Quote of the day—Doug Casey

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The government has no alternative but to “do something.” They will—they have to—print more money to keep the rotten house of cards from collapsing on itself.

The Democrats have already said that they want to increase the next stimulus to over $3 trillion. The fact that most of the last round of stimulus was either overtly wasted, went to cronies, or can’t be accounted for, is completely lost on them. They recognize that unless they give a lot of money directly or indirectly to the hoi polloi, there are going to be millions of them on the streets.

Approximately 11 million renters and 4 or 5 million mortgagees are now in forbearance. They’ll be kicked out of their houses and apartments come January 1, barring a huge bailout. Where are those people going to go?

If Obama had made good on his ridiculous promise about shovel-ready projects, there’d be a lot more bridges that they could camp out under. But he didn’t. They have a real problem on their hands. Millions of people have been living above their means and have no savings. At this point, if they let landlords and banks kick all those people out, a number of things will happen. Residential property prices will collapse. Millions of people will be scrambling for somewhere to live. Lots of banks and landlords would go bust.

The longer the government kicks the can down the road, the bigger the inevitable bust will be. The stimulus money will have to continue because Biden doesn’t want it all to come unglued on his watch. The State is not only going to have to pay individuals and business owners that their idiotic policies have busted. They’ll be subsidizing banks, landlords, and utility companies—because you can’t live in a house or an apartment without water and electricity.

It’s worse than that because even if you cover the bare essentials, there’s no money leftover for maintenance. There will be millions of buildings across the country suffering from deferred maintenance. The South Bronx, East St. Louis, and Baltimore will be replicated across the country.

Doug Casey
December 2020
Doug Casey on What Happens When the Suspension on Evictions Ends
[You might also want to watch Fight for the Soul of Seattle and The Worst Economic Collapse Is Starting Now. And this is real:

If someone trespasses by pitching a tent on private property or walks out with a handful groceries from the corner market or steals power tools with the intent of reselling them online in order to pay for a basic need like food or rent, the city of Seattle may be OK with that.

The cities are driving productive people out and inviting the lazy and criminals in. The tax revenue is way down and is responding by raising taxes.

I can’t imagine it improving with their mindset. They are in a death spiral that is likely to pull the entire country, if not the world, into it.

Another data point is that, as a construction guy I know was telling me recently, “No one wants to work anymore. They just want to stay home and collect their checks.”

Free money isn’t free. There will be a price paid. And the one, probably, good thing that may come out of the Biden/Harris administration is that the coming collapse will be easier to place on the heads of the Marxist rather than the free market advocates.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sean D Sorrentino

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When people talk about rioting if the Supreme Court takes any action, they’re not talking about Republicans rioting. They’re talking about the Left. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that. So when people tell you they’re worried about “unrest” they’re telling you two things.

1. That they know the Left will riot.

2. That they know the Right will not.

So game it out.

If everyone knows that the Right will calmly accept the decision to give the win to Biden despite evidence (though not “proof”) of election irregularities, and they know that the Left will react with violence to anything but a Biden presidency, why should they choose anything but a Biden presidency?

I’m not advocating violence. I’m sure not going to start rioting. But haven’t we taught them that they can ignore us and suffer no consequences while the Left has taught them to fear? Haven’t we allowed them to take our kindness for weakness? Haven’t we basically told them that there’s zero consequences for making us mad?

Sean D Sorrentino
Posted on Facebook December 17, 2020
[The above is in reference to this.

A1: I can think of some reasons. Like, it’s their job to do the legally correct thing.
A2: Yes.
A3: Yes.
A4: Yes.

This isn’t a tough quiz. Lots of other people will figure it out too and take away “interesting” lessons from it.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Update: The basis for this is probably false.

Moral cowardice

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Via daughter Jaime:

The following is my transcript in case the original goes away:

It was written by someone is a current staffer for one of the Supreme Court Justices…

I’ll just describe the report to you the report which I just read and you can make of it what you will.

He said that the Justices they always do [sic] went into a closed room to discuss, you know, cases they are taking or to debate. There’s no phones, no computers, no nothing, no one else is in the room except for the nine Justices.

