Annoyed at The State of the World

Part I: Hypocrisy, Gas Lighting, and Distraction


I am so frustrated with the state of the world. It is time for us all of to take a step back. This post is going to infuriate lots of people. This is also going to awaken some people. Others may agree with me, but have been too afraid to say anything because of the way society has been conditioned to react. Oh well. It is long past time that we have this discussion. I am so tired of the age of sycophancy. – 
 
"Stop, hey, what's the sound, everybody look what's going down" – The TLDR is this: [ Society is being blinded from far more pressing issues by redundant nonsense. Did everyone suddenly forget that we are not supposed to congregating, for our own sake? What did we learn from Covid-19? What is the only good thing to emerge from that mess: The world awoke and realized that it is a national security threat for 80% of our medical supplies and virtually all of our personal protective equipment and other (not limited to but including) medical machinery, such as ventilators, to be manufactured by the hostile regime known as the Chinese Communist Party. And now that has all been forgotten because of Derek Fucking Chauvin. ]

As I was saying, only in the age of sycophancy could anyone get away with domestic conquer like we have seen in Seattle – I am referring to the illegal occupancy of a portion of an American city by radicals that call their new country the “Capital Hill Autonomous Free Zone” – as if they represent the Hong Kong of the West. I’ve news for you: nobody elected those people. What occurred there is undeniably anarchy. It does not matter how morally correct, or by who’s standards, the occupiers are – their very presence is technically an act of domestic war. The first amendment, with it’s long history of legal contest, does not, and will never grant domestic occupation of any piece of this country, for any reason the right to… I am going to stop right here, because this is all just a red herring! It is a joke! Wake up: This was permitted. Do you really think the Seattle police were outgunned by a bunch of college-aged punks? Dear chaz: go home. While you can. You are just a tool, whether you know it or not. I shift my focus back to the United States of America:

I have a message for the news organizations: Do your jobs. I have a message for everyone listening to them: You are being played for a fool, and let me tell you why. All of you reporters and journalists that continue to report on nothing but the BLM protests – you are missing the real stories. Not to mention, at what point did the Democratic party decide that anarchy is permissible in a functioning society? (A clever person could say “when they started the KKK”, but that’d be silly...) What did BLM want? Justice for George Floyd? All four of the cops were charged with murder! What else do you want? The abolition of slavery? The end of segregation? Equal opportunity in America? You already have that. What else do you want? Yes, there are remnants of systemic racism in our society, and I am sorry to break it you – there always will be. People judge. They always have, and always will. I am not saying it is wrong to protest and press for change – I am saying that you have made your point, it has been received QUITE well, and at this point you are discrediting yourselves. It is not that your point is wrong, is it the WAY in which some of you protest that is wrong.

Only in a post-covid world could this ever occur. If even half of the so-called protesters had jobs, then the so-called protests would cease to exist. This is absolutely pathetic, and makes me embarrassed to be an American. While I was trying to be as apolitical as possible, I can’t help but add that this is just one of the negative effects that socialism has on society.

Although I am empathetic with anyone whom is oppressed by the police, I also tend to believe that this movement actually will make things worse by stirring up racial tensions, and therefore degrading race relations. What the hell is that anyway? I don't think of myself of a white person. I don't think of my black friends as black people. I see them all as people and myself as a person … It's redundant to keep this up at this point. All four of the police officers involved have been charged with murder, so would you all please go home now? America, and the free world, for that matter, has far more important things to deal with… I am getting to that part soon...

Stop ripping up statues. I don't particularly like Antifa, or anyone who engages in this type of vandalism and destruction of property because I don't like people going around and destroying whatever they decide that they don't like. If that's the way society operated then Larry Flynt would have spent his life in prison and we will not have Hustler Magazine today. Hell, by that measure, the Beatles never would have gotten “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the radio. It is not okay to go around and destroy things simply because they offend you. Something that offends you may be something that brings great joy to me. Perhaps I hate rap music, perhaps you are gay. Maybe Stephen doesn’t like strawberries, and Adam vomits when he sees John shagging Jay… Blah blah, blah blah, look the other fucking way … 

It is your opinion, and that is all, that you wanted some statue removed. I do not know if that was the majority opinion. Perhaps we should have put it to a vote. In November. Like you know, the way democracy is supposed to work? That said … 

What else is going on that the media is failing to report ? Well, one of the most important things is this: What is the one thing that we learned from this pandemic? What is the one good thing that happened because of this tragedy? I'll tell you: the world finally woke up to the fact that we all need to stop being dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. It is a national security threat to have them manufacturing 80% of our pharmaceutical drugs and virtually all of our medical equipment and personal protective equipment. 

For a minute there, that's what the entire world was talking about. Well, not anymore. Now it's all about this one poor dude that died because of a psychopath cop. Do you know how many people died because we could not manufacturer medical equipment / PPE fast enough, and because China, strangely enough, had been hoarding PPE for months before December 2019…? I don’t know, but it’s surely a number larger than one. 

