Because I'm in Appalachia and not a leftie. Marksmanship is what we do here in the mountains instead of golf...as any golf balls would wind up in the creek between the ridges no matter what. It's something to do sometimes when I'm not doing fusion research or on the 23 mile round trip to the beer store.
Not to brag of any special prescience, but this disaster was totally predictable given surrounding events (data slurping for cash, DDOSs and so on).
I developed my own homestead automation instead - it's not like a lot of the ideas aren't useful. But as I'm retired on an off-grid homestead I built...no need for the internet and its attack surface anyway - for that matter I skipped the whole smartphone thing - this area has only had coverage for the last 5 or so years anyway.
Survival is the oldest profession. If you don't - that other one that makes the claim wouldn't exist.
I have different challenges than most people do, I'd assume. Not having infinite power - not a good idea to turn on a big load like AC remotely anyway (not that I spend much time off my land as is). But I do need to monitor and control the solar system, the water collection/treatment/storage/delivery plumbing, and keep track of internal and external weather on campus (eg watch if pipes are going to freeze and preempt that if so).
I added in video and motion detection because it was easy and I get what amount to game pictures of the wildlife here as a bonus. I get audio announcements of important events off my background music system and if I want - I can send email to myself - all without leaving the LAN - or even having most of this (other than one raspi that serves as access point for the slave nodes and a web server) - visible even on my main LAN. I call it LAN of things, obviously.
The only real reason I see for being "out on the inet" is so some manufacturer can make money as a "man in the middle" - a widely discussed attack vector in security circles. And maybe charge rent, if not now, later after you're locked in. Imagine having to pay to have your own house work! (I suppose many less fortunate pay rent as is, but yet another one?). I see no point giving anyone else that kind of control over me.
I don't sell these, but some old documentation on how to do some parts yourself has been published. It's way not rocket surgery, mostly a ton of sysadmin on small computers - which I don't document, as it's all over the web as is.
I think of it as the "shoe shop ray" from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And in fact, it's the one thing the Russians are proven guilty of so far. But bear with me and try something yourself. With a raw machine (new MAC etc) go make a FB or google account, and do prog-leaning stuff on it. Make another on another machine and do con leaning stuff on it (words meanings have been distorted by political pricks, they are all neocon statists). Silo time! IT's amazing, the social media will put you into whatever echo chamber it thinks will hold your attention, and even if you pollute your lefty one with righty stuff - it'll just decide to feed you all controversy (and forget you like tech, science and so on).
I mean it - do it and don't take my word for it. It's not just foreign influence coming as payback for our previous crimes of that sort - we're doing it to ourselves to sell ads! I promise you'll have a whole new outlook after that experiment. Both sides are dirty as hell, and that's nothing new and we shouldn't have been tolerating it all along. But here we are, and now we have an amplifier for "divide and conquer".
William Binney's analysis showed the "hack" was copied at 22 megabytes a second. Far faster than any line from that server to a possible hacker, but right at USB stick speed. Assange has kinda hinted at Seth Rich as the source. I leave it to the interested reader to search those names for their credibility, story and possible motivations. DNC better have some real good 'splainin on tap here.
I live in conservative-land, and I observe that not even the most right-wing nutjobs or alt-rightest I know support Pai.
Not one, zero.
Maybe it's because long ago I stopped hanging with monopoly billionaires - who tend to simply buy what they want from either fake party - but I haven't heard one peep of support from any actual person (AC's not counted, could be telcos) for ANYTHING Pai has done.
It's kind of embarrassing when I talk to people overseas who assume, till you convince them, that Americans don't support most of what our MIC/Elite/State does. They're like, "why don't you take your country back, then?".
I'm not trying to be partisan here, more like the opposite - there's plenty of blame for dead innocents and bought law to go around.
"The deputy taking a position outside the Western side of Building 12 while shots rang out, "and he never went in" despite having a clear view of the entrance. Scott Peterson, was been suspended without pay pending an investigation, according to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel - however he has since resigned and retired from the department.""" (With FULL Pension)
Or according to this, don't even try to know, how often encryption gets in the way of actual investigations. They just insist they want a back door. They really do appear to think we are that dumb, and looking at social media, I'd have to agree, most are that dumb.