It’s typically very civil. They usually don’t hear any sound. They just debate what they are doing.

But when the Texas case was brought up, he said he heard screaming through the walls as Justice Roberts and the other liberal justices were insisting that this case not be taken up.

And the reason, the words that were heard through the wall when Justice Thomas and Alito were citing Bush versus Gore, from John Roberts were, “I don’t give a [blank] about that case. I don’t want to hear about it. At that time we didn’t have riots!”

So what he was saying, was that he was afraid of what would happen if they did the right thing. And I’m sorry, but That. Is. Moral. Cowardice.

And we, in the SREC, I’m a SRC member, we put those words in very specifically because the charge of the Supreme Court is to openly be our final arbitrator, our final line of defense, for right and wrong. And they did not do their duty.

So I think we should leave these words in because I want to send a strong message them.

See also 1:32:31 (Its Texas Congressman Matt Patrick Texas Cong. Dist. 32) for more context.

This is, literally, hearsay evidence. But if true, SCOTUS is sending a very clear message of how to get your way if the law and evidence isn’t on your side. The message will be heard loud and clear and the lesson learned will have dire long term consequences.

Update: This is probably false, at least in part. They have been meeting via video conferencing for months.

H/T to https://twitter.com/AdamPiersen/status/1339804928479473665

It’s possible something like this happened on a video call, but we have no evidence of that.

Quote of the day—Alex Woodward

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Mr Biden’s platform includes a proposed ban of AR-style rifles and high-capacity magazines as well as implementing universal background checks, closing “loopholes” allowing gun sales to at-risk individuals, and hold gun manufacturers accountable for their products – all of which are expected to face uphill battles from a GOP-dominated Congress and legal challenges from a ruthless gun lobby.

Alex Woodward
December 14, 2020
Joe Biden pledges ‘common sense’ gun control on anniversary of Sandy Hook massacre
[“Ruthless gun lobby”?

Bias? What bias?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tom Luongo

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The arguments against the electoral college are simply veiled arguments against Federalism. And while I’m happy to entertain arguments against any coercive form of government, in the case of the U.S. our Federal system is a flawed but robust system which has given ground slowly to these political terrorists over the past couple hundred years.

It is in a terminal state of collapse today and the odds are long that it will survive these challenges in any practical sense.

Tom Luongo
December 9, 2020
Less Electoral College? No, More Electoral College
[I don’t see them as veiled. And not arguments either. More like threats or, on really bad days, telling us this is how they plan to execute us.

I just hope we have enough strength of character to exercise our veto power if it comes down to that.—Joe]

It is 2020 after all

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Seven year-old grandson Bryce shared this in his parents Christmas letter:

Q: What’s the worst vision to have?
A: 2020!

Barb and I know we have been extremely fortunate compared to a lot of people. Still, there are some things that have been depressing to me in the last month or so.

I’ve lost three former classmates:

  • Verl Presnall was a good friend throughout most of grade school. He was also on the board of directors and past president of the East End Rod & Gun Club in Milton Freewater, Oregon. He died of prostrate cancer on October 14th.
  • Kathy (Fargo) Deyo was a high school classmate. We were never close but with a class of only 125 everyone knew everyone else. And she was always such a happy person. It was always a pleasure to be around her. She was one of those people who you think, “Life is so unfair that he/she should die so young.” She died November 13th.
  • Terry Thornton was also a high school classmate. Again we weren’t close but we had a lot of connections in the last 15 years or so. And he was another one of those people that you think shouldn’t have been one to leave us so early. Terry died December 1st of COVID.

I didn’t know it until a couple days ago but Eric Engstrom died on the same day as Terry.

