Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego announced a proposal Friday to strip benefits for active or retired military members who participated in the Capitol Riot on January 6, according to Stars and Stripes.
Gallego wrote a letter to the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Secretary Denis McDonough and other top military officials March 18, stating, “Unfortunately, many veterans led or participated in this insurrection. Reporting suggests that nearly 20% of the insurrectionists were either veterans or military retirees, including some of the most violent members of the mob.”
“Any veteran or service member who stormed the Capitol on January 6 forfeited their moral entitlement to privileged benefits at the expense of the people of the United States,” the letter read.
“I ask you to quickly identify, investigate, and prosecute any active service member or retiree that participated in the attack under the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” Gallego said.
Folks, I have strong feelings on this idea. As readers should know, I am a veteran. Here is a little background before I address the Congressman’s idea.
Buried in the bowels of my enlistment contract is a clause that I was subject to recall to active duty until I reached the age of 55 even though I never had to serve a day in the Reserves—Active or Inactive. So yes, the government, in special circumstances, does have a limited claim on military personnel even after they are discharged.
Also, I did take an oath to protect and defend the country of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Actually, I’ve taken that oath many times as both an elected official and a service member. Funny thing is, I was never released from that oath, either as a military member or an office holder.
So, when I read this article, it makes me mad for a number of reasons. First, the Democrat Party is the home of the domestic enemies of the United States. Look at what that Party stands for: they hate God, limited government, life, they welcome racists and racism, they are all about the color of people’s skins and not the content of their character, they oppose hard work and passing an inheritance to your grandchildren, they protect the guilty and punish the innocent, they oppose self-defense, demonize law enforcement, embrace tyranny, hate the Constitution, our Founders, and our history.
Given the oath that we veterans have taken, and the election fraud used to keep Democrats in power, I can fully understand that many veterans were in Washington D.C. on January 6th. Do I believe that what happened was an insurrection? NO. Remarkably, despite claims this was an armed event, no one in officer or law enforcement has yet to prove a single firearm was taken into the Capitol Building let alone used in an attempt to overthrow the government. It does appear that folks did not properly enter the building but for the most part, the worst they are guilt of is trespassing or something similar. Folks like buffalo boy and Jorge behaved stupidly by going into places that they shouldn’t like the House floor and Pelosi’s office. Had they stayed in public areas, much of the drama on that day would not have occurred.
Congressman Gallego is just pandering for some publicity. Invoking the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) is laughable [for reasons that I will explain in a moment] and meant only to impress the uninformed masses. There is no legal precedent to do what he is suggesting. Oops, he is a Democrat so when has the law even been an impedance to what they do?
Many parts of the UCMJ are not followed by the military except as a tool for selective enforcement. Here’s a few examples. Ever seem a sailor with a tattoo? Per the letter of the UCMJ, a tattoo is forbidden, allegedly as the destruction of government property. Although this policy has softened over the years.
Adultery is forbidden. As is homosexuality, at least until Obama was in office. The UCMJ covers many moral areas which are routinely not enforced. My point being that the UCMJ is being softened by the civilian government and not the military. The trend is away from enforcing many provisions and making the military, …well less military.
Sorry Congressman but attempting to use the UCMJ is a nonstarter in my eyes. Secondly, I know of no possible way that the military can touch the life of a discharged veteran or retired person. Gallegos wants to waive a magic wand and take away veteran benefits? Sorry dude. Whatever happens in the civilian world, we earned the benefits. Even veterans in prison can get benefits from the Veteran’s Administration.
After a diligent Internet search, it looks like the Congressman has this in mind:
Can A Veteran Receive Retired Military Pay While In Prison?
Generally, yes. Being convicted of a crime almost never jeopardizes a federal pension – the rare exception to this rule are charges relating to criminal disloyalty to the United States: espionage, treason, sabotage, etc.
Sorry Congressman but what happened on January 6th falls way short of “espionage, treason, sabotage”. Jorge Riley and others have been charged with many things, but none come close to the threshold needed to go after veteran’s benefits.
The truth is that most veterans and other folks in Washington D.C. on January 6th were peaceful. If the veterans were wanting to overthrow the government do you really think they’d bring their wives and children to help?
If that doesn’t help then try this, the purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. Since the evil veterans on January 6th didn’t come properly prepared with vests, guns, and other military stuff, then how were they planning to overthrow the government? Harsh pronouns and colorful metaphors?
This is just another attempt to use the power of the Federal Government to attack Trump supporters that believe that the Democrats cheated yet again and get publicity at the same time. Such selective enforcement is tyranny and doing it retroactively is doubly so.
Why does the Left persist with the lie that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 election? Give me a break!
Oh, the following voter fraud was made possible a grant from Big Tech. Thanks Mark Zuckerberg.
In Georgia, a state Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, county election officials still have not complied with a law requiring them to provide documents certifying the chain of custody of more than 400,000 mail-in ballots.
The request for the drop-box transfer forms was made by The Georgia Star News under the Georgia Open Records Law. Last July, the Georgia State Election Board passed an emergency rule requiring election officials to maintain the transfer forms
.But officials for the state’s largest county, Fulton, and another major county, DeKalb, said they didn’t know if they had the documents and promised to reply later, Georgia Star News reported.
But four months after the Nov. 3 election, those counties and 33 others have failed to comply with the law.
Overall, no chain of custody has been provided for an estimated 404,691 of the estimated 600,000 votes by mail-in ballot deposited in drop boxes, delivered to county registrars and counted in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, Star News said.
Yep, if you thought the “Velvet Sweatshop,” as their employees call Microsoft, was in the clear after plugging holes in the mega security breach of SolarWinds, you would be wrong. Yesterday, I saw this article reporting another huge securing breach, this time by China. (FYI that I know of, no one has taken credit for SolarWinds.)
The quiet release of an out of band patch for a flaw in Microsoft’s Exchange server is rapidly turning into a major story, with credible reports ofat least 30,000 organizations in the USA, and possibly hundreds of thousands around the world, being hacked by a Chinese hacker group, who now has full control of the servers and the data on them.