Now I would like to remain as apolitical as possible, but I must point out: Who is the presidential candidate that ran on and has actually been addressing the problem with China? And who is the candidate with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party? For all the less than complimentary things that Trump is, he is the anti-CPP candidate. He started the process of eliminating our dependence on a regime that has openly declared many times that the United States of America is it's #1 enemy... By the way, this has nothing to do with you Chinese people, whom are our friends. We both share a common enemy: The Chinese Communist Party. Joe Biden sold his soul to that devil a long time ago.

Most of you probably dislike Biden, yet most of you probably hate Trump more , but think about what I'm saying. I can't obviously prove the BLM movement is being used as a distraction from bigger problems, but if you do you research you shall conclude that Biden is absolutely the pro Chinese Communist Party choice for America. He's spent 20 years helping them destroy our economy and invade our culture.

My point is, i feel like this is a distraction. I can't prove it. Yet. But I feel strongly that these riots, and protests are being used a red herring – it’s not that they’re wrong, well yes the way that some of these people “protest” is indeed wrong – anarchy is not protected by the first amendment – but the point is that we have bigger fish to fry. 

I'm not the only one saying this. But not many people will not go here because society is conditioned to scream “FASCIST”, “RACIST”, “How dare you suggest that Black Lives Matter could be being used as a political pawn”… Fuck that. I suggest it. I strongly suspect it to be so. Have you even heard about Obamagate? Or Hillary Clinton being forced to testify at last for that email scandal? Likely not. All you have been hearing about is Floyd & Chaz. It is so time to move on. 

I don't care what color you are. You should not be okay with our nation being dependent on a regime that actually has concentration camps full of Muslims, Christians, and other “prisoners of conscience”, and is engaged in forced organ harvesting... These are facts, look it up. The world is FULL of problems. The tunnel vision of the American media right now is dangerous. The selfishness of the media that gives the limelight to be mob is despicable. The actions of the anarchists in Seattle are unmistakably criminal. Just as the use of force against George Floyd was excessive. We get it. Enough is enough.

To the protesters I ask kindly; for the sake of the future of our nation, please find something else to do. You have made good progress. But let's be real. Do you *really* think the world can function without due process of law? Oh, I get it -- you don't literally mean 'defund the police' -- so why don't you SAY THAT? At this point ... what are trying to to accomplish? You got what you wanted. You got everything you asked for and more. If you really care about America, if you really want to bring about positive change, if you really care about race relations, then go find a better way to make use of this idol time. There are so many problems that you could try to fix. Have you noticed that practically everyone is on your side? What else do you want? You have already won. At this point it is straight up redundant, in my honest opinion. 

Not to mention that BLM, is at least partially funded by a superpac that gives 100's of millions of dollars to DNC candidates. The movement, sadly, has been hijacked and now the narrative is starting to look like it is controlled the deep state. These things seldom 'just happen'. Did you know that Occupy Wall St was started by the FBI? Sabu, the traitorous infamous member of Anonymous, had been a confidential informant working with the FBI for three days before he sent out the initial tweet that started the Occupy movement. It took years for this information to surface, and I expect that will likely be the case here.

Not to mention -- I am confused -- So, It was wrong, it was selfish to protest this economic shutdown, because it endangered the lives of others, but it is PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE for your to protest some other cause? The first amendment does not say "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, so long as the media agrees with the demonstrators." Give me a break. I see through your hypocrisy. Do you? Have you any clue what a double standard that message sends?

To the people that cannot think about anything else, I implore you to turn off the TV and do some good old fashioned research and soul searching. And to the media that won’t stop covering this endless parade, I ask .. I ask you to do your jobs. To those of you who say 'oh who made you the chief of police'?, I say this -- nobody. I am just exercising, lawfully, my first amendment rights. Peace be with all of you. God bless America (Actually, I am an atheist. But it has a nice ring). Humanity is better than this! I do not mean to offend anyone. I do not mean to undermine the fact that there is systemic racism in our society. I just think feel like there's a lot more to this story. Goodnight.

Stay tuned for Part II: how the tragedy of the pandemic was abused to take away your freedoms. 

The Symbiotic Relationship of Humans & Computers: Part I : Mititaging Data Loss

Preface

Over the last 60 years, computers have become a transcending component of the human experience. Computers were once novel, misunderstood, mammoth-sized, greasy machines available to only governments and the wealthy. Today, they are an omnipresent force and indispensable component of our lives. In bio-mechanical fashion, these machines are rapidly becoming extensions of our physical bodies. With the recent evolution of artificial intelligence, one could argue that this could be defined as a symbiotic relationship.

This article will focus on one particular way these devices complement our lives: long-term data storage, or the biological equivalent of the hippocampus.

Birth of the Turing Machine: War & Innovation

The first true modern digital computer was created during World World II by Alan Turing; a project bankrolled by MI6 and approved by Winston Churchill, which was crucial to the Allied victory. If you've seen The Imitation Game, than you can skip over the next two paragraphs.