Eric had a larger impact on my professional life than anyone in the world. The impact was huge. I would never have gone to work for Microsoft if it hadn’t been at Eric’s urging. He knew I had written tons of assembly language code for various graphics boards. Eric needed people to write video drivers for Direct Video (as it was called in May of 1995) for Windows 95. It had to be done by August so game developers could have games ready for Christmas. That was the wildest ride I have ever been on. Read Renegades of the Empire. Whenever you read something in there that sounds too far out to be believable double the “far out” quotient and you will be in the ball park of reality. I saw a hole kicked in a wall when I reported a bug I had found and fixed. I didn’t create the bug, it was from the manufacture of the video board. It was extremely obscure and absolutely deadly when it showed up. And it wasn’t found until after the code had been “frozen”. I was there when a keyboard was repeatedly bashed against a desk at 3:00 AM. From my office the key tops falling to the desktop sounded like broken glass. The motorcycle, spinning it’s tire in the hallway, burned a hole through the carpet all the way to the concrete. There was the illegal fireworks on campus, the Humvee driven across the grass field on campus (and getting stuck there), and the persistent thief who kept stealing RAM out of our computers in the middle of the night making it problematic as to whether we would be able to work when we came in the next morning.

That was just the first few months of my time at Microsoft and with Eric in “full bloom”. After a few years I was his first employee for his first startup, Chromium Communications.

That path changed my life forever. I made at least twice as much, if not three times as much, money because of Eric. Working with Eric and others at Microsoft was an alternate reality for me. I had never met such smart people before. I was used to frustration at explaining the same things over and over to co-workers. During those first years at MS people would “get it” before I had finished my first sentence. That changed my standards for the type of working environment I was willing to be in.

On a personal level Eric was so incredibly funny and happy and could even find humor on the darkest of days when his companies were imploding during the dot com bubble implosion. His probably (you frequently couldn’t tell) insane ideas and ambitions were amazing. When I was working in Richland, WA I would drive 200 miles, one way, to have dinner with him in Kirkland, then drive back to Richland to go to work the next day. It was more than worth the drive.

I’m certain I thought of him at least once a week even though I hadn’t had contact with him for years. I kept putting “things on the list” I want to share with him. My accomplishments and bits of news or inside knowledge about things I knew he had an interest in.

Eric had a personality (and ego) which could fill the largest ballroom in the largest hotel. He could make you believe the impossible was not only plausible but he was going to do it and it was going to be FUN! He planned to live forever and I though he probably would succeed. He failed and the shock will be with me for a long time.

2020 sucks.

Then this morning, this is just minor punctuation mark on the 2020 ledge, some thief stole the presents from our font steps. Daughter Jaime had Amazon ship them to us and we didn’t notice they had been delivered last night. Amazon didn’t put them in the package box. I checked the video this morning and saw this:

FullScreen

Package theft in Bellevue is up 72% last month compared to last year. We just contributed to the statistics for December.

It is 2020 after all.

I did get some good news late yesterday. Dad tried to buy a particular piece of prime properties to add to the farm on August 16, 1978. He was not successful. My brothers and I tried again in the early 1980s without success (the owner would barely talk to us).

In 2008 there was a verbal agreement between brother Doug and a third party. The third party wanted some of our land. Doug agreed that we would trade it for the land we really wanted. We knew the land we wanted was for sale but the owners wouldn’t have anything to do with us.

In May of this year, yes 12 years after the verbal agreement, they FINALLY, signed a contract to follow through with their verbal agreement. The contract said the deal would closed by November 29th. Uhh.. okay. That seems like an awfully long time to sign a few papers. We signed our papers in the middle of November. Wow! That took a long time (almost all of the hold up was on the side of the other party). But at least we are going to make the deadline. The other party still took what seemed like forever. Twice they sent papers to the title company without the signatures being notarized.

Yesterday the title company sent an email saying the papers had been recorded at the local courthouse.

It took over 42 years, but now we own that property. Maybe we can close out 2020 on a happy note.

Update: 12/15/2020 was also a good for another reason. I did the final review on a new patent application from the lawyer. I’ve solved tougher problems but I’m more proud of this patent application than any of the others. I thought of Eric a lot when working on this. Last January through March I worked an average 16 hours a day 7 days a week (except for a week in Hawaii for our first wedding anniversary) to find the solution and demonstrate its validity. I really wanted to tell Eric about this accomplishment.

Quote of the day—Ida Auken

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Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

…

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.