Don't worry, DOJ is still resisting plenty of FOIA requests on their illegal activities (many are admitted, just the details are missing). Partisanship is the wrong approach here. No political party is representing the interests of the citizens at this point. Now, if you're big pharma, the military industrial complex, a big social media outfit...and have plenty of lobby money, you get the best government money can buy - and they are ALL for sale. I can't really tell much difference between a clownish buffon and a more subtle murdering felon in re how they affect my life. They both want to bomb brown people, they both want big corps to get all the money, neither want my freedom, just their power and riches. All get rich in public service on fairly low paychecks. How is even an obviously dumb congressperson living in a 5 million dollar house, Maxine? This is not a party-line thing, they are for someone besides us - who they think of as cattle to be farmed.
"If we're so stupid that we can be manipulated on social media we're doomed."
We're doomed then. It isn't just foreign interference. I did a little test on social media. Create some accounts.
The look at some extreme (YMMV on what constitutes that) content from "either side" on one, the "other side" on the other one. You will then be flooded with confirmation bias for whatever you've just been characterized as by their "deep learning" analytics - and it's hard to flush out, extremely. This isn't done so much for politics, as it is for ad sales and eyeballs - as usual, and just like politics, following the money gets you closer to truth.
I did this as the partisanship that's turning up all over sickens me - friends can't agree to disagree anymore. Brother vs brother is rampant. It's like the shoeshop ray in Hitchhiker's guide is telling us all to hate one another, and because your guy is wrong, mine is right - which is obvious bullshit. Perhaps neither side is "right" or has anyone's interest at heart other than their own, which interest is of course, the money they get paid by lobbies.
The unthinking religion of partisanship on either "side" is destroying this country. If it's the Russians fault, bad on them - but how about Google, Facebook, Youtube, all advertisers and so on - who have a lot more money, and thus influence and power than a piddly trolling operation that was utterly outspent by either party...Occam's Razor, people. And it's not like our own government doesn't want to "control the narrative" either, and didn't even try to hide the initiative, started of course, while no one was watching... https://phys.org/news/2011-10-darpa-master-propaganda-narrative-networks.html And of course, it doesn't matter what party was in power at the time to the "true believers" - they give the one with their bias a free pass...
Too much hypocrisy for my taste. How about we come together and agree they're all against the little guy (eg anyone who can't afford to lobby), as they demonstrate daily?
One wonders if by stopping at the spokespuppet we followed far enough. It's become obvious that government is almost utterly compromised by money from big businesses. I can't think of a law or regulation made since I was born > 64 years ago that didn't somehow help the big guys/big IP portfolio at the expense of the entrepreneur. Now, end to end encryption has at least the possibility of locking out even the major data slurpers. They don't like that, they live on data for their marketing. Forcing them to have and store a key solves two issues for them - they can now peek (again) - and they get paid, inevitably, for doing it. Either out of taxes or just raising their prices. So, in the more obvious model, they use their influence with their .gov to make it so, or attempt to.
It's pretty obvious that even with the very powerful tools LEO already has - they haven't solved or prevented diddly in terms of terrorism, which is always their stated reason for this stuff. If they have, why the crickets? If their real reason is wanting to nip any serious dissent in the bud before things get organized, the whole point of doing so is that we wouldn't notice if things were nipped in the bud early enough "Earl was always a little off" and so on - and the crickets now make sense.
Hey, I can't remember when an administration didn't promise better infrastructure in the boonies for internet or whatever else was a concern, even before anyone cared about internet, and guess what? We still don't have diddly. Blaming decades of neglect on the current bunch of jerks implies time machine shenanigans. Get real. It's a problem, and your half of the fake divide in the uniparty isn't the answer.
Pretending it's one side's issue and the other side would solve it totally ignores the fact that this has been around through N different administrations...and isn't solved yet. Are you really that dumb, or just a useful idiot?
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced net neutrality legislation on Tuesday.
Now, I'm not going to claim this will actually help anything, like the loophole I mentioned above, the devil here will be in the details, and any bi-partisan effort will have bribable contributors sure to fill this or any other attempt full of holes, and since this will be legislation, it'll be a lot more locked in than what an FCC commissioner can manage.
Hate to break it to you guys, but simply agitating - keyboard wars, even bringing legal action isn't going to repeal the old golden rule - the gold rules. Trying to blame it on one team - red or blue, ignores the fact that they are all on the "gimme the green" team, and like Hitchhikers Guide mentions, just there to distract from the real power.