For those that don’t know, Microsoft Exchange is their flagship email server software.
Krebs on Security reports that a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments have been infected, with the hackers leaving behind a web shell for further command and control.
Microsoft said the original attacks were targetted at a range of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs, but Krebs notes that there has been a dramatic and aggressive escalation of the rate of infection, as the hackers try and stay ahead of the patch Microsoft released.
“We’ve worked on dozens of cases so far where web shells were put on the victim system back on Feb. 28 [before Microsoft announced its patches], all the way up to today,” said Volexity President Steven Adair, who discovered the attack . “Even if you patched the same day Microsoft published its patches, there’s still a high chance there is a web shell on your server. The truth is, if you’re running Exchange and you haven’t patched this yet, there’s a very high chance that your organization is already compromised.”
“It’s police departments, hospitals, tons of city and state governments and credit unions,” said one source who’s working closely with federal officials on the matter. “Just about everyone who’s running self-hosted Outlook Web Access and wasn’t patched as of a few days ago got hit with a zero-day attack.”
Folks, this is a really big deal but unless you read tech blogs, I doubt you’ve heard about this. Again, this breach includes schools, police departments, hospitals, financial institutions, and businesses. I encourage you to read the article which I linked above. I suspect we will hear more about this breach before long. Oh, and if you don’t that doesn’t mean everything is better.
Don’t forget that whatever the outcome of this most recent breach, your smart phones are sending all your text messages, address books, location, and other data to both China and Big Tech on a regular basis. Your privacy is an illusion in a digitally dependent world. How people use the information they are collecting is probably above my paygrade. If knowledge is power, then we’re likely in trouble…
With the backdrop of impending economic ruin and a recall, Governor Newsom has implemented what I consider a financial suicide pact for California’s government. Newsom and his “brain trust” have decided that working conditions under Covid-19 are such a wonderful thing that all State workers—to the fullest extent possible—will continue to work at home from now until Doom’s Day.Yep, state workers—as a group—will never again have to report to a brick-and-mortar office building. They will continue to work at home from now until they retire.
Apparently, this onetime accounting gimmick is projected to save the state lots of money. Instead of the government paying building rental (or long-term leases) and all utilities, supplies, and maintenance of the offices, now its employees will. As a benefit, California can fudge some numbers about how green the state’s government has become because nobody must drive to work anymore. Oh, and all those businesses that once served state workers breakfast and lunch around said office buildings are going out of business in droves.
In March I will have to spend one three-hour session in my office packing up my personal belongings and scanning any documents in the cubicle. Said documents will then be placed in the shredding bin for destruction. The goal is for me to be completely out of the office at the end of this visit. My coworkers have been commanded to do likewise. Sometime that month we will also be issued laptops to replace the desktops that we have been logging into from home each day since the pandemic panic was initiated. Then we can use VPN (Virtual Private Network) access instead of the VM Ware application that we now use.
Folks, in some cases working from home might work OK but to initiate a blanket policy doing this is nuts. If you think, there’s fragmentation in the Android ecosystem, just wait until the fragmentation of government functions becomes manifest.
How does someone monitor your workload when you work from home? Remember that government is not concerned with sales or productivity so what metric do you use? Hamsters are busy all day but do they actually go anywhere on their little wheels?
How do you balance workload when you’ve never done the work you are now supervising?
How do you promote people or train new employees with no properly written procedures and no face-to-face interaction? Office work is about relationships not just managing email traffic.
Folks, I know that in this post Enron business world, separation of duties is a thing but what California is perpetrating now is a gross perversion of the concept. I think it is a formula for financial ruin with even less accountability.
Oh, case in point is EDD. Did you know that the $31 billion in fraud was due in part to EDD’s employees working from home? There was no way to properly supervise the unemployment case workers because everyone was hiding in their respective homes just clicking approve on whatever came up on their computer screens. I really doubt that EDD employees—especially those hired after the two weeks to flatten the curve—ever had any relationship with their supervisors and I also guarantee that they had inadequate training to boot. In such a scenario, you only get supervision when you ask for help or deny too many claims.
Folks, Governor Newsom, and his fellow travelers are remaking California government right under your noses and the public—as usual—is none the wiser. Guess if it’s not on television then it’s not news. Both ideas and actions have consequences.
The only upside I see on this is that more people can be home during the day to watch their neighborhoods. Hopefully, this will somewhat mitigate the fact that both Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown have emptied much of the state prison population into suburbia. Perhaps tens of thousands of state workers being home all day will make the criminal class think twice about home burglaries.
Meanwhile, because I work from home; my wife is happy that the trash is empty, the laundry is done, and the dishes are clean; and my dog is happy that he gets at least two walks a day and lots of love. Sadly, Rush Limbaugh is not the only guy showing up to work with half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair.
Note: This blog is a place where I share how I feel or what I’m doing, often to let off some steam; however, occasionally, it’s just a place where I park notes to myself in case need them later. This article is one such note to myself; however, you still might learn a thing or two about how your tax dollars are spent. If you read on, remember that you’ve been warned.
Background—including Jargon and Vocabulary
In terms of technology, one of the most backwards places to work is the State of California. Yep, while the State may be home to Big Tech, your government is stuck in the past. In a sense, I can’t blame them. Government has zero incentive to become efficient, innovate, or do better. One reason is that everybody is represented by a union whether or not they are even a member of said union. As such, no jobs can be eliminated without their express permission—which never happens. Any media reports to the contrary are lies or smokescreens to trick the public—usually for sympathy to further the union’s grip on state government.
A legacy piece of technology which is the aging backbone of California’s finances is CalSTARS (California State Accounting and Reporting System). I have written about this software before. It is a Unix based mainframe system that was brought online when Ronald Reagan was President in the 1980’s. This is the same software that desperately needed patching as part of the Y2K scare. It is still in use today.
California has spent over a billion dollars of your money to try and get their new accounting system deployed to replace CalSTARS, but as usual, it is many years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over budget. This gem is called FI$Cal (Financial Information System for California). The acronym is pronounced fis-cal [with short “I”) Think of it as pausing between syllables of the word “fiscal”.