During the second great war, the Germans encrypted all radio communications with an enigma machine; a device which utilized an early, brilliant form of one-time-pad encryption, functioning very much like modern public-key cryptography. The enigma, with it's millions of possible settings and genius implementation of OTP encryption, allowed messages to be sent via shortwave AM radio all over the world; interceptable by anyone with an AM radio kit, yet decryptable only by those whom had the keys -- in this case, the Axis forces.

Allan Turing, a forward-thinking, misunderstood, brilliant man recruited by MI6 understood that in order to feasibly break 67-bit encryption (that's impressive - for a device invented in 1918. To put this in perspective, today we use 128 - 256 bit encryption to reliably keep our data secure), he needed to build a machine to do it. Thus, the digital computer, or "Turing Machine" was  born. Of course, there were earlier implementations of the digital computer -- the distinction here is that Allan Turning developed the Turing Cycle; today represented as assembly code. Assembly is the lowest level of machine code; utilized by central processing units to this day:

Input  >  [Python/C++/Java/Ruby/Node/Etc] > C > Assembly > Processor > Output.

Omnipresence & Essence

Today, computers are a very essential component to the human experience -- perhaps even the prime component of the next phase of human evolution. Computers consist of a few key components: input devices, processors, temporary storage devices, long term storage devices, and output devices.  This article will focus on the problems with long-term storage mediums, and how they may be mitigated.

Flash-based storage technology is beginning to replace not only hard disc drives, but even the need for human memory. This has been both very liberating and problematic for humanity.

Imminent Failure

"If you don't have at least three copies, you don't own it" -- Anonymous


Fact of life -- Discs fail, all of the time. When this happens, people are often surprised, angry, and depressed. I've lost countless memories due to a lost hard disc that contained three years of my best professional photography. I should have learned this lesson then.

Every disc will fail, eventually. The average life span of a modern solid-state drive is about ten years, but I did recently have a brand new m2-sata SSD die on me after only six months. My ill preparation for this incident ended up costing me a tremendous amount of money because I had a couple of Bitcoin wallets on that computer that I was unable to recover. I should have been able to recover those funds. I thought that I taken all of proper precautions. These were electrum wallets, and the seeds (backup codes) were stored in both an encrypted master password storage database and a notebook.

The trouble was that I had not made a copy of that database, and the backup code I had written down on paper was destroyed when I somehow spilled water on one of my notebooks. This is one example of why you should always have at least three copies of anything digital of value to you -- and in multiple locations. If the recovery phrase is stored on the same disc as the wallet, and the disc dies and you do not have another copy, then you are SOL.

Example II: One day, a couple of summers ago, I took my ex girlfriend to Boston for the night. Before I left, I created a new wallet on my cellular phone (a brand new OnePlus 5T) and deposited a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin on it. I tend to overestimate how much money I will need for a given occasion as I tend to be slightly obsessive when it comes to preparation. I did write down the seed to this  wallet somewhere...

After renting bikes and riding around the city for a couple of hours, my ex and I were drinking Patron straight out of the bottle on a sketchy dock on the Boston Harbor while looking at pictures I had snapped that night of our adventure. Suddenly, she dropped my phone into the ocean (accidentally, I believe) ... and that, as they say, was that. Right after this happened, she fell into the harbor, and then I fell in as well while trying to help her up, destroying my electronic cigarette, a nice sports coat I had just bought, and some other things I cannot remember.

Fortunately -- or so I thought, I had booked our hotel room before this happened. Soaking wet, shivering, and drenched, we made our way to the hotel. Needless to say, I was not particularly thrilled with her. To make matters worse, she smoked cigarettes in the hotel room. I got a knock the following morning from security, and they informed me that I had to either pay a $200 cleaning fee or I would be arrested. Normally this would not have been an issue, but thanks to my lost phone, I had no way to deposit any money onto my Visa Bitpay card. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to take care of this mess, I got lucky and the hotel staff decided to give me 24 hours to pay the fee before filing a police report. After leaving the hotel, I went straight to the cell phone store and bought a new phone. It was awful. I was 27 years old and had to have my Dad temporarily add me to his phone plan so that I could get a new device.

I never did find the backup code to that wallet. Total damages of this incident as of today, factoring in the Bitcoin that was still on that phone are well above $5000.

The moral of these stories is to always, always have at least copies in multiple, secure locations of anything digital that you intend to keep. A waterproof notebook is a good investment. Wet paper does not do anyone much good. A fireproof safe is also a good investment -- I have not personally suffered the aftermath of a fire, but it doesn't take much imagination to see how this could be completely applicable here. It turns out that planning for failure is not "dumber than regular planning" (a quote from Rick & Morty).