Ida Auken
November 11, 2016
Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030
[Auken also says:

Author’s note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading – for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.

The “devil’s in the details” as they say. If you think about it just a little bit you realize it isn’t even possible. A few examples:

  • Auken’s statements are self contradictory. Everything is free? Then what is “employment” about then? They claim, “It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.” Do they get paid for this or not? If yes, then who are the consumers and do they pay for the products and/or services? If they don’t get paid, then what is their motivation to product a product and/or service someone is interesting in using?
  • They don’t explicitly say this but it’s implied that all the services are supplied by artificial-intelligence/robots. So what of crime control? Even if one were to concede there was no physical need for sustenance, shelter, entertainment, etc. there will be still be crimes of violence. Conflicts over relationships, insults, broken agreements, etc. Who pays for the cops, lawyers, judges, and prisons? Keep in mind that in a place where everything is free fines are meaningless.
  • Accommodations are not all equal. Who gets the penthouse overlooking the ocean and who gets the street view of the recycling center? They’re both free you know.
  • They don’t own anything, really? Not even clothes they say. Yet, I just demonstrated that a claim on quality of accommodations is going to occur. What about the dress they were married in? Or the food they ordered which just arrived from the robot pizza joint down the street? And what of the food they made themselves? Or the photographs they took, the art object they made, the diary they kept, or the book they wrote?

There will always be markets with sellers and buyers of property. They may be black markets in a time and place where thugs attempt to create a utopian world of free everything and equality for all, but markets will always exist.

Auken vision is not one of “for better or worse”. It’s one of reality or delusion.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Stephen Michael Stirling

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Which is why vaccination should be compulsory, unless there’s independently-corroborated medical reasons for not taking it.

And by “compulsory” I don’t mean fines and scolding; I mean the cops will come to your house and physically hold you and your family down while the shot is administered, and if you resist beat you to a pulp or shoot you.

Stephen Michael Stirling
Posted on Facebook December 12, 2020
[Via a private post by Jonathan.

Best response (also private) by Vector Victor:

“Alexa, vacuum the doormat.”

I find it interesting so many people are so casual about advocating egregious violation of basic human rights.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Via Kevin Baker on Facebook:

Seen elsewhere:

Both sides think they’re right.
Only one side is censoring you.

That doesn’t guarantee one side or the other is telling the truth. Both sides could be wrong.

But it does guarantee which side I’m going to oppose.

Eric Engstrom

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This morning I received an email telling me Eric Enstrom died.

I probably spent an hour staring off into space thinking about him. I thought about all the things I would say in my blog post. Then I realized I didn’t have enough time in the day to write everything I would need to say. I have too many other things that must be done today. Maybe next weekend I’ll have the time.

Read some of the things I have written about him in the past to get a flavor of my view of him. And know this, he had a tremendous influence on my life. My life would have been unbelievably different without him. I last saw him in March of 2011. I’ve been wanting to “catch up” with him for years and always put it off. Now, it’s too late.

Eric once told me:

I will consider myself rich when I’m standing on the moon with the sunlight reflecting off my visor as I’m looking at my initials carved into the soil. They will be big enough and deep enough that when people on the earth look up they can see I was there.

He wanted me to do that for him because of my experience with explosives. I did the calculations on the line width needed for the font. IIRC it was seven miles. I told Eric it was impractical and his immediate response was, “You just need more explosives.”

That’s just one of dozens of stories I could tell about Eric. And no matter how many stories I told it wouldn’t begin to capture the reality of his personality and genius.

The man who planned to live forever and had plausible visions (as well as crazy ideas) of how to make that happen died from medical complications after dropping a monitor on his foot.

Dystopian plot point is reality

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On a recent trip to Idaho I listened to the book Alongside Night (and from Audible):

It’s the near future and America is in trouble. Hyperinflation and disorder reign in the towns and cities of the nation.

Alongside Night tells the story of Elliot Vreeland, son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Martin Vreeland. When his family goes missing and while being shadowed by federal agents, Elliot, with the help of his mysterious companion Lorimer, explore the underground world of the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre to rescue them. It’s a story of romance, intrigue, action, adventure, and exhilarating science fiction thrills.