I wish it were otherwise, but after 60+ years of watching this circus slide down a slippery slope that began long ago, it's hard to keep believing.
Hey, the TLA's already decided on their own that they'd extend their program a few months on a technicality. There is no enforcement though congress doesn't agree to that. It's more and more obvious that one aspect of this data collection is to have the dirt on the people who sign the checks for these agencies - and not only are they the dirtiest among us, but also the only ones who really care what people think - as they are still somewhat bound by the results at the voting booth. The idea to blackmail the boss would have, and did, occur to even the most brain-dead beaurocrat. I don't know why it isn't obvious to everyone, even though it's slightly harder to notice "the dog who didn't bark". Name a case where these agencies didn't get 100% of what they wanted....now name any other outfit that always gets their way in the budget. Crickets, right?
My best guess is more like corrupt loose cannon. I know a lot of "conservatives" and monitor the "alt right" quite a lot as part of my financial dealings. Zero of them support Pai and his actions. Well, I should say "zero whose bread isn't buttered by the ISPs/telcos/cablecos". Most of the rest seem more like "cut this crap out, you're making us look bad" - and you can see it in some new attempts at legislating this power away from the FCC (which contain their own attempts at obfuscation and loopholing).
Kind of like if you trace climate change denial back - follow the money - other than the odd useful idiot - it always ends in a fossil fuel company providing the bucks for "some study". Forensic accounting is your friend if you want to know truth. The revolving door rewards are usually what happens in cases like this, with the benefit(?) that our laws don't handle "delayed bribery" very well at all.
Ah, the (dis)advantages of age. You evidently only go back as far as Bush (2?). I go back to just after Eisenhower. The America I grew up in would be ashamed of the one we have now, it's only gotten incrementally worse, like the boiled frog, since I was a kid. The idea that either political team or any one personality can fix what's wrong is utterly false, they all fail in one way or another, kind of ratcheting in the direction of "worse" in a divergent process. Government responds to the people degrading by degrading them more, and the loop is complete. We are now at full "don't get caught" instead of "don't do wrong" and it's happened over the timescale I've witnessed first hand. Fix the problem, fixing the blame doesn't really help, there's plenty go around anyway.
You are correct - they were very embarrassed, if not right then, later on when they did their homework and found out about my work in .gov and the top secret gold stars on my dossier. They must have spent in the 10's of thousands for that raid, and wound up with a couple joints charge (which then cost me $8k to defend - successfully, as we were able to prove various civil rights violations).
I told them about the energetics I was doing with the chemistry, and asked them to send BATFE to make sure we were all squared up...This surprised them, as I was supposed to be a meth cook, scared to death, and fer sure hiding something. So to ask for more of those fed guys to visit, while handing them a code to go look up, really set them back. This wouldn't have worked had I not stood my ground, been white, had employees present, and probably a host of other not-so-intangibles.
I should say, that after it all, we became more or less friends, or at least not enemies, and the BATFE guys turned out to be pretty cool, unlike other things you hear about it. Of course, they had already looked me up for real by then and kinda were in damage control mode by then.
The other funny thing is, they bring a local cop when they do this. This one was my friend - he and I had done all sorts of odd capers while he was growing up - he told the feds no way I was the guy they wanted, but..."We do not make mistakes". You called it right. Thank $DEITY for small towns where we all know each other, and no one really cuts the feds much slack.
Funny, I'm off-grid with a ton of solar panels, and yes, they mentioned that possibility, not knowing that it would have been the most expensive pot ever...their fantasies aren't reality.
A 5kw solar array wasn't cheap then or now. It only makes that for a few hours a day, not enough to grow dope. Further, in the rural area I live in, all the pot that's grown is pretty much in the huge forest edges...where sun is free and there's just too much ground for them to find it, pull it up, or bust someone. The big risk to a small time grower is hunters who don't mind bagging some herb along with whatever else.
Which has even crept into and taken over a few tech sites I used to inhabit frequently. I just quit going to a couple of them, even ones slanted in "my direction" as it got so tiresome - and anyone who "knows it all" via oversimplified stereotyping of "the other guy" doesn't know diddly. No truth to be found in that, and heck, I just wanted tech news, which last I heard is not particularly political (though politics does affect tech as displayed here, often enough from ignorance of the pols).
