’ve gotten constant probes from certain bad areas, I’ve sort of taken the approach of temporary DROP operations with Fail2Ban. Repeated abuses come, and I start restricting entire countries.

rule family="ipv4" source address="222.160.0.0/11" drop
rule family="ipv4" source address="180.96.0.0/19" drop

I can remember when you’d use things like reject –reject-with-tcp-reset to try to really overload attackers’ network gear. I don’t do it anymore, because it’s just easier to let attackers’ attempts fall into the ether.

You’d be justified, even, in affirmative responses. No NAP violation, because you’d first been attached.

Probably.

And that I can’t be sure is part of why I’m just dropping shit.

But if I did know, for sure, that the attacks were actually originating from where it appears they are, immediate defensive response is justified.

There’s a reason nobody dares attack the Norks (see #4 there). They’ve got lots of big fucking guns. Even if half of them cook off on the first fire, they’ve killed millions of people in South Korea before those guns could all be taken out. No nukes needed.

Would covert action to eliminate some of those assets early be immoral?

The Colonial Pipeline and JBS attacks happened. Would retaliation for those attacks be justifiable? I think so. What about retaliatory attacks against other things in the area from whence the attacks came? I don’t know.

I can’t remember where I saw a discussion of this, and the question of transition from cyberwar to kinetic war.

The sorts of things that float around my scarred brain.

Background music for this morning.

(And, just now I’m worried that I should write out what this was a link to so it’ll persist after the didn’t-used-to-do-evil company’s vide site goes away… Wake Up by XTC)

Good chat last night with the PF folks last night. Discussion of one of the things that really bothers me, “intellectual property,” I learned that I’m a Fed (how’d I miss that??!?), catfish (my experience is that they’re the fish eating whatever you toss over at the marina as you’re cleaning your deep sea catch…ick, but there’s people who have a eaten it) . We also talked a bit about my dilemma lately about what to do with the Virginia election.

I have no idea who the LP is going to run. I’ve been not terribly impressed with some of the answers about most things, but I will use my chance-of-winning threshold. If an election is within roughly ten percent, based on RCP polling, I’ll vote for the Republican. The Democrats are having a primary; I’ll vote in it, because there are incredibly bad candidates running there, just to vote against those terrible candidates.

One of the candidates is running TV ads talking about women in the workforce; how that they’re not re-entering the workforce, and there’s disparities when they do.

Because of that, Virginia needs to implement policies to ensure that there’s pay equity. Umm, okay.

So you can leave. Companies are doing that.

And with the surge in the use of telework, some companies are just refusing to hire people in states that have the sorts of regulations this guy is campaigning on.

People do just leave to get away from bad government policy. So that has to be stopped globally.

Old and busted: think globally, act locally. New hotness: ignore locally, dominate globally.

So, again, I find myself in the situation where the response, is “what can I do?” Sort of circles back to where I was when I wrote last fall about How I Fount Freedom In An Unfree World.

What’s on tap for this week? Hmm. This is when I’d planned to not care about health stuff/exercise, diet, but I’m just so in to the mode of paying attention to it that I’m finding it difficult to not do the things that have become habit.

I want to be slovenly. I want to eat bad food. I want to drink. But doing those things doesn’t bring me a lot of pleasure at this point.

What to do…?

Other than stop writing for the day. There’s not a lot of direction here, and there’s not a lot of inspiration.

I started listening to this during a discussion of awards shows on one of the podcasts I was listening to. I reject that. There can be many places where there’s no ultimate winner. Obligatory UDict. (My mother used to watch that all the time….wasn’t my thing)

But more of it was listening to a discussion among these folks. Bryan and Thad were talking about things that happened in the South during the Jim Crow era, where people would just do things to provide for/sell to each other in spite of whatever ways an authoritarian government, or other racist denizens wanted.

No. They just did their own thing. Because of that, they were attacked either by the thugs with badges, or hoods.

Is there really that big a difference?

So there was a big push to be number one in the approved economy. That led to the awards shows, and the like. Bubuhbut Oscars So White!!1! That problem’s been solved, and the audiences continues to shrink.

The Intertubes have given people a way to narrowcast, and people aren’t consuming things the same way they used to. So your product ends up as “number one,” but does that really matter when your cumulative audience is smaller than the number ones from the past when there were less people around to consume?

There is an older segment of the population who really still care about that stuff; it was the thing not terribly long ago.

The people worried about those things are the ones driving the news cycle. They’ll continue crowing about it until their audience shrinks to the point when there isn’t anybody left watching/listening.

I can’t bring myself to be upset about this…and that’s part of why I’m a bad person.

But the same thing applies to the political parties. Narrow down options, hope that people are okay with just one choice to make.

Nope.

People will stop paying attention.

That they’ve got the guns might dissuade people, but I’m wondering, really, if it does. Even under the threat of death, I’d probably just choose to not participate. Oh well.

Obligatory when you’re talking about The Smiths.

I’m listening to the discussion between Dave Smith and Joshua Smith on Part Of The Problem.

This is sort of on the heels of Dave’s debate with Eric Brakey a few weeks ago.

What Eric is doing is within the Republican Party. Eric is trying to work within the duopoly.

But will it even matter if HR 1 is passed by Senate trickery? The Clearly Canadian Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, calls it the “Corrupt Politicians Act.” (Maybe he took that from Heritage….but that’s what turned up in my first DDG search…)

In the state where I reside, the Democrats have turned the Commonwealth blue, just as the Byrd Organization intended.

So, for many people in many places, will a takeover of a small portion of a party legally-prohibited from winning even matter?

Do I agree with many of the things the folks in the Mieses caucus are saying? Certainly. Should I spend any significant time on it? If I’m living in a place where a Democrat is always going to be elected with a plurality, does it matter?

So, what can I do?

Exercise my Generation X indoctrination, and Just Say No.

Virginia has “open” primaries. Much of my adult life, I’ve lived in a locality where there is zero chance where my party affiliation would actually affect who gets elected.

In Norfolk, essentially whoever won the Democratic Primary in May was going to win the general election in November. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

So. I find myself in a situation where I vote in one of the duopoly’s primaries just to prevent a certain candidate from winning.

In the Presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020, I voted intentionally against one of the duopoly’s eventual nominees.

I can’t think of a single duopoly candidate I voted for during the primary who got my vote in November.

Just Say No.

So does it even matter what happens?

Hmm.

Other reax from the episode, and a lot of what’s been going on….

I do like most of the organizations specifically on the unwritten enemies list from the folks in the Mieses Caucus.

Maybe someone there disagrees with part of the messaging, but they generally do agree with you. I agree with taking on the woke brigade who aren’t at all concerned with any principles.

If that means I have to vote in the Party of the Klan/Jim Crow/The Tuskegee Experiments/School Segregation/implementation of a South Asian caste system in the name of equity, so be it.

To terrible candidates, I will Just Say No.

As for the LP, no, Dr. J, the party doesn’t need to be anti-racist. No, I don’t agree with a private company exercising the same sorts of tyrannical decision-making as a government might.

But they’re not the government. I can get a chuckle out of The Hoteps. I can buy their wares if they’re of interest to me.

If someone is using government to enforce whatever standards they’ve adopted that I might find to be misguided, I can just not spend any of my money with them.

I’m not going to evangelize to you about it. I’m just going to choose something different.

It’s not that difficult. It’s kind of what Harry Browne was writing about before I was born.