The next thing you need to know is that within the State of California, there is no formal way for one agency to talk with another. Lazy people might blame the right to privacy in the State Constitution. This privacy clause was sold to voters as a barrier to keep agencies from sharing information and to cripple “Big Brother” from spying on citizens. Voters we told that by passing it, government would be prevented from compiling comprehensive files to track citizens. Think Soviet Union Politburo and KGB surveillance.
I have two comments on that promise. First, who needs government to do that when we have credit agencies and Big Tech to do it for you. If you want the goods on a conservative, just ask Big Tech; if you want the same info on a Liberal you better get a court order. Such is life in Biden’s America.
Second, somehow liberals argue the this right to privacy—banning the government from keeping comprehensive records on citizens—must also include a right to abortion. Abortion was never mentioned by the campaign advocating passage of the right to privacy back when it was passed in the 1970’s.
Anyway, it is impossible for peers within agencies to speak directly with each other unless you are a lifer in state service and happen to have a personal relationship with someone in another agency; usually because you were once coworkers. If my agency has a question for the State Controller, Franchise Tax Board, Dept of Motor Vehicles or any other state agency, we get to call the very same 800 number that you do as a member of the public to try and get help. Needless to say, with no way to prove who I am, where I’m calling from, or why my question is related to my duties as a state employee, I can get no help. Managers have no secret backdoor or liaison to go thru to get answers either.
This communication barrier extends to email also. Even when I have the email address of someone, say at the State Controller’s Office, my experience has been that email outside that agency is refused by the mail server and/or firewall. In the wake of Covid and other state activities, perhaps this will eventually change.
My point in bringing up communication is this, no one at my agency can get the State Controller to find a better way to send us accounting documents other than snail mail. The accounting documents that we get arrive in drips and drabs (when they make it to us). Each envelope or box has two copies of each accounting document. These must then be sorted and scanned into Adobe PDF files. These PDF files are then run thru an OCR program and then manually attached into our accounting system. My question, for the entire time that I have been a state employee (12 years), is why can’t we get this information in an electronic form?
The answer is simply that no one in my agency knows who to ask at SCO to make this happen or even if it’s possible.
Anyway, we typically get 2,500 – 3,000 unique pages, plus their duplicates, per month from the State Controller. When SCO screws-up employee payroll, then we get extras. Lots of extras. In January, we were supposed to get over 19,500 extra accounting documents (plus their duplicate copies). Snail mail being what it is, the documents did not arrive in a timely manner and yours truly was tasked with finding a way to get them from the old Unix system so we could manually attach them into our accounting system (not FI$Cal).
sample of terminal software
What follows is my account of how I solved the problem of getting these missing documents for my agency and making them usable.
SCO Prod
Via the Unix/mainframe computer program mentioned above, we can log in to the State Controller system with Read Only access. In theory, users can go other places too, but you need user and firewall permissions which I don’t have. Oh, I don’t have access to the State Controller site either. I have to use some else’s account.
You see, the Information Technology people where I work never interact with actual users, just each other. They have no clue what we need, they just take their best guess, filtered thru the lowest bidder, and deploy it to us. We are expected to like it, even if it is outdated or underpowered equipment when its brand new. Ditto for software. IT doesn’t care what our job is, just that each budget is spent and not exceeded. Thus, about five or six years ago, they went from giving access to almost everyone to taking it away. Apparently, the per seat costs were too high so they cut to the bone and beyond.
Anyway, using the log in information that I possess, I went hunting for the missing documents. We use a terminal program to access the mainframe. This software is capable of being configured to do bulk screen captures. Screen captures are the only way to get the missing documents. The only option is whether to print to a file or a physical printer.
Using my three hour per day window to be in the office, I went in on consecutive days to capture our missing documents. The missing documents were on two different dates. With a practical limit of about 80 screen captures per batch, I did over 35,000 screen captures during my six hours in the office. Each batch was saved as a PDF file. The PDF batches were then merged so all those on the same date were in a single file.
Filter Results
My next step was to sort the pages by agency, a four-digit number on each page. By doing research, I found that Adobe Acrobat had no built-in way to do this. I tried converting the file into Microsoft Word, an RTF file and a few others only to have Adobe Acrobat crash completely after the better part of an hour. After crashing Acrobat about a half dozen times, I gave up on any type of file conversion.
After more diligent research on the Internet, I found a different solution, a Java batch file run in Adobe Acrobat.
Here were the steps that I followed:
First, I had to see if it was possible and if so, how? This thread said it could be done.
By clicking on the link found in the Correct Answer, I found some Java code to copy and paste. As is usual on the Internet, it was only part of a correct solution.
If you look at the above two pages, you can figure out where to go in Acrobat DC to paste the code into the Action tab. However, the code is not correct.
The line:
var stringToSearchFor = “Total”;
is not the correct syntax. (Whatever is written inside the quotation marks is what the script searches for.)
By looking at the below line of code, I found the missing thing needed above, parentheses.
var n = str.indexOf(“welcome”);
What the wonderful Java script mentioned above does is this; it looks for a string of text on the page and if it finds a match, it copies the page to a new file. Thus, I enter the agency number as the string to search for and then everything matching my agency is copied into a new file. As counter intuitive as it seems, I filter out what I want to keep and not the other way around.
The documents that were the result of the screen captures had only one problem, the font size was too small to be used in the macro process which I will describe below in a moment.
Increase Font in Acrobat Files
Once again, I found that Adobe Acrobat lacks a feature that I desperately need now. Acrobat has no ability to increase the font size of a PDF document. The reason for the need to increase font size is due to how the macro operates. The macro searches a location on the page for a document number. The margins on the page were too large and font too small. I felt that this would be a problem going forward.
Other than a few mentions about magnifying the size of a document on the page—which is not the same thing—I could find no solution. I came to the conclusion that improvisation was needed. I took the files created by the script above and then printed them to a new PDF file while increasing the magnification of the printed output to 115%.
The result was a page with a font size and page layout similar to the snail mail copies that we normally get. Once the font size was increased, I merged all files for the month into a single PDF.