Conclusion

• For personal data such as photographs, music, literature, and documents, I would advise using an encrypted cloud-based storage service such as mega.nz in addition to keeping a local copy of your documents on an external hard disc. You can grab a decent 4TB external hybrid solid-state/mechanical disc on Amazon for less than $100. Do not keep this drive plugged into your computer all of time. Instead, periodically synchronous your files and keep your backup disc in a secure location.
• Anything monetary or security related such as cryptocurrency or two-factor authentication recovery codes should be written down on waterproof paper and stored in multiple locations; at least one of which should be a safety deposit box (Consider stenographic means of data storage for monetary recovery codes if you do not trust the bank [wise of you]) or equivalent.
• Get in the habit of doing weekly backups of all of your files. You can configure your computer to automatically synchronize your files to a remote service for you, and this is great -- but it is also important to remember that there is no "cloud" -- it's just someone else's computer. This is why it's important to encrypt any data stored remotely. You should also be aware that sometimes even the most scrupulous service providers make mistakes, and your data can be lost. This is why it's important to have a local backup as well. You want a copy that is in your control. 

It's a hell of a lot easier to deal with these inevitable failures before they happen in a precautionary fashion than it is to scramble  after the incident occurs. Trust me -- I have lost years of music, photography, earnings, etc ... don't learn the hard way.

Selenium + Firefox on Headless Debian

Today I ran into an issue while working on a project for a client. I was tasked to write a web scraper to grab data off a website because there are no descent API's in existence that are "good enough" and the client wanted the data directly from the most well known source.

After spending twelve hours writing this thing, I finally got it working flawlessly. I sent it to the client, whom couldn't get it to work, and we were both a little bewildered. It turns out that the issue was that in order to use Firefox as your scraping browser, you... well, you need to have Firefox installed on your server, headless though it may be.

For my own future reference I figured I'd note how to configure that here. Perhaps this post will help someone else out as well. These instructions are intended particularly for Debian (not everyone uses Ubuntu!).

First, you need selenium:

$ sudo -i
# apt update ; apt install python3-selenium firefox-esr

Next, you might need geckodriver. I am not sure because i installed it manually,  but you might as well grab the latest version:

# cd /usr/local/src
# wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/v0.24.0/geckodriver-v0.24.0-linux64.tar.gz
# tar -xzf geckodriver-v0.24.0-linux64.tar.gz
# cp geckodriver /usr/local/bin

 Finally, let's fire up a test webdriver and see if it works:

# exit

$ echo -e 'from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.python.org")
assert "Python" in driver.title
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
elem.clear()
elem.send_keys("pycon")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source
print('If you see this, it worked.')
driver.close()' > test_selenium.py

$ python3 test_selenium.py

If you see this, it worked.

That's all there is to it.

Is This an ISMI-Catcher or What?

Over the last couple years, I have been tracking this oddity amongst the cellular networks. Somewhere around Waltham, Massachusetts, was some sort of rogue cell tower, I knew that much. Unfortunately I accidentally deleted most of the screenshots that I had of this data, but fortunately I have enough circumstantial evidence left to suggest that there is a military or police ran ISMI-Catcher (aka "Stringray") operating out of  Waltham, MA.

I first noticed this when my phone switched from 3G over to LTE when I was on the train to Boston, MA. That immediately made me feel suspicious because my phone should not be able to pick up any LTE bands in the United States, as my  radio firmware locks some of usable LTE bands and only supports certain spectrums used in other parts of the world, primarily Europe and Asia. So, it is very odd for this particular device to pick up any LTE band at all in the United States. As far as I know, there are no LTE bands in use by any legit carrier in the USA that my device picks up; band 1(2100mhz), 3(1800mhz), 5(850mhz), 7(2600mhz), 8(900mhz), and 20(800mhz).

Over the course of a few months I continued tracking the source of this strange signal, which finally lead me to Prospect Hill Park; a little wildlife reservation in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Up on the top of this little hill is what appears to be an ancient radio tower of some sort that has been retrofitted to be an all-in-one cellular surveillance monstrosity. Google seems to think it's an 'observation tower':

The tower is conveniently located in an area such that anyone that rides the T-Line from Fitchburg (possibly other lines) into Boston, or drives through this area on Route 95 will be "tagged" by this device (yes, you should feel quite violated if this the case).

If you don't know what I am talking about, than now is a good time to Google "Stingrays",  "ISMI Catchers", and "ISMI-Catcher-Detector" applications that you can use to  find these things...

Behold, on top of Prospect Hill, the source of the signal.

Note the variety of cellular antennas on top of that thing. Although some follow-up research still needs to be done, it appears that this thing could be an all-in-one, multi-band, stationary Stingray. These devices can remotely eavesdrop on your communications, man-in-the-middle your data, and in some cases, remotely manipulate and/or install malware on your device.

When I got closer to the device, the LTE signal became stronger. You may have heard about the 18 or so rogue towers identified across the United States, could this be the 19th? It's hidden in such an obscure, beautiful location that it's not surprising that nobody has noticed...

Obviously more research needs to be done, and I need to find the actual BTS measurements that I took while I was there before I can confirm this for sure. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted my entire sdcard a couple weeks ago, so it may be a while before I can recover that data.

