FAFO

With the election passing now and we know who the next President will be on 1/20/25, I am going to capture some of the consequences that electing someone whose first term ended in an unmitigated disaster and follow up coup attempt. I call this the FAFO file/

Tariffs - Tariffs are always paid by the consumer in the end, not by the country of origin itself. Your electronics are likely to go up 20% or more in all likelihood, as well explained in this Gizmodo article. If you were planning to purchase a new computer, TV, cell phone, or other electronic device, see if you can move your purchase to before any idiotic tariff goes into place. This will be similar for most household appliances as well. Don’t like inflation over the past couple of years? Wait to all the tariffs get added to the cost within the manufacturing and supply chain….

Science and medicine - the war on science and facts will continue. If RFK Jr. is anywhere near the healthcare or FDA, his insane antibacterial and holistic medicine positions will kill people. Vaccines do NOT cause autism, fluoride in water is beneficial, but RFK Jr. has brain worms that affects his ability to think logically and gives air to anti-health ideas. Scientists are concerned to about the affects Cult 45/47 will have on research according to this article in the Washington Post. Because we will make idiotic decisions that will further harm the climate, future generations will have a harder time on this planet.

Project 2025 - Now admitting Agenda 47 is a kissing cousin to Project 2025 (not quite the same, but has people overlapping between both “conservative” agendas (ain’t nothing classically conservative about them). Judge for yourself the differences through this article from verifythis.com or from Harper’s Bazaar.

Education - Education will be gutted. I think the GOP likes their populace DUMB. Voting on school principals annually is a good idea? A good list of things Agent Orange (on video) can be found at the MeidasNews.

Mass Deportation - This will both be an economic disaster and an assault on the Rule of Law (trying to disregard the 14th Amendment to our Constitution). Migrant crime is lower than the rate for natural-born American citizens.

One last question - what is the temporary hardship that the world’s richest tech bro is referring to under an Administration Orange?

Books that paint a picture about what happened to the GOP

Since our dog ha had plenty of energy when I get home from work, I have had chance to read…er…listen to audiobooks more recently, and I have been on a kick on trying to decipher on how the GOP had gone from a somewhat sane center-right party to the party of crazies that it is in 2024. Some of these well written books include:

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta (2023) - This book is written by the son of an evangelical minister who wrote about his experiences with the religious movements in the age of MAGA.

Tired of Winning by Jonathan Karl (2023) - the effect of Trumpism on the GOP and elections post January 6.

The Conspiracy to End America by Stuart Stevens (2023) - Written by a former GOP media campaign operative who work multiple winning GOP presidential campaigns, this book takes a look on how the Republican party has gone from functioning center-right political party to that of one espousing many tenants of autocracy.

Finally….the book I just started is Network of Lies by Brian Stelter (2023) - How Fox News and the Trumpist GOP fed off one another.

If you have a chance to get a digital library card, it can be a great (usually free) way to increase access to reading material. Many libraries have a link to libby, which gives access to more than 100k titles.

A great interview with Andy Cohen

As I was listening to this week’s Hacking Humans podcast, there was a great discussion about an interview on the Today Show with Andy Cohen with regards to a fairly sophisticated phishing event that led to the compromise of his bank account with funds being wired out of his account. It is a great, non-technical interview with tips from a victim on what to look out for.

The "Free" State of Florida

It feels like I say the same thing about the GOP every year about being a non-serious party, especially in the “Free” state of Florida, which is working towards a sadistic love child of George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (or if you are like the Ziegler’s, a threesome including Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Instead of working for the good of the Floridian citizen, like working for real insurance reform, preparing for continued impact of climate change through environmental fortification, and ensuring real equity and freedom, they are trying to enact a dystopian future for many Floridians. Bills being introduced in 2024 include:

Taking away parental rights and free speech of minors:

• HB1129/SB1196 “Harm to Minors” - among the provisions being proposed include “They also require all manufacturers of smartphones and tablets to provide on-by-default filters on all their devices sold in the state after Jan. 1, 2025, that would prevent minors from accessing or downloading harmful material, with heavy penalties for companies failing to make a good-faith effort to comply or adults besides parents or guardians who remove the filters for a minor.” Who defines what is harmful material is? Do you want nutjobs like Mom’s for Liberty, or ultra right wingers make that definition? Does the nanny state of Florida want to apply this to movies that can be seen on these devices? Games? Websites? Why do I need to have these rule turn on for me as an adult by default. In the computing world, code is free speech. Does the theocrats of the GOP want to have their great firewall of Florida, or do they truly believe in free speech for its citizens?

• SB 454: Protection of Minors on Social Media Platforms - First of all, define what a social medial platform is. Facebook, X, Tiktok, YouTube? Twitch? Zoom? IRC? Any website with a comment section? If they have to put on age verification, this means I have to to identify myself online to any social media site I sign up for? Do I have to put website verification on my web site? Sounds like another 1st Amendment violation to me….

• HB 1/SB 1788: Social Media Use for Minors - Same reasoning as the previous anti 1st Amendment violations, this time banning social media to anyone under 16. I thought that I as a parent, have ultimate say on what my children access, or are they blowing smoke up my skirt with all their parental rights rhetoric?

• A variety of anti LGBTQ+ bills that are so egregious and against human rights that they should immediately shot down, but they have the smell of the religious right or the TPUSA’s and their ilk in their red meat of the knuckle-dragging MAGAts in this state. More of these can be seen in this Gainesville Sun article.

We also have an anti-science antivaxxer as our state Surgeon General, who thinks that he knows more that the FDA about vaccines (including mRNA vaccines), and has recommended against the vaccines because of some cockamamie idea of DNA contaminations (which as been thoroughly debunked). And this idiot is being paid by the taxpayers of Florida more than 500k to spout off this non-sense and to campaign with our missing governor who thinks he can out-MAGA the multiply indicted former President who is leader of Cult45, whose supporters freely give their money to this supposed billionaire.

The GOP is a farce of a political party

It is problematic to have a 2 party system when one of the major political parties is not serious at all on real issues, but all about trolling and rage politics. The U.S. House will have the malcontent wing with extraordinary pull, while state legislatures in particular work hard to bring back the 1950’s for some reason. Here are some prime examples of how unserious this party is at this point:

Wyoming Republicans want to ban electric cars - An attempt to troll the California government in an effort to protect their oil and gas political donations business interests.

Smoking ban has ended in Congress - Freedom for lung cancer for all!

We have a whole list of Ron DeSantis political red meat for the far right in order to run in 2024 for POTUS and his desire to continue to destroy Florida’s educational system in K-12 and post-secondary promote his conservative agenda through legislative and executive fiat orders. This includes:

• Still taking on Disney for their choice to exercise their free speech

• A desire to turn a Florida public university to a conservative bastion based off a small private Christian university

• Continued attack on free speech at public universities with his anti 1st Amendment Stop Woke Act. - By the way, can I get a Republican to explain what they think “woke” means and why they are against it?

• I guess using Florida taxpayer funds to transports migrants from Texas elsewhere flopped badly in the public’s eyes.

While not truly legislative, we still have to award the Oxymoron award to Moms for Liberty, which is strongly Republican. They want to extend the “Don’t say gay” law into puberty, past the time when most children go through puberty and well past the time when most students get sex ed in public schools. Let’s not forget that they want to ban books and keep children from being exposed to the real world.

Back to legislative actions, Missouri is worried about bare arms in its legislature, GOP legislatures are for conversion therapy, blocking what adults can see, and block books that have trans or gay people depicted in it. We cannot forget the race to the bottom with regards to Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, and 1st Amendment attacks.

What are the odds of default as the GOP House plays a game of chicken with the debt ceiling? They must be forgetting the words in the Constitution in Article IV Section I, something about full faith and credit….