Macro
Each month, I must take the existing PDF file for the month and run a series of macros on it. The end result of the macros is three parts:
First, is a list of comments that is bulk uploaded into the accounting program.
Second is that the merged file of all PDF documents is split into individual files that are labelled by document number.
Third is a list of accounting documents that need to be manually uploaded one page at a time into the accounting program.
As part of the Macro process, each page of the PDF file is imported into an Excel workbook as a separate worksheet. This was the largest Excel workbook I every created with over 20,000 worksheets. This baby took lots of CPU power but unlike Acrobat, Excel didn’t crash under the strain.
Sadly, the next two steps of the macro failed to find the needed document number to continue.
After a review of a few worksheets, I noticed that the part of the monthly PDF file created by the process described above were all the same, which was good, but the rows were not where I needed them to be. There were blank rows at the top of the worksheets. I thought, what if I can remove the top row of all these at the same time?
In the dark recesses of my mind, I remembered that this was possible, but I forgot how. After a quick Internet search and creative use of the Shift key, I deleted the top row of one selected page and after an interminable wait, the first row was deleted from all the other selected worksheets as well.
I reran the failed macro steps and found that everything worked just like clockwork.
Elapsed time for the above was a week of my life.
Conclusion
Now 18 of us are manually attaching all the documents created above. Each of us has 1,080 (or more) PDF files that we are attaching one at a time to line items in the accounting program. This takes about 12 hours per person of uninterrupted time or about 216 manhours just for this month.
I’m sure it is possible to do this entire process in a matter of minutes if the people controlling the budget layer cared about a fiduciary responsibility for taxpayer money, but we work for the union not you so such waste in baked into the system.
Stay tuned for more tales of how your tax dollars are spent.
Folks, if you want to see what’s likely on tap for your digital future, then one country to watch is Australia. Australia is doing many things differently than we are, but many of the tech companies in the United States are wanting to see their policies adopted here.
First, in Australia, Microsoft and Google are in a fight about a proposed policy that directly affects online news articles.
February 11, 2021
Australia is currently in the process of passing regulation which would force Google and Facebook to pay publishers for linking to their news articles, a controversial proposal which appears to go against the whole ethos of the web, which is in the end all about linking to pages for free. Importantly Australia would not allow Google to avoid paying the newspapers by simple delisting them from their index.
In the blog post, Smith explains the 4th Estate is a very important element in democracy, and that the weakness of news organizations and the strength of social media is what resulted in Donald Trump being able to convince tens of millions of Americans that he won the election he actually lost.
“It was far from unusual for a losing candidate to request a recount or take a dispute to court – both parts of the democratic process,” Smith noted, “But, this year, even after losing more than 50 lawsuits in a row, President Trump waged a sustained campaign that successfully persuaded tens of millions of his supporters that the election was rigged. Without this sustained disinformation barrage, it’s hard to imagine that January 6 would have become such a tragic day.”
Smith notes that while Google and Facebook has generated billions in revenue from aggregating news, since 2000, newsroom revenue in the United States has fallen by 70% and employment has been cut in half. More than 2,000 newspapers have closed entirely. In many places, local news has been decimated. The majority now got their news (and disinformation) from social media, often only reading the headlines and not even clicking through to the news website.
Microsoft notes that news publications have been powerless to fight back, due to the monopoly position of Google and Facebook, but that Microsoft has always supported paying publishers for news and that they are well prepared to do this on a large scale if they gain market share.
February 15, 2021
Microsoft has turned into one of the most ardent advocates for the proposed Australian media code, which would see Google and Facebook pay news publications a share of their profits.
The proposal has been called a link tax which would break the internet, but Microsoft insists funding newspapers is important for the health of democracy and fighting fake news.
Conceptually it is easier to think of the proposal as a tax on Google and Facebook, similar to the TV License in UK, where TV owners have to pay a £157.50 tax per year to support public access TV and news. In this case, the tax is being directed to trillion-dollar companies rather than the citizens of the country, and the benefit would be spread wider than simply the state publisher.
The FAQ does not address concerns that the proposal would fund newspapers which are equally involved in spreading fake news as Moldovian content farms and that it would place the power to decide which news outlet succeeds or fails in the hand of the government rather than the market.
February 17, 2021
In response to Australia’s proposed new Media Bargaining law, Facebook today announced that it will block publishers and users in Australia from sharing or viewing news content. This is applicable for both Australian and international news content. The proposed law will force platform providers like Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for using their content. To continue operating Google search in Australia, Google today signed an agreement with News Corporation for sharing the revenue obtained through news content. However, Facebook refused to sign any such deal citing the below reasons.
Second, Australia is putting together a coalition of corporations to fight fake news.
February 22, 2021
Microsoft today announced that it is partnering with Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel and Truepic to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project formed to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content.
“There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content — now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet. Our imperative as researchers and technologists is to create and refine technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We’re excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content. It’s an honor to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members to take this critical work to the next step,” said Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer and Project Origin executive sponsor, Microsoft.
The major technology companies and social networks in Austalia have signed up for the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, a voluntary code of practice by the Digital Industry Group Inc (DiGi), a non-profit industry association advocating for the digital industry in Australia.
Policies and processes concerning advertising placements:
Empowering users:
Integrity and security of services and products:
Supporting independent researchers:
Without prejudice commitments:
The policy was developed at the request of the Australian government and will be reviewed in 12 months. Companies involved are required to have a working complaints procedure in place within 6 months. The code excludes private messaging services, email services, and enterprise services. Notably, it also excludes content authorised by an Australian state or federal government; political advertising or content authorised by a political party registered under Australian law.
Folks, please read the links of these stories if you want more information.
What you are beginning to see is that Big Tech is setting themselves up as the arbitrators of all truth. While some of the things mentioned above, sound good and perhaps even noble, the bottom line is that tech companies are deciding what information that you can or cannot access. Microsoft has kept a lower profile than other companies, but they are right there with the FAANG companies and Twitter.