When some tech development is in the news and the comments are all "this red/blue teams fault" about OT stuff - I'm gone. If I try to say something *about tech* and it gets modded down because someone perceived it as political and not their flavor, I'm gone. No eyeballs from me if you can't keep to your mission. It's especially moronic to blame the current crowd for things that have been going on for decades in my 64 or so years of observations. Yeah, we have some problems, but gheesh...
Instead of trying to fix blame, why not try to fix the problems?
I've had the DEA come and "bust" the place because a cop saw a chemistry setup when they came to deal with another problem. As far as they were concerned, there's no legal use for chemistry at all. When we (I was running a software biz at the time) pointed out that no, we didn't make drugs, and were making more money programming than we would dealing with meth heads...they at first refused to believe us, then switched to "then you must be robbing banks over the internet" - this back in the days just before DHS and when even the local FBI was on dial-up.
It seems it is assumed that you wouldn't bother to learn anything unless it was going to be used badly. With the laziness I see around me, it might not be a stupid thing to think, but that doesn't include me!
Holy crap, I work with nuclear fusion in my lab! And a lot of other "things of interest" as well.
FWIW, one of those things sometimes IS energetics. The cookbook is often wrong, or was last time I saw it, and laughably wrong more often than not. When the FBI questioned me about that I told them to leave it on the market, as they they could ID teeny-bombers by the acid burns and missing body parts...
Really, it said use acid from a *dead* battery to boil pure for the sulfuric you need as part of a nitration process, and that you could then distill nitric with two beer bottles and duct tape over a campfire...Any real chemist is either LMAO or aghast.
Re: Re: Re: Saw it coming, rolled my own
Note I don't feel the least bit buried, as I'm not sucking data or selling anything at all. I never did do the FB thing as I kinda had my own anyway.
Re: Re: Saw it coming, rolled my own
Because I'm in Appalachia and not a leftie.
Marksmanship is what we do here in the mountains instead of golf...as any golf balls would wind up in the creek between the ridges no matter what.
It's something to do sometimes when I'm not doing fusion research or on the 23 mile round trip to the beer store.
Saw it coming, rolled my own
Not to brag of any special prescience, but this disaster was totally predictable given surrounding events (data slurping for cash, DDOSs and so on).
I developed my own homestead automation instead - it's not like a lot of the ideas aren't useful. But as I'm retired on an off-grid homestead I built...no need for the internet and its attack surface anyway - for that matter I skipped the whole smartphone thing - this area has only had coverage for the last 5 or so years anyway.
Survival is the oldest profession. If you don't - that other one that makes the claim wouldn't exist.
I have different challenges than most people do, I'd assume. Not having infinite power - not a good idea to turn on a big load like AC remotely anyway (not that I spend much time off my land as is). But I do need to monitor and control the solar system, the water collection/treatment/storage/delivery plumbing, and keep track of internal and external weather on campus (eg watch if pipes are going to freeze and preempt that if so).
I added in video and motion detection because it was easy and I get what amount to game pictures of the wildlife here as a bonus. I get audio announcements of important events off my background music system and if I want - I can send email to myself - all without leaving the LAN - or even having most of this (other than one raspi that serves as access point for the slave nodes and a web server) - visible even on my main LAN. I call it LAN of things, obviously.
The only real reason I see for being "out on the inet" is so some manufacturer can make money as a "man in the middle" - a widely discussed attack vector in security circles. And maybe charge rent, if not now, later after you're locked in. Imagine having to pay to have your own house work! (I suppose many less fortunate pay rent as is, but yet another one?). I see no point giving anyone else that kind of control over me.
I don't sell these, but some old documentation on how to do some parts yourself has been published. It's way not rocket surgery, mostly a ton of sysadmin on small computers - which I don't document, as it's all over the web as is.
http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=59&sid=65ae80d0c2bcbb16960f301772dfad08
Re: Re: Re: DNC lawsuit
I think of it as the "shoe shop ray" from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And in fact, it's the one thing the Russians are proven guilty of so far.
But bear with me and try something yourself. With a raw machine (new MAC etc) go make a FB or google account, and do prog-leaning stuff on it. Make another on another machine and do con leaning stuff on it (words meanings have been distorted by political pricks, they are all neocon statists).