In the mean time, here is a view of the tower from Google Earth, which oddly, does not appear to have the antennas on it. You may have to scroll in/out a little to see it.



If you think this a little strange, than you are not alone. If you think that this should not be legal, than you are correct. Technically, the use of these devices fall into a legal gray area thanks to the Patriot Act. Basically, the FBI would rather drop a criminal case than discuss the details of ISMI-Catcher usage. Now why would they want to do something like that?

I will update this post when I get more details.

Edit: I acknowledge It's possible that my carrier is simply testing some new technology, or perhaps planning to open up some of those LTE bands in the US, which would actually be pretty cool. So I need your help getting to bottom of it.

Anecdote of a Nighmare

Last night I had a vivid, horrific dream. I recall walking down this dark, damp corridor of this apparently abandoned hospital, or maybe it was a school-- hard to say. I remember long halls, absence of light, and in true Sin City style, a world embellished with dreary, gray-scale tones. Everything was somewhere between ebony and ivory, save the few effulgent objects, like glowing red eyes, and the  EXIT signs hanging at the end of the halls.

Making my way down this interminable corridor, suddenly my chest surged with adrenaline, as this loud theatrical sound interjected the dream, a kind of suspenseful, foreboding,  "ba-dum!", associated with a climactic scene out of a horror film. Standing before me was my sister, just glaring at me, her eyes wide open, contrasting the colorless world with a neon bloodshot, like she was either a zombie, or demon possessed.

I asked her, "What the hell is going on? What are doing here?". In a nullified, uncanny voice, she said, "Don't you know?", as if something horrible and obvious was happening, to which I was oblivious. "What am I supposed to know...?", I replied. I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I decided I'd rather assume she was sleep walking than possessed, so I told her to go back to bed, and lead her back to one of the desolate hospital-esc bedrooms.

Continuing my way down this endless corridor, next I ran into my mom. At least, she looked like my mom. But she too had the same bloodshot, nefarious, if not unearthly look in her eyes. I began to say "Mom..?" The words barely left my mouth before she lunged at me, knocking me to the ground, and began to strangle the life out of me. I began screaming "What the fuck Mom!", as it occurred to me that none of this was passing the reality test, and than I suddenly found myself transported somewhere else entirely.

With the inexplicable change of environment, I realized, 'Okay, this is certainly a nightmare, and I need to wake the f--- up'. The moment I became aware that I was dreaming, I was stricken with sleep paralysis. Terrorized, it became clear that I wasn't going to just 'snap out' of this one. (If you've ever experienced sleep paralysis, than you know it can be quite horrifying).

Decisively I tried to take control of the nightmare, hoping I could salvage the experience and turn into a lucid, perhaps even pleasant dream. That, as it usually happens, was a no-go. Words cannot explain what was occuring around me, but it was as if the Earth itself was crumbling back into the stardust from which it originated, unknown millenniums ago.

After what seemed like ten agonizing minutes in this dubious abstract, I finally managed to move my leg just enough to turn my body over and wake myself up. Aware of how quickly dreams fade from memory, I jumped out of bed, grabbed a pen and notepad, and began to document whatever had just occurred. But I'd badly burned my hand on a hot glass pipe last night, and it was too difficult to write. So I grabbed my cell phone, fired up an audio recorder, and instead, narrated the dream to disc. From those two memorabilia, I later composed this anecdote.

I thought this a great illustration of just how comically creative our minds can be while we sleep. Unfortunately, I can't consciously make this shit up.

Overlooking the Obvious: The Search for Better Health

Lately I've been experiencing some rather debilitating health issues. Suffering from brain fog, nausea, weakness, low energy, and endless symptoms associated with allergies has forced me on a journey to find the cause. These health problems have steadily taken their toll on  my creativity and ability to contribute to society in a meaningful and valuable way. For a while I attributed it to aging, prescription drugs, or cat allergies. Despite keeping the cats off of the entire floor that I live on, reducing my exposure, the problem has been getting worse.

When one feels like total shit all of the time, one tends to self medicate. Legal or not, prescription drugs take their toll, and society needs to understand that there is little  difference between illegal and prescription drug addiction. Just because my pills come in tamper proof bottle with my name on them does not mean that it's actually in my best interest to take that stuff. Legal drugs actually kill more people per year than illicit drugs, and that says something about our society's medical practices.

While I admit that prescription drugs are definitely a contributing factor to my health issues, I don't believe that they are responsible for all of them. I am not denying that Big Pharma is putting profit in front of health to keep us sick and sell us cures, in fact I strongly agree-- but I'll save that for another post.