Fake News
Before I go further, it will be helpful to note that the concept of fake news is not monolithic. There are several different types of fake news. Here are a few examples:
Microsoft often talks about the potential for fake news using digital manipulation. Think the movie Looker (1981) or Carrie Fisher being digitally added to Star Wars after her death. What if a video of a politician was faked for the purposes of fomenting rebellion or aiding the point of view of a media outlet hating said politician? Wouldn’t that be bad? In theory yes, unless its Donald Trump.
DEBUNKED: Remember the "very fine people" lie the Biden campaign and mainstream media fed everyone? Here's the whole story: pic.twitter.com/DkvLekG4Ei
But Microsoft is envisioning a video technology or capability that is even more manipulated than that of Trump or Carrie Fisher. What if we entered an era when no one would trust what they see? We are a very visual society, if people don’t see something, it is not real to them but what if someone took advantage of that?
Another type of fake news is the good ‘ole Dan Rather using Microsoft Word kind. For those too young to remember, Dan Rather faked a memo about then President George W. Bush in an effort to influence the 2004 Presidential election.
Dan Rather CBS news
“Rathergate” is the derisive term applied to a set of four documents allegedly written by the former commanding officer of President George W. Bush in the early 1970s, and broadcast on the CBS program 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. The resultant exposure of these documents as forgeries, coupled with a lack of proper news investigating techniques, led to the ouster of four senior producers at CBS several months later, as well as the departure of long-time anchorman Dan Rather, for whom the scandal was named. Because of this, the event was also infamous for coining the phrase “fake but accurate”, referring to Fake news.
Sometimes fake news is just a refusal/denial to acknowledge something is true because it might be perceived as either hurting the side you support or benefitting someone that you disagree with. Instead of “We report, you decide” becomes “We decide, then report”. Or as Steve Taylor sang in Meat the Press (1983):
When the godless chair the judgment seat
We can thank the godless media elite
They can silence those who fall from their grace
With a note that says “we haven’t the space”
So fake news is sometimes the sin of commission or conversely the sin of omission; both are equally fatal for the person trying to make an informed decision. As I’ve stated before, without agreeing to the same set of information (or facts) we can’t have a dialogue, debate, or discussion about anything.
I’m not against polarization when it comes to certain issues. Some things just have no middle ground. As Gary North is fond of pointing out, a posture of neutrality is an illusion where one side tries to gain the upper hand on the other. The important things in life ultimately come down to the broad way or the narrow way. Lesser things can be negotiated or reduced to personal preference.
What bothers me about the fake news debate is that the purveyors of fake news have appointed themselves as the arbitrators of what is fake news; thus, when the fox places itself in charge of the henhouse, there can be only one outcome.
Let’s look at the previous election
To the is day, not a single liberal will admit to any voter fraud in any state during the 2020 presidential election. This is an unreasonable and unrealistic claim. There is always voter fraud. The question is whether it is widespread, systemic, organized, and enough to sway the outcome.
If Michigan and other states would voluntarily clean their voter rolls on a regular basis then we conservatives would have more faith in the system; however, the reality is that it takes years of lawsuits to force Secretary’s of State in Democrat controlled states to do their job. Oh, and even prevailing in court is no guarantee that the voter rolls are ever cleaned up.
Folks, I know that California does not care about election integrity or keeping clean voter rolls. As long as Democrats continue to win elections, there will be no meaningful election reform in the once golden state.
Prior to the election, was this report from Judicial Watch:
Media Matters and other groups on the left, throw hammers at Judicial Watch but where it counts, Judicial Watch wins.
The lawsuit confirmed that Los Angeles County has on its rolls more than 1.5 million potentially ineligible voters. This means that more than one out of every five LA County registrations likely belongs to a voter who has moved or is deceased. Judicial Watch notes that “Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.”
The Judicial Watch lawsuit also uncovered that neither the State of California nor Los Angeles County had been removing inactive voters from the voter registration rolls for the past 20 years.
Please note the last line in the quote above, California voter rolls have not been cleaned up in over 20 years which I’m willing to bet was the last time a Republican was Secretary of State.
Meanwhile, after a brief internet search…
Yep, it was Bill Jones, the last Republican to win the office of California Secretary of State. Jones served from 1995 – 2003.
Bill Jones 1995
This allows me to circle back to a claim made by Brad Smith, “… even after losing more than 50 lawsuits in a row, President Trump waged a sustained campaign that successfully persuaded tens of millions of his supporters that the election was rigged.”
Folks, Trump lost zero trials on the voter fraud issue because none was ever heard in court. Even the Supreme Court has taken a pass on this issue. The courts refused because they view this as a political issue and since the election is over, it’s a moot point. Thus, no determination is or will be made on election fraud or if it was significant enough to change the election outcome. I think the federal courts are taking a pass on this not due to the substance of the issue, but because they know that if the case is heard, it will be used politically as a way to even further politicize the court system and make it even less independent than it is now. Packing the court is a likely outcome of any judicial relief granted to Trump. Also, I don’t think the courts are comfortable being the arbiters of last resort in Presidential elections.
If during the first two years of the Trump administration, a national system or standard was set for vote I.D. in federal elections, I think the outcome would have been different last November. But when the leadership on both sides of the political aisle are all in very safe seats then little incentive exists to fix a very broken system. Oh, and yes, I would prefer a state solution over a federal one but see my comments above on California. No chance it ever happens here.
Conclusion
Much of the time, fake news is in the eye of the beholder. We see what we want and ignore much of the rest. This trend will continue into the future. Soon we will go from memes with fake quotes and funny captions to fake videos with words never uttered. Discerning truth will become more difficult. Look for some to just give up on trying and resort to feelings to guide them—half our population is predisposed to do this already. “Trust your feelings Luke.” Those of us that believe there is only one Truth will become fewer.
I know that digital information will be even more scattered and fragmented in the future. As our culture becomes more splintered and fragmented, we become even more isolated, even living amongst other people. Sin divides us from God, His creation, our fellow man, and ourselves.