The original copyright is 1979. This explains the existence of phone booths in the book. One of the novel and interesting (to me) plot points was the existence of a special code certain government people could use to make phone calls even though communication services for the average person were shut down by the tyrannical government.

I didn’t realize it was created by President Kennedy by a Presidential Memorandum on August 21, 1963, was extended to wireless services, and still exists.

Quote of the day—David Kopel

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China’s Cultural Revolution began to end in 1976 when Mao died, and the pragmatic totalitarians staged a coup that removed the more idealistic totalitarians. Will the people of the Anglosphere have to wait that long, or longer, for rescue? Or will the hundreds of millions of people who don’t support the totalitarian ultra-left emancipate themselves from mental slavery? Will they end the reign of terror of today’s Maoists?

David Kopel
December 11, 2020
The Cult of Mao 1966 v. 2020
[Good questions.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Election questions

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From a comment thread:

In many cases if proper procedures are not followed it would be impossible to show fraud occurred even if it were massive. Should the plaintiffs have to prove fraud occurred when the defendants eliminated the possibility of such proof? Do you really want that to be the law of the land?

Election fraud stories

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I as I said in my previous post I work with computer security. I know how tough that is to do right and how easy it is to believe things are security when it’s actually, for all practical purposes, a wide open system.

I only had one story from the election security world and I didn’t think that was sufficient to make my point. Just a few minutes ago I found another story which may help to prove the point that my concerns about election security also being a very difficult problem. The information was from a somewhat private forum so I’m removing the attribution:

I recently had an old guy from Northeast Philly tell me they used to grow beards for Election Day. Because you could get 3 or 4 votes out of a good beard by shaving a little off before revoting.

My personal story comes from an acquaintance of mine who used to live in Indiana. They were a volunteer who helped count ballots. Ballots, by law, would be discarded if there were extraneous marks on it. The ballot counters would put a small piece of pencil lead under their thumbnail. When a ballot came through that was a “straight ticket” of the opposing party, which became relatively ease to identify with a little practice, they would give the ballot a swipe with their leaded thumbnail and then show it to the opposition ballot counter who would agree the ballot should be discarded.

It is this sort of thing that makes me believe all the testimony from numerous election officials and elected politicians claiming the elections were fair and honest are meaningless. Even if they watched the process with their own eyes a skilled fraudster could get away with massive fraud and the observer would be clueless.

Good security is very, very difficult.

A security story

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My job is computer security. My job, among other things, is to think like a bad guy and then prevent security breaches and/or catch them soon after they have begun executing their “kill chain”. Most people, even many very smart people, do not have the capacity to think like a bad guy. I have a real life story to illustrate.

Just because this is computer security don’t think this isn’t relevant to current events of a vital importance to the entire nation. I’ll tie all together before the end.

Please do not assume this happened at the company I work for. I have contacts with many other people in the security industry. We often share stories. Sometimes this story sharing is to warn others of how clever the bad guys are and how they succeeded or almost succeeded. Other times stories are shared about how mind bogglingly stupid and numerous some of the mistakes were in the implementation of a computer network system.

This story is about how stupid and numerous the mistakes were.

The type of business and other potentially identifying aspects of the story have been changed to protect the guilty. But the critical aspects of the story are true.

The company penetration testers were asked to test a tool used by customer facing employees. This tool allowed employees to assist the customers with their business with the company. It gave the employees access to personal information about the customer. The personal information access was required for the employee to do their job. The tool had been “released to production” months before the penetration testers (and apparently or other security professionals) took a look at things.

A simplified view of the tool architecture looked something like this:image

Database Servers A & B are the only servers applicable to the Customer Assist Tool. The other Database Servers are for other web applications unrelated to the Customer Assist Tool.

Everything from the Load Balancer up were Internet facing. It wasn’t originally designed that way. Originally everything seen in this diagram was inside the corporate network. But because of COVID they had “reasons” and they changed the design so employees working from home could easily access the Customer Assist Tool.