Silo time! IT's amazing, the social media will put you into whatever echo chamber it thinks will hold your attention, and even if you pollute your lefty one with righty stuff - it'll just decide to feed you all controversy (and forget you like tech, science and so on).
I mean it - do it and don't take my word for it. It's not just foreign influence coming as payback for our previous crimes of that sort - we're doing it to ourselves to sell ads! I promise you'll have a whole new outlook after that experiment. Both sides are dirty as hell, and that's nothing new and we shouldn't have been tolerating it all along. But here we are, and now we have an amplifier for "divide and conquer".
https://youtu.be/RmIgJ64z6Y4?t=49m12s
Re: The further hole
William Binney's analysis showed the "hack" was copied at 22 megabytes a second. Far faster than any line from that server to a possible hacker, but right at USB stick speed. Assange has kinda hinted at Seth Rich as the source. I leave it to the interested reader to search those names for their credibility, story and possible motivations. DNC better have some real good 'splainin on tap here.
Re: Re: Re: Moral bankruptcy of Pai
You are unfortunately correct, Orbital.
I live in conservative-land, and I observe that not even the most right-wing nutjobs or alt-rightest I know support Pai.
Not one, zero.
Maybe it's because long ago I stopped hanging with monopoly billionaires - who tend to simply buy what they want from either fake party - but I haven't heard one peep of support from any actual person (AC's not counted, could be telcos) for ANYTHING Pai has done.
It's kind of embarrassing when I talk to people overseas who assume, till you convince them, that Americans don't support most of what our MIC/Elite/State does. They're like, "why don't you take your country back, then?".
I'm not trying to be partisan here, more like the opposite - there's plenty of blame for dead innocents and bought law to go around.
Unions...don't get me started. Look at this guy:
"The deputy taking a position outside the Western side of Building 12 while shots rang out, "and he never went in" despite having a clear view of the entrance.
Scott Peterson, was been suspended without pay pending an investigation, according to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel - however he has since resigned and retired from the department.""" (With FULL Pension)
There Are No Words For This... None...
but they don't say
Or according to this, don't even try to know, how often encryption gets in the way of actual investigations. They just insist they want a back door.
They really do appear to think we are that dumb, and looking at social media, I'd have to agree, most are that dumb.
Don't worry, DOJ is still resisting plenty of FOIA requests on their illegal activities (many are admitted, just the details are missing).
Partisanship is the wrong approach here. No political party is representing the interests of the citizens at this point.
Now, if you're big pharma, the military industrial complex, a big social media outfit...and have plenty of lobby money, you get the best government money can buy - and they are ALL for sale.
I can't really tell much difference between a clownish buffon and a more subtle murdering felon in re how they affect my life. They both want to bomb brown people, they both want big corps to get all the money, neither want my freedom, just their power and riches. All get rich in public service on fairly low paychecks. How is even an obviously dumb congressperson living in a 5 million dollar house, Maxine? This is not a party-line thing, they are for someone besides us - who they think of as cattle to be farmed.
"If we're so stupid that we can be manipulated on social media we're doomed."
We're doomed then. It isn't just foreign interference. I did a little test on social media. Create some accounts.
The look at some extreme (YMMV on what constitutes that) content from "either side" on one, the "other side" on the other one. You will then be flooded with confirmation bias for whatever you've just been characterized as by their "deep learning" analytics - and it's hard to flush out, extremely. This isn't done so much for politics, as it is for ad sales and eyeballs - as usual, and just like politics, following the money gets you closer to truth.
I did this as the partisanship that's turning up all over sickens me - friends can't agree to disagree anymore. Brother vs brother is rampant. It's like the shoeshop ray in Hitchhiker's guide is telling us all to hate one another, and because your guy is wrong, mine is right - which is obvious bullshit. Perhaps neither side is "right" or has anyone's interest at heart other than their own, which interest is of course, the money they get paid by lobbies.
The unthinking religion of partisanship on either "side" is destroying this country. If it's the Russians fault, bad on them - but how about Google, Facebook, Youtube, all advertisers and so on - who have a lot more money, and thus influence and power than a piddly trolling operation that was utterly outspent by either party...Occam's Razor, people. And it's not like our own government doesn't want to "control the narrative" either, and didn't even try to hide the initiative, started of course, while no one was watching...