More and more you will hear some variation of the mantra, “you have your truth and I have mine.” Or the sugarcoated Disney version of “follow your heart.” This is a lie. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9
There is only One Truth. Denial of its reality does not change Reality. Believing faerie tales like there are more than two genders, or evolution explains creation, or abortion is not murder, or “gay marriage” only proves your denial, self-delusion, and spiritual blindness.
The controversy over fake news is a microcosm or a much larger battle; a spiritual one.
Here’s what our future looks like unless we change our ways. Take a look at Deuteronomy 28 starting at verse 15.
Below are a few selections from this passage:
The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.
The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.
The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind.
You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you.
The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, but you will be the tail.
Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess. Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known. Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot.
There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.
The good news is the God has promised believers that His Spirit will lead you into all Truth. Only God can cut through all the “white noise” in our culture and give you the wisdom to discern which spirits of our age should be shunned or followed.
Trusting in Big Tech to decide what’s best for us is just another name for tyranny. That Big Tech wants to work hand-in-hand with big government instead of hold government accountable, is no surprise. In a way, this marriage of convenience; looks to be the ideal power couple… for now.
I was reading some highlights of various things said by Rush Limbaugh this last week and while it was not on the topic of race, it seems to touch on the subject. Here’s a few quotes from Most Limitations Are Self-Imposed
It’s easy to be a victim. Look how easy the Democrat Party has made almost half this country think they’re victims of something.
And what happens to you when you’re a victim? Well, when you’re a victim, you automatically have a built-in excuse for failure. When you are a victim, it’s always somebody else’s fault. When you’re a victim, success is not possible. When you are a victim of something, you are acknowledging that you are as far as you’re gonna get, and you can’t get any further, because there are more powerful forces arrayed against you than the force of yourself against it.
And the Democrat Party does this on purpose. The Democrat Party makes as many people victims as possible because it freezes them right where they are. And that’s usually in lower middle class or abject poverty. It makes them resentful. If you’re a victim, you’re not happy. You can’t be happy. It’s impossible to be happy. It’s even difficult to be content. If you’re a victim, you’re always mad, but never at yourself. You’re mad at somebody else.
The Democrats have parlayed this into one of the biggest political movements in human history. And that would be of the victimized. Look at how many victim groups there are. And they all happen to be Democrat constituency groups. They all are on the protest march. They’re all angry; they’re all enraged.
Some of them are women, some of them are minorities, some of them are illegal immigrants — you name it — but they all have one thing in common: They have given up on the notion that they could be somebody and instead have descended into full-fledged victimhood and the comfort of being in a group of like-minded failures. Why isn’t everybody a victim? It’d be easy. Anybody could choose that if they wanted to. Being a victim is almost as easy as being a liberal. It’s one of the most gutless choices you could make.
It doesn’t take much. There are built-in excuses for failure. Built-in excuses for being miserable. Built-in excuses for being angry all the time. No reason to trying to be happy; it’s not possible. You’re a victim. Victim of what? … You’re a victim of something. The Democrats got one [a group] for you. If you want to be a victim, call ’em up.
Call Schumer and say, “Hey, I want to join you. I want to be a victim. Do you have a group for me?” He’ll have one. … you can keep it flowing if you just do two things: Stay a victim and vote Democrat.
Folks, the difference between Conservatives (and most Republicans) is that we see people as individuals while Democrats can only see people as groups. Democrats lump people together by the color of their skin (or other characteristics). They have no place to look at each person based on the content of their character. Looking at each person as an individual with great value is a biblical concept, the fact that the Republican Party adopted it and championed the freedom of slaves, and to some extent the unborn, is an outgrowth of the influence of this biblical truth.
After I posted my brief response to the Wired Op-Ed, I started going thru some old mail when I came across an article on the subject of racism. It posed an interesting question, why does cancel culture never consider cancelling Charles Darwin? While Darwin didn’t create racism, he is singlehandedly responsible for advancing the scientific basis that some races are more fit than others. His beliefs have been the basis of eugenics and genocide for tyrants all over the world. Millions have perished and millions more have been subjugated because of the impact of Darwin’s racist ideas. Yet, Darwin is given a free pass.
The following is printed in Answers, a publication of Answers in Genesis. The article that is quoted below is Should We Cancel Darwin by Mark Looy.
Modern views about human origins are built on a toxic error. Unless these opinions change, racism will keep raising its ugly head. Any serious desire to solve racism must inspire the question, “What about the influence of Charles Darwin’s racist views? Should they be banned (or ‘canceled,’ in popular jargon) from the culture?”
In a sequel to the better-known On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s The Descent of Man argued that humans, having descended from apelike creatures, were continuing to evolve and produce various races. Darwin posited that some races were more developed than others. Throughout Descent, Darwin labeled different people groups other than his European race as “low” and “degraded,” including Africans. Darwin argued that the “highest races and the lowest savages” clearly differed in their “moral disposition” (Darwin, 445).1 These “savages,” he further claimed, possessed “insufficient” powers of reasoning (Darwin, 489). At the end of Descent, Darwin declared he would prefer to be descended from a “little monkey” or an “old baboon” as opposed to an Indian “savage” from South America (Darwin, 919).
Darwin’s racism and belief in white supremacy were an outgrowth of his ideas regarding natural selection (a view popularized later by others as “survival of the fittest”). Accordingly, he excused aggressive colonial imperialism with the comment, “The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world” (Darwin, 521). Although he may not have explicitly endorsed such imperialism, Darwin saw the elimination of nonwhite races as the natural result of white Europeans, who “stand at the summit of civilisation” (Darwin, 507), being the superior race.
Such reasoning, even before Darwin laid it out, was essentially the same rationale used by European, Muslim, and American slave traders, who viewed the Africans as less than human and deserving of enslavement.
If they were consistent, cancel-culture advocates would ban Darwin from society. But most won’t touch him, for he is like a prophet for their worldview. Even if they condemn racism, they blindly still want to commemorate Darwin. From him, they have a supposed scientific justification for rejecting the Creator and living as they please with regards to abortion, sex, and so on.