The Internet facing Customer Assist Tool required a company network username and password. The Load Balancer did not. The Load Balancer accepted connections from anyone on the Internet. The Database Servers did not require any security tokens or login. Anything coming from the Load Balancer was considered valid.

The penetration testers didn’t bother trying to do a brute force attack on the login to the Customer Assist tool. They connected directly to the Internet facing Load Balancer and sent queries to the Database Servers. If they knew just a tiny bit of unique public information about the customers, say an email address, phone number, street address, or Social Security Number, they could then get access to extremely personal information from the database.

The penetration testers sounded the ALL HANDS ON DECK alarm. The incident response people (IR) showed up.

The software developers (SDs) of the system were brought into the virtual room and told this is a really big problem. Except for biologically required breaks you’re not leaving the room until this is fixed.

SDs: “We don’t see why this is such a big deal. Someone would have to know the URL for the load balancer. And the only people that might know it are the users of the tool. And we don’t think very many, if any of them are smart enough to figure it out.”

IRs: <blink><blink> “The penetration testers figured it out. And the bad guys out there do this sort of stuff all the time. It’s how they make their money. I’m not going to waste our time explaining this to you. Fix the problem. NOW!”

The IRs then asked how far the logs go back, “You do have logs, right?” The software developers assured the IRs they had logs. The logs went back 90 days. There probably were a few days of missing traffic between when the system was released to production and the oldest log files but most of it was there.

IRs: “Okay, good. We can find out if there was actually any customer information lost.”
SDs: “Oh. You want logs for that? We just log activity at the Customer Assist Tool Web Application. The penetration testers, and any bad guy activity, won’t be in those logs.”
IRs: “Okay…. are there ANY log on the database servers?”

The SDs go looking and find there are generic web logs available that go back to the beginning of the release to production. The IRs looked at the logs for a few seconds and realized the IP addresses of all the requests are of the Load Balancer. There is no indication of the origin of the request. Requests from the Customer Assist Tool are indistinguishable from a request from anywhere else on the Internet.

What about load balancer logs? Maybe. But they don’t go back very far. And if they do exist, all the data is intermixed with the other web applications and other Database Servers.

Within a few hours the SDs have a fix.

IRs: “Tell me about your fix.”

SDs: “The login credentials of the employee used to login to the Customer Assist Tool are passed to the Database Server which validates the credentials before responding.”

IRs: “Okay, we should improve upon that, but maybe that will be good enough that we don’t have to shut down the application until a permanent fix is in place. But that’s a question for our VPs to discuss. Oh, by the way, how many employees do you have authorized to use this tool?”

SDs: “Uhhh… all company employees can use this tool.”

IRs: <blink><blink> “Everyone in the company? Really?” <IRs go to the tool and verify they have access>

SDs: “Yes. If someone improperly used the tool to gain access to customer information when they weren’t supposed to they could be caught and could lose their job. Therefore the customer information is safe from misuse.

IRs: <some facepalm><others bang their heads against the wall> “This is a large company. There are thousands of employees. Anyone on the Internet can find valid company credentials in five minutes or less. We disable hundreds of accounts per week as we find credentials on the web ourselves.”

SDs: <blink><blink>

The story goes on but the important part is that the SDs, not stupid people, made a ton of errors. These errors started with not getting a security professional in the room when they changed the design. The errors compounded dramatically from there.

They had a world view much different than the bad guys and the security professionals.Things which could not even be imagined by the SDs were child’s play to the penetration testers and the IRs.

Now to tie this to current events. Our recent election.

Several courts reviewing the lawsuits claiming foul play have concluded the election was fair and honest.or, at least, there was insufficient evidence of widespread fraud to change the results.

As seen in the story above there are failures modes which not only allow unauthorized access/fraud but make it impossible to determine if such access/fraud occurred. Furthermore, unless someone is experienced in thinking like a bad guy they can honestly believe everything is “fair and honest” and be completely, totally, catastrophically, wrong.

I trust the courts to know their profession. I don’t trust them with security issues. I trust them to accurately asses the integrity of our election far less than the SDs could accurately asses the security of their system. The system they designed and built.