If it's not the meds, than what is it? Perhaps the answer is the most simple, and obvious one. We've all heard that saying "you are what you eat". It's a scientifically accurate notion, and I don't think anyone could raise a logical argument that claims we are not compromised of the matter that we consume. We are products of our environment, and that environment is perpetually growing ever more toxic. In the time it will have taken you to read this blog, approximately 666 acres of rain forest will have been demolished or degraded. You may be wondering how I arrived at that figure: Simple math, using estimates from credible sources in my bookmarks:

anon@sketchbox:~$ curl https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/|grep "acres"
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0<p>Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day&mdash;or some 50,000 species a year&mdash;as the forests fall.<br />
100 78408    0 78408    0     0  31646      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:-- 31641
anon@sketchbox:~$ # Scientific American estimates we lose 80,000 acres per day while degrading another 80,000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 80000 + 80000
160000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 160000 / 24 / 10 

666

Six-hundred and sixty six acres every six minutes sound devilish indeed. The next logical question is why are we doing that? We know that the rain forest and oceans create the majority of the oxygen that we breath, so it would appear to be in our best interests (if survival really is the point of life) to conserve and protect these precious ecosystems. So why are we doing the opposite? The surprising answer is that 70% of all deforestation is the result of the global animal agriculture culture. Most of that land is used to either graze cattle or grow grain to feed cattle. The majority of crops that are grown on this planet are fed to cattle, not humans.

Deforestation is not the only negative impact that our meat obsessed lifestyles have on Mother Earth. Agricultural pollution is an increasingly problematic phenomenon that only gets worse as the human populations grows. Pesticides and fertilizer tend to seep into our groundwater, or run off into the ocean. This both changes the pH of and pollutes freshwater aquatic ecosystems, drinking water, and the oceans.

For example, along the US Southern coastline, there is a "dead zone" that's been growing for decades now. The farm runoff enters the ocean, increasing the acidity and introducing toxins into the water. This stuff is so toxic that it kills practically everything that it comes in contact with. Even before BP blew up the Deepwater Horizon rig and essentially murdered the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, which used to be the most productive ecosystem in the world, aquatic life was suffering along the coastline.

Off topic, but worth mentioning is that the Deepwater Horizon spill was handled extremely poorly. Rather than actually clean up the oil using effective, natural methods like spreading hay bails over the water to soak up and remove the oil, BP chose the "out of site, out of mind" approach. It's actually worse than it sounds. A chemical dispersant that has been banned in Great Britain for over a decade called "CoreExit" was dumped into the ocean, to dissolve the oil into the ocean.

Typically, oil and water do not mix, which makes it (relatively) easy to clean these spills up. Somewhere along the line, BP decided it was more economically convenient to disperse, rather than actually remove the oil. The toxic chemical dispersant was sprayed from airplanes, and dumped deep under the ocean, near the leaking well. The people of Louisiana suffered terrible health effects as their environment became more toxic than ever. CoreExit rained down upon the Southern coastline, and possibly traveled much farther than that. The long term effects have been devastating. Shrimp born without eyes, fish born with lesions on their skin, dolphins with lung disease... it goes on and on.

This is just another of the countless horrors that stem from corporate greed, which brings me back to cattle agriculture. When I was very young, I was diagnosed with an allergy to milk. From age 3-10 I did not consume dairy products. I would eat pizza without cheese, drink soy milk, and use dairy products like butter very sparingly. One day when I was 9 or 10 years old, I got tired of being allergic to milk, and ate some pizza during school lunch. I didn't notice any allergic reaction, so I figured I'd outgrown the allergy and could now consume dairy again. I was always a skinny, scrawny kid, and due to the false notion that drinking milk is vital to producing strong bones, I started drinking a whole lot more of it, to make up for all the years I went without it.

In retrospect, when I began drinking milk is when I started to develop some problems. I was actually getting fat for a couple years, and this is something that I didn't think was possible because I had always been underweight. I had anxiety by the time I was 12, and depression by age 13. Coming from an upper middle class family, we always bought organic food. Most of the milk I drank back than was "organic" milk from grass fed cows. While this milk certainly tastes better and appears more humanely produced than milk from factory farms, the reality is that it's actually less sustainable and worse for the environment than grain fed, factory farmed milk. This is because grass fed cows require a hell of a lot more land to graze than their caged counterparts at the slaughter houses. With population growing rapidly, and with 70% of our farm lands growing food for cattle, it makes me wonder... is there any sustainable, humane way to raise enough meat to support a population expected to hit 9 billion by 2050?

If the environmental toll is not enough to dis-way you from eating dairy, than perhaps the effects that cow's milk has on our own bodies will. Despite relentless campaigns to promote the health benefits of milk (Got Milk, anyone?) , science is beginning to tell us that milk is actually bad for your health.

"A large observational cohort study^[1] in Sweden found that women consuming more than 3 glasses of milk a day had almost twice the mortality over 20 years compared to those women consuming less than one glass a day. In addition, the high milk-drinkers did not have improved bone health. In fact, they had more fractures, particularly hip fractures." 