Answers in Genesis proclaims that there is only one race of men. Toward the end of his article, Looy writes:
The Bible’s history is crucial to a true understanding of “race.” God’s Word reveals that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve. At the tower of Babel, God separated the rebellious people by both geography and language. The population broke up into sub-groups, and as people married within their own group, certain genetic features (like skin shade and eye shape) became more prominent. Some people groups ended up with light skin and others with dark skin. All people today are actually shades of brown, depending on the amount of melanin, the main pigment, in our skin (and some other minor factors). There are no truly black or white people.
Funny how, no matter how you look at the Scriptural position, it really is about the content of your character and not the color of your skin.
Folks, I do occasionally try to understand other points of view but this article which appeared on Wired.com was just begging for a response. Frankly, its hard to take this guy seriously, but he thinks he is. If this is the best the “Woke generation” has to offer, then Lord have mercy.
The piece starts with race and name calling disguised as facts. Not a good start.
EARLIER THIS MONTH, in the wake of the fatal incursion of an angry, mostly white and male mob into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, Facebook and Twitter blocked Donald Trump’s accounts. YouTube followed with a temporary ban, which it has continued to extend in the weeks since. According to these platforms, Trump’s dangerous pattern of behavior violated their content management rules. Shortly after, Amazon Web Services ended its hosting support for the neo-Nazi online haven Parler.
The paragraph above starts with the incident at the Capitol Building. Why is it whenever Liberals write about this, they have to say some variation of “angry, mostly white and male mob”? What does race have to do with any of this?
Then the author goes after Parlor for being a haven for neo-Nazis. Classic strawman argument. Again, the author thinks he is being intellectual while throwing hammers at imaginary foes.
Then he celebrates the censorship of conservative folks with the following.
The collective sigh of relief that rippled through the digital spaces occupied by Black, indigenous and other people of color following the wave of deplatformings was visceral, and the impact was almost immediate. A study conducted by research firm Zignal Labs found that online disinformation, particularly about election fraud, fell by an incredible 73 percent in the week after Twitter’s suspension of Trump’s social media account. Online forums for Trump supporters are now fractured and weakened.
OK so how did “Black, indigenous and other people of color” benefit from censorship? Oh, and who talks like that anyway? Why is it that Black folks—which as you will see, the author considers himself—can never look at people by the content of their character but only by the color of their skin. Yet they celebrate MLK as their hero? Sir, have you never heard his I Have a Dream speech?
Folks, this brings up another issue. Why is any attempt to discuss the fraud that occurred in the last election somehow disinformation? The evidence is overwhelming that election laws were violated, ignored, and not enforced. This debate (or lack of one) is framed in a peculiar way. Liberals maintain that there was absolutely zero fraud in the last election despite many examples and Conservatives know there was rampant fraud. When Liberals acknowledge that there was fraud then at least we can have a discussion on whether there was enough to change the outcome of the election but until they recognize the same set of facts, there can be no dialogue on the issue. Denial is not dialogue. Ignoring facts does not make them go away it just makes folks ignorant or worse.
Before I continue, let me make these comments on the First Amendment.
First, strictly speaking the First Amendment applies to the national government. Via various laws and Court actions, the First Amendment has been extended to cover the various states.
The tech companies are private, but Congress has extended protections to them for the purpose of allowing free speech on their platforms and giving the companies legal protection, so they don’t have to moderate all posts on their websites. (I think this is intended to emulate the FCC regulation of broadcast media.) I’m fine with this arrangement as long as all points of view can be expressed. When only one point of view is allowed, and all others are banned or people that feel differently are intimidated to the point that they can’t express their point of view without fear of reprisal then the First amendment is not in operation. This is the current situation for both my wife and I and many others that we know. We cannot express what we believe either politically or religiously at work or on social media without fear of reprisal. While this blog in technically on the public internet, its just my corner to vent and not subject to the whims of big tech algorithms.
In addition, what frosts me, and my fellow conservatives is that the rules (whatever they might be) should be applied equally to everyone and they are not. The selective enforcement and resulting uneven playing field really grates on me.
In his essay, the author goes on to mention the First Amendment.
But many reacted to the social media bans with outrage. First Amendment fundamentalists across the political spectrum raised “free speech” concerns, claiming that the social media bans were a slippery slope. Though they’re being used to hold the powerful to account today, the argument goes, they could be used to repress minority groups in the future. Others worried that a digital oligarchy of big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon with the unchecked power to silence individuals represents a threat to democracy.
I share the concern about the outsize influence of big tech on governance and the economy. But, as a Black activist who’s been fighting for digital rights and justice and against digital disparities, surveillance, and hate for more than a decade, the reaction that most resonated was relief and a sense of collective triumph. Finally, after years of organizing, movements for racial justice and human rights were able to hold these companies accountable to the demand that they give no platform or profit to white supremacy—at least momentarily.
To summarize the above two paragraphs, the author states that he shares the concerns expressed on the First Amendment but since his side won, it’s OK because his political opponents were silenced. He’s relieved that big tech put their thumbs on the scale to interfere. He calls this a triumph.
Now I will try to unpack the second paragraph. What caught my attention was this part, “…as a Black activist who’s been fighting for digital rights and justice and against digital disparities, surveillance, and hate …”
What does this even mean? This guy is talking in code and not the King’s English.
Digital rights are the copyrights on digital content which clearly is not what he’s talking about.
Justice is a meaningless word in the context used above. True justice is measuring man’s behavior by God’s Standard which is not what this guy has in mind.
What are digital disparities? Poor people need the Internet too? Heck every homeless person I’ve seen in California over the last decade has a cell phone.
Surveillance is how Apple, Google, Facebook, and most of the rest monetize your personal information. Most users, regardless of race, are OK with this. Whatever is the real concern, I sure can’t tell from this article.
Hate is another buzz word. The author doesn’t mean hate in the classic dictionary definition. This has to be another term related to race. Wanna bet he thinks only white people can hate or be racist?
Lastly, the author concludes the paragraph by again equating silencing President Trump as silencing White Supremacy. This is demonstrably a false claim and his insistence on making it proves that he is uninterested in an honest discussion of facts and is instead wedded to a political opinion which he must defend no matter what.
