Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?
Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.
But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.
UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”
*NOTE*: This isn’t a normal blog post; this is a declaration of war. It is tactical and dirty because it was a dirty fight already before I got here.
Wait, I thought I was done fighting about free and open source software…
Yes, I distinctly remember closing down my old FOSS-focused blog, delivering my final battle report for the Great Linux Desktop Wars, getting one last laugh at the con artists I helped shut down, and moving on. The mobile market gives the read-only users their software, and we makers and doers have our laptops, so everyone’s happy. Android rules the mobile, Linux rules the server and industrial sector, it’s Miller time, right?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz, one of my old comrades in the FOSS wars, gave me a nice send-off in 2013. So yes, I must have properly retired.
Why is this still happening? Well, actually, a new thing is happening.
The Old Thing that was happening: Everybody had nothing but desktops and laptops. Makers and doers, us working folk, needed these tools to make and do stuff, using Linux and command lines and programming. Read-only users, people who do nothing but consume, wanted computers to be dumbed down TV sets for them to drool on, while hunting us geeks down in the streets to brand our foreheads with the scarlet “elitist” and then force everyone to use Microsoft Windows.
(To make a long story short, OK?)
That thing stopped happening because hallelujah, mobile came along and saved us. The read-onlys could have their TV set in their pocket and never cared about our tools again. It’s been a loooooong time since I heard anybody attack a command line.
But here’s the New Thing happening: Now the read-onlys outnumber the makers 9-to-1, and they are in charge. The read-onlys want to dumb down our tools anyway because they want everybody to use mobile like them and can’t see why we need powerful, complicated tools to do stuff. If they can’t get us onto mobile, beside them, so that no work gets done, they want to break the tools we use on laptop so we’re screwed anyway. Out of spite.
Dangerous things happen when you put a read-only in charge of an open source software project, especially when he’s the CEO of the company that owns it, and is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – yet another trust fund baby born into wealth and prestige who spits on people who do work.
Again, I thought this was over. I don’t want to go back in the trenches, I thought everyone had learned that lesson!
This is about WordPress, Gutenberg, and Matt Mullenweg
Get used to those three terms, because you’ll be seeing them a lot around here in the coming months.
I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:
COVID-19 pandemic hits
World recession (if not depression) hits
An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!
This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.
It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?
So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…
UPDATE 04/19/20:Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.
See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.
The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.
In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, has been getting death threats. Merely for doing his job.
We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.
DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).
What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.
This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.
Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.
But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…
Here it is Christmas Eve, and I’ve JUST NOW shoveled my way out from under my workload to pay attention to my own site for a change.
I know most of you want to think about this like you need a hole in your mistletoe, but I promise it’s funny and enlightening. The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump examines where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, and – are you sitting down for this? It actually explains things so they make *some* sense!
It’s a defining Christmas for the Trumpster. Lots of soul-searching is due (though we may be sure none will be undertaken). If ghosts of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John McCain visited him tonight, that would be most fitting.
Yeah, so there’s a new post up at 123ish.com, about the current situation with Hong Kong’s protests and China. It came onto our radar when it involved the gaming community via the Hearthstone fiasco, when a tournament player got suspended for making a little demonstration in support of Hong Kong’s struggle for liberation from China.
I went into covering that story intending it to be light-hearted satire, poking a jab at Blizzard Entertainment and making a few swipes at dictator Xi Jinping and his Winnie the Pooh resemblance. But once I started reading up on what the hell is really going on in China, the story got too grim. Be advised, that link goes to some stomach-churning stark reality. Hong Kong is protesting because it doesn’t want to be subject to Chinese control. After seeing just a taste of what’s going on there, can anyone blame them?
At the very least, China’s torture of Falun Gong members amounts to a modern-day Inquisition, except even Torquemada never got sadistic enough to harvest organs from subjects while they were still alive. The treatment of everybody else in China isn’t exactly winning any human rights pageants either. The continued censorship of most of the world by China through corporate proxies is added salt in the wound. We are all living under China’s bootheel already, whether we know it or not.
Xi Jinping is a modern-day Hitler, and in some ways he’s even worse. This is no laughing matter. China must be stopped now. Why is the rest of the world turning a blind eye?
Faster than I could post, new stories of horrors and atrocities are coming out of China by the day. Read well, because we can do something about China now, or we can all look forward to a “re-education camp” tomorrow.
I wasn’t taking boycotts against Blizzard and other companies seriously before. But now, I’m going to have to at least think it over. If the price of doing business in China is kowtowing to this savage, monstrous regime, then it is not worth it.
UPDATE:NGO Human Rights Watch now declares China “a global threat to human rights.” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth states: “Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics. Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone’s future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing’s assault on the international human rights system.”
Big whoopie, I’m a food blogger now! Well, OK, we’ve gotta fill categories somehow, so it’s been food a couple times. I am far from the only blogger online to rave about the Mediterranean Diet, but it’s the only sensible diet there is to find with real research to back it up.
Naturally, sticking to the Mediterranean Diet is just about the most anti-American thing you can do. Walk home from the store with a bottle of actual olive oil (easier said than done) and a bag of kale and pick-ups like these:
will follow you down the street yelling “FAGGIT!” So I go into how American food culture is one big conspiracy to keep you tubby as a hippo. This brings us to a very topical subject…
Ah, Denver International Airport! Nothing adds spice to the most controversial – and most expensive – public works project in history like decorating it with Nazi murals, demonic horses, grimacing gargoyles, and Freemason symbols. Join me on a tour of DIA, as we delve into the mysteries surrounding this nexus of nuttiness.