The legal professionals of the court did not design or build the election system. They did not evaluate the security after the (supposedly) COVID inspired changes were made from the viewpoint of a security professional. The original election security features had evolved over hundreds of years and thousands of people poking at it, finding faults, and attempting to prevent future fraud and errors. In the span of a few months a few people made changes which did not go through nearly as rigorous review as the pre COVID system.

I don’t know with a 100% guarantee that sufficient fraud occurred to change the election results. I do know, with 100% certainty, that many people were highly motivated to commit fraud. I do know, with 100% certainly, that some fraud occurred. I’m nearly certain the system in use has issues which make it impossible to detect fraud after the fact.

The bottom line to this is that anyone who says the election was fair and honest because the courts say it was is either lying or placing their trust in a body of people that don’t know anywhere enough about security to make that call.

Quote of the day—John F. Kennedy

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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy
March 13, 1962
Address on the first Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress
[I grew up with this being part of my understanding of what made the U.S. different from so many other governments of the world throughout history. I never imagined this might be a prophecy for our future.

We now have a situation where essentially half of the population believes a fraudulent election gave the presidency to a candidate who openly, and proudly, states they plan to deny every citizen their basic, inalienable, human rights.

See also the other times when I referenced this same quote.

Today there are other Kennedy quotes which are also applicable:

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Petr Svab

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An elections supervisor in Coffee County, Georgia, demonstrated in recent videos posted online how Dominion Voting Systems voting software allows votes to be changed through an “adjudication” process. The process allows the operator to add vote marks to a scanned ballot as well as invalidate vote marks already on the ballot.

Adjudication should only serve to resolve issues of voters marking ballots incorrectly, such as filling the bubbles in a way that doesn’t clearly show who he or she voted for. Yet it appears a substantial number of ballots went through that process, at least in some Georgia counties. As the Coffee County supervisor, Misty Martin, showed, the system can be set to allow adjudication of all scanned ballots, even blank ones, and effectively allow the operator to vote those ballots.

Petr Svab
December 10, 2020
How Dominion Software Allows Changing, Adding Votes
[Interesting.

The article makes it sounds like tampering with the vote is fairly easy and perhaps undetectable.

After thinking about this problem for all of 30 seconds… If I were writing the software for this feature it would print out a copy of the original ballot with the adjudicated vote indicated, a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) and a hash of votes and the GUID. The GUID and hash would be stored in the database with the other vote results. This would make an audit relatively easy and resistant to tampering.

Perhaps they did that or even something far better. But the article doesn’t indicate that. Concerns such as this need to be investigated.—Joe]

Stretched necks

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Long ago and far away (20+ years and 300+ miles) I was just starting to reload rifle rounds. I probably wasn’t using the proper lubrication and I got a 30-06 case stuck in this die:

image

I concluded it was impossible to get the case out and I went to the local gun shop to see if they had a replacement die I could purchase. The owner of the store, a wise and knowledgeable man, suggested I order a case extraction tool rather than purchase a new die. I did so, but it took far longer for the tool to arrive than I had patience for and I got another die anyway. A neck resizing only die.

When the tool did arrive I was looked at the situation and realized I needed to drill out the primer pocket (drill provided with the tool), tap the resultant hole (tap provided), use a cup like piece of metal with a hole in the “bottom” through which a bolt was screwed into the base of the shell casing, then tighten the bolt to pull the case out of the die. That should work! Except for one problem. The depriming pin and expander ball were inside the case and blocking the drilling and tapping operations. I was unable to remove them from the case up through the top. In fact you can see the broken top of the spindle (is that the correct word for this?) in the picture above from my attempts to unscrew it from the die. I didn’t really need the full length resizing die at the time and left the stuck case in the die.

20+ years later I started to reload 30-06 again and I needed to do full length resizing with some used brass I had purchased a year or so ago. I got out the full length resizing die and discovered the stuck case. Crap. As I shuffled through my die supplies I stumbled across the case removal tool and reevaluated the situation. I really needed to figure out how to get the depriming pin and expander ball out of the case. After way too long I realized something.