For the past decade, we have witnessed the resurgence of white supremacy in mainstream political and public debate, and it’s only been enabled by media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While those already in power may rely on the Constitution and the democratizing promise of the open internet, Black people and other marginalized groups need more than the intent of the law to enjoy its equal protection.
OK, again what resurgence in white supremacy? The KKK was founded by Democrats and was at its peak just over 100 years ago. Virtually no Republicans were even Klan members, and none was a slave owner. The Democrats are the ones trying to keep Blacks on the plantation not me. (Note to Liberals, I’m quoting a Black man when I talk of Democrats trying to keep Blacks on the plantation.)
White Supremacy is routinely condemned by folks in both political parties so what is this guy angry about? Trump condemned both White Supremacists and neo-Nazis all the time, but it was a cold day in hell when CNN finally aired the comments during the second impeachment show. The mainstream media just denied that Trump ever said it because they would rather edit the tape than trust people to make up their own minds. Sadly, this supposedly informed author never bothered to do the research because he would rather have Trump lumped into the White Supremacist basket because then he can just dismiss the guy without having to hear what he actually said. In short, falsely labelling Trump and his supporters enforced his prejudice and presuppositions.
Please note that the author asserts that the First Amendment is not enough. Wrong. Dear Sir, the First Amendment is freedom of speech, assembly, press, and religion. There is no right to be heard or receive government subsidies if you’re not.
Then the article goes on to list various grievances that the author has with people due to real or perceived racism. None of the things he lists are the fault of Donald Trump, Parler, or the 75 million people that vote for Trump. Thus, why banning Trump, Parler, or others is a victory—since they’re not part of the problem—just mystifies me.
All of the above is used to justify Some Black Lives Matter as the hope of Blacks due to their “largely peaceful anti-racist protesters in almost every US city”. Sorry but I’ve never been to a peaceful protest that needs police, medical, and fire personnel on call because of how peaceful we were acting. I’ve never been to a peaceful protest where random people were dragged out of their cars, businesses, or homes and beaten because of the color of their skin. Doesn’t the fact that DR. King protested such thuggery mean its not ok to do no matter what color your skin is? How does playing the race card inoculate you from doing what you know is right?
I know BLM in Sacramento has had the District Attorney’s Office under siege for several years which as required the DA to install temporary fencing, hire extra security, and take other precautions due to their “peaceful” nature.
I’m not saying that all BLM protests end with violence and businesses being burned but I have never once heard of BLM trying to police their own and expel those who break the law or cause harm to life and property; thus, a reasonable person can only conclude that such violence is encouraged by the organization. Seems like a strange way for a billion-dollar corporation to behave. (Yes Virginia, Some Black Lives Matter is a corporation worth more than a billion dollars). They spend funds promoting violence while their supporters claim they are poor and voiceless. In the final analysis, it’s just another race based shakedown group.
As an early member of the Black Lives Matter Global Network in the Bay Area, I was among the leaders responsible for managing several BLM Facebook pages, and I witnessed the inequity first hand. I spent hours each day from 2014 until 2017 removing violent racial and gendered harassment, explicitly racist anti-Black language, and even threats to maim and murder Black activists.
I don’t agree with BLM, but I also don’t agree with online harassment. Its that old “do unto others” credo that Jesus taught. Bullying is out of bounds in civil discourse.
Again, I don’t know why Black people need different protection than anyone else. Why don’t we have the same protections for everyone? I thought we believed in equal justice under the law—a core biblical value by the way.
In this context, an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment—that all speech is equal, that the internet is a sufficiently democratizing force, and that the remedy for harmful speech is more speech—willfully and callously ignores that all speech is not treated equally. A digital divide and algorithmic injustice has fractured the internet, and, together with the racial exclusion of mainstream media, has turned the remedy of more speech into a false solution.
Dear sir, try being a Republican or a Christian if you think Black folks are having a rough time of it. Better yet, take a look at the treatment of Black Republican Christian Conservatives on the Internet and then see how much better that you are doing. None of us has a billion dollars in our bank account to underwrite our movement or hire lawyers if we want to take someone to court. Sharpton and Jackson don’t come to my aid or theirs when we get dumped on by “the man”.
The article has a few digs at the media and a token shot at “white liberal elitism”. Dude have you never watched ESPN or anything else sports related? The commentary is all about race and rarely about the sport. They spend way more time on athlete’s felony arrests than player trades. The entertainment industry has their diversity quotas to try and stay in your good graces as well. Truth is that the news media tends to give you cover and protection and amplify your message because they agree with you politically and are afraid of offending you. What more do you want of them? You’re just ungrateful; but it always circles back to that subject when discussing liberals.
The author then says that tech companies need to write algorithms to fight hate rather than promote it. However, who gets to write that code and then enforce it? The author presumes that we are stupid sheep and someone—either big government or big tech—needs to care for us. Sorry but trusting either—government or tech—is destined to fail.
Concluding Remarks
The bottom line is that the author is looking for a political solution to solve spiritual problems. Human nature is broken and neither BLM nor any other political interest group can fix the human heart. Civil government was established in part to restrain the acts of evil doers but only God and His Bride the Church can mend the flaws and brokenness inside people. Sin divides us from each other. Dr. King’s vision of a colorblind society is ultimately the work of God’s Holy Spirit. Until we get the logs out of our own eyes, we are ill equipped to get the splinter out of our neighbors. Malkia Devich-Cyril needs to start at the Cross not with Karl Marx if he truly wants to improve the lot of all lives; Black or otherwise.
If BLM was mobilizing their community to shun Planned Parenthood—an organization founded to eliminate Blacks via genocide—and advocating that they look to God and not Washington for assistance, then I would take them a lot more seriously when they claim to be a force for good. Until then, I regard them as a criminal organization using hate and intimidation to achieve political and social aims. Sadly, Some Black Lives Matter is a proudly Marxist organization and thus will never look to God for true justice. Ironically, theirs are much the same tactics that the KKK has historically used on Blacks. Is this an example of the saying that “you become like what you hate?”
Better to love the hell out of someone than beat it out of them.