Social media accounts

With all of the issues going on on Twitter these days, I can be found on these difference sites. Some of them I am pretty inactive on (see anything that is owned by Mark Zuckerberg), but the accounts do exist and have rare posts on them. Just click on the links for the appropriate site. The 2 without logos currently are Mastodon (on the left) and Post.news (in the middle):

A Modest Proposal (for the Alachua County School Board)

So, in their infinite wisdom, the Alachua County School Board had sent out this communication announcing changes to the backpacks allowed by middle/high school students for the upcoming school year. Here is the text of the email we received:

What a great idea!

So the goal of the school system is to promote the safety of students, staff, and these pesky other people like parents. Silly me, I thought the goal of the school system is to educate students and prepare them for life after graduation like, oh I don’t know, be able to go to college, or God forbid, become productive members of society.

Since safety is the goal of the school system, the school systems are well on their way to make the schools look like educational prisons. Campuses aren’t supposed to feel welcoming to the students, but we have to make sure that we have the chain link fences and locked gates to keep all those ungrateful little minions safely locked away for 6 hours a day in these educational facilities. Why do we stop there? You know what else we should erect in the name of safety? Guard towers! Panopticons! Moats filled with alligators, after all we are in Gainesville! Any of those little ingrates parents lovingly call their children can easily be cast into those moats to fend for themselves. You already have their tax dollars and it’s one less mouth to feed, so that sounds like a win/win to me!

Maybe you don’t want to go that far, but want to just see what these miserable teens are bringing to school in the hopes of actually getting an education (we can easily dash those hopes by forced indoctrination as prescribed by the glorious leaders in Tallahassee….they shouldn’t be allowed to think and grow to begin with….way too much trouble). These clear backpacks will show everything they bring to school. Especially those teenage girls who may need to bring special supplies to school a couple of days a month. Who cares if they might be embarrassed or otherwise want to keep their private issues private. We live in a post-Roe world now! We live near several fairly in-bred states here in the South where them womenfolk are meant for breeding, not educating them to live their dreams of becoming teachers, astronauts, doctors, scientists, and maybe even lawyers or politicians (we can’t all be productive members of society). They need to be toughened for that birthing that the glorious Supreme Court believes that they are good for.

But why stop there? Are we afraid of things that are in the backpacks that can be used as weapons. You can use books as bludgeoning weapons. We don’t plan to educate these thankless wretches anyway…remember safety first! If they don’t need to focus education, you can remove these other things that could hurt people, like compasses, binders, pencils and pens, calculators…those seem pretty useless in an education setting. (Now that I think about it, since these chatterboxes are nice and safe in our custody…er school, they don’t need keys to get home, phones to contact parents in an emergency). God forbid we even let them learn off of laptops…those are just prizes for anyone to grab and steal since anyone can see where they are in the backpack).

Backpacks shouldn’t be the only thing that are clear or banned. Them female rapscallions don’t need to have purses that may again hide things like tampons or pads…you know those tampons could be used to stuff up someone’s nose in a fight. Those need to be clear as well. No need for privacy in this day and age. What else? I’ve got it! This may get some of your knickers in bunches, but we should also have clear clothing as well. Leave nothing to chance. Some of those boys will be exposed for those weapons they think they have, but resemble more of a pea shooter. Nothing to chance for the sake of security.

You know what, those non-biodegradable plastic backpacks will do wonders for the environment as well! We need to get more petroleum into the ecosystem. We don’t really care about leaving a better world for these petulant humans-to-be. Screw the wildlife as well as everyone goes to Amazon to go and by the cheapest piece of junk to save on the expense of the multiple bags these students will go through in a school year. The post-industrial age has done wonders for climate change, what a few more thousand clear (plastic) backpacks. We can help that ice melt just a little more to help Gainesville get that oceanfront property again!

(H/T to Jonathan Swift and his 1729 Essay)