In the picture you will see four different knurled sections to the die. The top two are associated with the spindle. I removed these, squirted some case lube into the top of the die, turned the second one upside down so that it didn’t thread itself back into the die main body and tightened it up. It was a hard pull but the expander ball came back up through the case which had been stuck for 20+ years.

I drilled and tapped base of the case and successfully extracted the case with the case extraction tool I had purchased so many years ago. See the case on the left below compared to the normal case in the center:

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I expressed my joy and cleverness to Barb, reassembled the die, adjusted it, lubed up a bunch of cases and started resizing them. On about the fourth case I stupidly picked up an lubed case sitting on the bench and got it stuck.

This time it only took about 10 minutes, instead of 20+ years, to get the case out. See the case on the right above.

What I found most interesting was that the stuck cases had necks which were stretched a full 0.150 inches. Previously stuck cases on the left and right compared to a normal case in the center:

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Quote of the day—SilverDeth

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The rubes they’ve been working all these years are roused, pissed off and looking for the nearest pitchfork. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. ALL OF THE GUNS sold out over Thanksgiving weekend.

ALL.
OF.
THEM.

Our “betters” should have taken them before they started blatantly nullifying elections. Pride and arrogance has done in our owners, like so many tyrants before. They mistook “negotiation, forbearance and appeasement,” for “surrender.”

What these Cloud Dwelling Nimrods, fail to understand is this sudden swelling of anger has little to do with Trump specifically – and everything to do with the ARROGANCE our civic masters.

Donald Trump was never anything but a symptom of an amok government and a deadly warning to our elite. He was Joe-Six-Pack NICELY telling Mordor’s brain-trust to back the F*CK OFF. The message was ignored, mocked and then followed by a host of deliberate provocations and indignities.

Well, congratulations – “nice” just stormed out the door with his AR and a serious attitude problem. “Nice” ain’t entirely sure what to ventilate first, but that’s O.K., because “nice” bought several billion rounds of .223 in over the last few years.

SilverDeth
December 7, 2020
2020 Just Keeps Shittin’ in our Mouths
[Via Matthew Bracken.

We live in interesting times and the clock is ticking down to the decisive second…—Joe]

Lost classmates

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Long time Boomershooters didn’t know him but they had plenty of reason to appreciate him. Terry Thornton owned Portogo Portable Toilets and delivered them to Boomershoot until 2017 when he sold the business.

We weren’t close but we had a fair number of connections. I went to High School with Terry and when I lived in Moscow Idaho he lived about a 100 yards down the street from me. I would occasionally see him at the grocery store and other places around town. His wife was a chemistry teacher at the high school and taught all my kids. One time she called me about Xenia. 

On December 1st Terry died:

Terrance “Terry” Thornton passed away Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020, in Yuma, Ariz., from complications of COVID-19.

…

He met his wife in Moscow, and he and MaryAnn Kallas were married March 4, 1979, in Spokane. They enjoyed traveling, watching their daughters play sports, watching their son ride in motorcycle races, riding their side-by-side, hunting, boating, golfing and gambling at their favorite casinos. He also had a love for riding motorcycles, dirt bikes and his Harley-Davidson. He was always in search of Bigfoot, and we wish him well on his quest to find “The Foot.” He was happiest when he and MaryAnn were traveling and his theme song was “On The Road Again,” which he sang loudly and off tune.

Terry never met a stranger. He would say hi and wave to everyone. His friends and family described him as funny, charming, the kindest soul you could ever meet, he lit up a room wherever he went and always had a smile on his face, kindhearted, good man, excellent husband and father, one of the good ones, wonderful laugh and warm hugs, caring and loving and hero to many. He could go into a room of deaf and blind people and come out with friends.

This is the second former classmate I’ve lost in the last month. Kathy (Farbo) Deyo died November 13th:

Kathy attended the one-room school at the Yaak until the family moved to Butte and then later to Orofino when she was in the third grade. Kathy made lifelong friends while attending school in Orofino, graduating as a proud Maniac in 1973. Kathy was the editor of the high school newsletter, editor of the annual and instrumental in organizing class reunions that are held every five years.