1. In observational studies both across countries and within single populations, higher dairy intake has been linked to increased risk of prostate cancer (cited in ^[2]).
2. Observational cohort studies have shown higher dairy intake is linked to higher ovarian cancer risk (cited in ^[2]).
3. Cow’s milk protein may play a role in triggering type 1 diabetes through a process called molecular mimicry^[3].
4. Across countries, populations that consume more dairy have higher rates of multiple sclerosis^[4].
5. In interventional animal experiments and human studies, dairy protein has been shown to increase IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor-1) levels. Increased levels of IGF-1 has now been implicated in several cancers^[5].
6. In interventional animal experiments^[6] and human experiments^[7], dairy protein has been shown to promote increased cholesterol levels (in the human studies and animal studies) and atherosclerosis (in the animal studies).
7. The primary milk protein (casein) promotes cancer initiated by a carcinogen in experimental animal studies^[8].
8. D-galactose has been found to be pro-inflammatory and actually is given to create animal models of aging^[1].
9. Higher milk intake is linked to acne^[9].
10. Milk intake has been implicated in constipation^[10] and ear infections (cited in ^[2]).
11. Milk is perhaps the most common self-reported food allergen in the world^[11].
12. Much of the world’s population cannot adequately digest milk due to lactose intolerance.

(Source: http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/)


With all of this new evidence emerging that shows milk is actually terrible for your health, perhaps it is time for humanity to phase out dairy completely. I've been drinking almond milk and trying to avoid meat for a couple weeks now, and I can honestly say that I feel much better. I felt like so much shit that I no longer felt like writing, and it had been a while since I wrote a blog post. My cognitive functionality seems to be getting better, as have my allergies. Last week I scored 130 on an IQ test, which is ten points higher than I scored a couple years ago. I am writing better code and learning new things faster, and this is only after a couple weeks of cutting down my dairy and meat intake. Science is beginning to show that people that eat plant based diets are much healthier all around than people that eat animal based diets. It's not your fault either! We were simply following bad advice, and that doesn't make us stupid.

I'd encourage anyone that feels sick to try to eat less meat and dairy before resigning to prescription drugs. It's worth a shot. Voting with your wallet is the only effective way to send a message to the food industry, because all they care about is money. That isn't to say that they are evil, it's just the way that business works. Supply will meet demand, and if we all demand more plant based foods, than that is what we will get. It seems rather unnecessary to continue to cause massive suffering amongst farm animals when scientists are saying that everything we need to survive can be found in the plant kingdom. If we used that land to grow more fresh fruits and vegetables instead of feeding and graze cows, than perhaps we could knock out both world hunger and the largest contributer of environmental damage simultaneously.

Polluted water is the cause of about half of all human disease. As we enter a world where it's becoming harder to trust tap-water, we must ask ourselves, what can we do to reverse this destruction? With cattle causing more damage to the Earth than fracking, and with a president in office that does not seem to care about scientific facts, the world's fate is in the hands of the people. It seems overwhelming, but the truth is that there are simple things you can do to make a difference.

Sadly some things are beyond our control. There is one more issue that I want to shed some light on, because frankly it is very disturbing. Scientific evidence is confirming something that ecologists have known for years-- much of the prescription drugs that we take are impossible for municipal water treatment centers to filter out. Traces of anti-depressants, opiates, and most concerning, birth control, can be found in US lakes, rivers, aquifers, and tap water, in alarming concentrations. Hormones are potent chemicals, and it doesn't take very much exposure to these chemicals to cause damage to human and animal life alike. Premature puberty and increased testicular cancer has been observed in humans, and studies have discovered an increase of hermaphrodite fish in aquatic ecosystems. Essentially, we are seeing mass sterility as a result of second hand hormone exposure.

This happens because enough people have been passing prescription drugs through their bodies to cause an accumulation of these substances in our water supplies. I am no expert, and thus am not sure why water treatment facilities cannot filter these chemicals out of the water. I can only guess that it's because these drugs are water soluble. Treatment facilities typically utilize the natural filtration of the Earth to treat the water, so it makes sense to me that anything soluble will remain.

There you have it, anything smaller than thirteen micro-grams cannot be filtered out of waste water this way. The put this in perspective, medical grade micron filters used to prep water for injection use 0.02 micro-gram membranes, which is sufficient to remove just about everything but the water itself. Pharmaceutical chemicals will indeed pass right through a 13mm filter.

It's not realistic to ask people to stop taking medications, so we need to find another way to deal with this. Perhaps it's time to seriously rethink our waste treatment and disposal methods. According to the EPA, municipal waste water wells are Class V injection wells, which are supposed to be for treating non-toxic waste. This has appeared to work well for a long time, but it is becoming apparent that it's simply not enough, and that our sewage waste is more toxic than we thought. We need to protect our environment and the ecosystems that we are so interdependent on at all costs. Methods of treating water vary depending on the problem that the water in question has. For example, water with high levels of iron is treated with charcoal filtration, and bottled water is purified using reverse osmosis membrane. The problem is that none of the conventional methods of treatment can remove all of the contaminants-- except for properly implemented distillation.