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-darpa-master-propaganda-narrative-networks.html
And of course, it doesn't matter what party was in power at the time to the "true believers" - they give the one with their bias a free pass...
Too much hypocrisy for my taste. How about we come together and agree they're all against the little guy (eg anyone who can't afford to lobby), as they demonstrate daily?
Follow the money?
One wonders if by stopping at the spokespuppet we followed far enough. It's become obvious that government is almost utterly compromised by money from big businesses. I can't think of a law or regulation made since I was born > 64 years ago that didn't somehow help the big guys/big IP portfolio at the expense of the entrepreneur.
Now, end to end encryption has at least the possibility of locking out even the major data slurpers. They don't like that, they live on data for their marketing. Forcing them to have and store a key solves two issues for them - they can now peek (again) - and they get paid, inevitably, for doing it. Either out of taxes or just raising their prices. So, in the more obvious model, they use their influence with their .gov to make it so, or attempt to.
It's pretty obvious that even with the very powerful tools LEO already has - they haven't solved or prevented diddly in terms of terrorism, which is always their stated reason for this stuff. If they have, why the crickets? If their real reason is wanting to nip any serious dissent in the bud before things get organized, the whole point of doing so is that we wouldn't notice if things were nipped in the bud early enough "Earl was always a little off" and so on - and the crickets now make sense.
What's funny is I don't even own any tinfoil.
Partisan?
Hey, I can't remember when an administration didn't promise better infrastructure in the boonies for internet or whatever else was a concern, even before anyone cared about internet, and guess what? We still don't have diddly. Blaming decades of neglect on the current bunch of jerks implies time machine shenanigans. Get real. It's a problem, and your half of the fake divide in the uniparty isn't the answer.
Pretending it's one side's issue and the other side would solve it totally ignores the fact that this has been around through N different administrations...and isn't solved yet.
Are you really that dumb, or just a useful idiot?
See?
From slashdot.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced net neutrality legislation on Tuesday.
Now, I'm not going to claim this will actually help anything, like the loophole I mentioned above, the devil here will be in the details, and any bi-partisan effort will have bribable contributors sure to fill this or any other attempt full of holes, and since this will be legislation, it'll be a lot more locked in than what an FCC commissioner can manage.
Hate to break it to you guys, but simply agitating - keyboard wars, even bringing legal action isn't going to repeal the old golden rule - the gold rules. Trying to blame it on one team - red or blue, ignores the fact that they are all on the "gimme the green" team, and like Hitchhikers Guide mentions, just there to distract from the real power.
I wish it were otherwise, but after 60+ years of watching this circus slide down a slippery slope that began long ago, it's hard to keep believing.
Lawless Tyranny
Hey, the TLA's already decided on their own that they'd extend their program a few months on a technicality. There is no enforcement though congress doesn't agree to that.
It's more and more obvious that one aspect of this data collection is to have the dirt on the people who sign the checks for these agencies - and not only are they the dirtiest among us, but also the only ones who really care what people think - as they are still somewhat bound by the results at the voting booth.
The idea to blackmail the boss would have, and did, occur to even the most brain-dead beaurocrat. I don't know why it isn't obvious to everyone, even though it's slightly harder to notice "the dog who didn't bark". Name a case where these agencies didn't get 100% of what they wanted....now name any other outfit that always gets their way in the budget. Crickets, right?
Partisan?
My best guess is more like corrupt loose cannon. I know a lot of "conservatives" and monitor the "alt right" quite a lot as part of my financial dealings.
Zero of them support Pai and his actions. Well, I should say "zero whose bread isn't buttered by the ISPs/telcos/cablecos". Most of the rest seem more like "cut this crap out, you're making us look bad" - and you can see it in some new attempts at legislating this power away from the FCC (which contain their own attempts at obfuscation and loopholing).
Kind of like if you trace climate change denial back - follow the money - other than the odd useful idiot - it always ends in a fossil fuel company providing the bucks for "some study".
Forensic accounting is your friend if you want to know truth. The revolving door rewards are usually what happens in cases like this, with the benefit(?) that our laws don't handle "delayed bribery" very well at all.
Re: Trump's army now
Ah, the (dis)advantages of age. You evidently only go back as far as Bush (2?). I go back to just after Eisenhower. The America I grew up in would be ashamed of the one we have now, it's only gotten incrementally worse, like the boiled frog, since I was a kid. The idea that either political team or any one personality can fix what's wrong is utterly false, they all fail in one way or another, kind of ratcheting in the direction of "worse" in a divergent process. Government responds to the people degrading by degrading them more, and the loop is complete. We are now at full "don't get caught" instead of "don't do wrong" and it's happened over the timescale I've witnessed first hand.
Fix the problem, fixing the blame doesn't really help, there's plenty go around anyway.
Re: 'We at the DEA do not make mistakes. EVER.'
You are correct - they were very embarrassed, if not right then, later on when they did their homework and found out about my work in .gov and the top secret gold stars on my dossier. They must have spent in the 10's of thousands for that raid, and wound up with a couple joints charge (which then cost me $8k to defend - successfully, as we were able to prove various civil rights violations).
I told them about the energetics I was doing with the chemistry, and asked them to send BATFE to make sure we were all squared up...This surprised them, as I was supposed to be a meth cook, scared to death, and fer sure hiding something. So to ask for more of those fed guys to visit, while handing them a code to go look up, really set them back. This wouldn't have worked had I not stood my ground, been white, had employees present, and probably a host of other not-so-intangibles.
I should say, that after it all, we became more or less friends, or at least not enemies, and the BATFE guys turned out to be pretty cool, unlike other things you hear about it. Of course, they had already looked me up for real by then and kinda were in damage control mode by then.
The other funny thing is, they bring a local cop when they do this. This one was my friend - he and I had done all sorts of odd capers while he was growing up - he told the feds no way I was the guy they wanted, but..."We do not make mistakes". You called it right. Thank $DEITY for small towns where we all know each other, and no one really cuts the feds much slack.
Re: Re: Ability != Intent
Funny, I'm off-grid with a ton of solar panels, and yes, they mentioned that possibility, not knowing that it would have been the most expensive pot ever...their fantasies aren't reality.
A 5kw solar array wasn't cheap then or now. It only makes that for a few hours a day, not enough to grow dope.
Further, in the rural area I live in, all the pot that's grown is pretty much in the huge forest edges...where sun is free and there's just too much ground for them to find it, pull it up, or bust someone. The big risk to a small time grower is hunters who don't mind bagging some herb along with whatever else.
Tired of polarization/divide and conquer/identity politics
Which has even crept into and taken over a few tech sites I used to inhabit frequently. I just quit going to a couple of them, even ones slanted in "my direction" as it got so tiresome - and anyone who "knows it all" via oversimplified stereotyping of "the other guy" doesn't know diddly. No truth to be found in that, and heck, I just wanted tech news, which last I heard is not particularly political (though politics does affect tech as displayed here, often enough from ignorance of the pols).
When some tech development is in the news and the comments are all "this red/blue teams fault" about OT stuff - I'm gone. If I try to say something *about tech* and it gets modded down because someone perceived it as political and not their flavor, I'm gone. No eyeballs from me if you can't keep to your mission. It's especially moronic to blame the current crowd for things that have been going on for decades in my 64 or so years of observations. Yeah, we have some problems, but gheesh...
Instead of trying to fix blame, why not try to fix the problems?
Ability != Intent
I've had the DEA come and "bust" the place because a cop saw a chemistry setup when they came to deal with another problem. As far as they were concerned, there's no legal use for chemistry at all. When we (I was running a software biz at the time) pointed out that no, we didn't make drugs, and were making more money programming than we would dealing with meth heads...they at first refused to believe us, then switched to "then you must be robbing banks over the internet" - this back in the days just before DHS and when even the local FBI was on dial-up.
It seems it is assumed that you wouldn't bother to learn anything unless it was going to be used badly. With the laziness I see around me, it might not be a stupid thing to
think, but that doesn't include me!
Holy crap, I work with nuclear fusion in my lab!
And a lot of other "things of interest" as well.
FWIW, one of those things sometimes IS energetics. The cookbook is often wrong, or was last time I saw it, and laughably wrong more often than not. When the FBI questioned me about that I told them to leave it on the market, as they they could ID teeny-bombers by the acid burns and missing body parts...
Really, it said use acid from a *dead* battery to boil pure for the sulfuric you need as part of a nitration process, and that you could then distill nitric with two beer bottles and duct tape over a campfire...Any real chemist is either LMAO or aghast.