The standard for producing medical grade water has always been distillation. It used to be a very expensive procedure that required very high amounts of energy, but that's changed thanks to the modern vapor compression distiller, invented by Dean Kamen (the segway dude from Manchester, NH). These units recycle the input energy as they operate so effectively that they consume just 1 kw per hour, and are able to produce ~ 40 liters of clean water per hour. Incredibly, these devices can turn just about any source of water into water that's not only safe to drink, but also is suitable for injection! They cost less than $ 2,000, which is amazing. Could vapor compression distillation help solve our water crisis? Would this be a reasonable replacement for the methods used by traditional water treatment plants? I don't know, but it's worth looking into, and a better approach than what we are doing now, which is basically pretending that we don't have a problem. With all of our insane tech, surely humanity can figure this out.

Finally, while on the quest for better health, I realized that the environment is not limited to the outdoors. I am kind of a slob by nature, and until recently was not good about keeping my place clean. Vacuuming up about ten pounds of dust, cleaning the hell out of my bedroom, and finally throwing away a moldy pumpkin that I'd pretty much forgotten about seems to have worked wonders for my allergies overnight! It doesn't matter what you eat when your house is becoming toxic. It took me 27 years to figure out how important this is. I can even think more clearly now that my house is clean again. I mention this because it seems people have a habbit of overlooking the most obvious solutions to a given problem.

That's all for today. Remember, there is nothing more valuable than good health.

Goodbye, Oracle. Hello, KVM!

In this age of incessant cyber-security threats, virtual machines have become a popular first line of defense. In thoery, properly implemented virtualization will protect the host operating system in the event of a guest compromise. Our computer systems are getting so powerful that lately it seems overkill to dedicate all of a system's resources to one particular task. For example, my CPU load seldom goes above twenty percent since upgrading to an i7-6700k. Virtual machines allow me to get more bang for my buck, in terms of how many simultaneous tasks my computer can run at a given moment. They also provide a priceless layer of security by keeping potential compromises localized to the virtual machine that they may or may not have occurred in.

Over the years I've found that reinstalling your operating system is never a bad move. If you suspect, but are not sure if a system compromise has occurred, than the safest thing to do is to reflash-- just in case. The only issue is that it takes a decent amount of time and energy to reinstall an operating system. You've got to back everything up, save all of your configurations, perform the installation, reinstall all of your software, reconfigure your preferences, files, and so on. Of course, much of this process can be automated with some simple shell scripting, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to reinstall a VM than it is a physical machine.

Having a separate VM for every task greatly minimizes the damage that a program compromise can do. I have a VM for just about everything. A VM for watching Netflix, another for watching porn. A VM for development, another for hacking. A VM for social media, and another for personal finances. This way, if Netflix or Facebook tries to deliver an evil payload to my system via say, javascript, than the attacker will not be able to get my bank details.

As great as this sounds, until recently, one problem remained with this philosophy-- I was dependent on Oracle's closed source software, Virtualbox, to make all of this work. If you know me, than you know that I believe that there few things on this Earth as evil as proprietary software. If you can't audit the source code yourself, than how can you trust the software? It's fundamentally impossible to completely reverse compile a complex program such as vbox. Sure, you can successfully reverse engineer some software, but you're rarely going to get the whole picture. It's also a huge pain in the ass. And since there happens to be other software that can drive virtual machines out there, that has no closed source parts, it makes more sense to use that instead. Thus, I decided it was time to ditch vbox and switch over to KVM.

Making the switch was a hell of a lot easier than I expected. Virt-manger has come a long way over the last couple years, which I imagine helps people like me that are used to Virtualbox's nice GUI to feel like they can safely make the switch. It's also quite easy to convert your current vbox virtual machines (OVA's and VDMK's) into KVM's format (qcow2), using qemu-img. I've also found that KVM is actually much more stable than Virtualbox. No more random crashes, or seemingly random corrupted disc images, unexplainable data loss, or stupid error messages like "Cannot add this disc because it's already attached to this machine". I really hated that shit.

Libvirt is a hundred times smoother, more featured, and cleaner than vbox. Even being able to close the window that the VM is running in without having to shut the whole damn thing down (without having to start the machine as 'detachable' ... give me a break!) feels absolutely liberating. My CPU load is now averaging about half what it was before I switched over, so KVM, with it's type 1 hypervisor, is clearly better about resource management. Full screen, high resolution graphics are now working just fine, and in my opinion, graphics and user friendliness were perhaps the only advantages vbox had over KVM. This is not the case anymore. There's so many great reasons to switch.

Now that I have ditched Virtualbox, I can proudly say that I am running a system with absolutely no proprietary software or drivers whatsoever (except the bios, of course. We've got much reverse engineering to do yet). Hell, I even sleep better knowing that Oracle no longer (may) have a backdoor to my systems! I'd encourage any and all Virtualbox users to switch to KVM today. Virtualbox may be a decent program, but KVM is awesome.