Politics

NPR

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A hacker bought a voting machine on eBay. Michigan officials are now investigating : NPR

For those not in the know, Hursti said it sounds shocking to hear that voting machines can be bought and sold for little money.

"People think it's a big deal but it happens all the time. Most of the time the seller is a government, a county, or it is electric recycling. ... And it is a good thing because hackers are a resource to make things safer."

Hackers like him, he said, are not interested in weaponizing the weaknesses they find. "The reason you pop open the machine is to learn the vulnerabilities" of each machine, in order to safeguard democracy, he added.

And there are plenty of other machines to tinker with, while he waits for the Michigan investigation to unfold.

"I bought two others last month, so I'll get started on those," he said.

This article just makes me cynical -- why election official so worried about people getting their hands on scrapped voting machines if they aren't rigged or terribly insecure? While there are plenty of legal ways that elections are rigged, such as voting laws and gerrymandering or simply stuffing political candidate's favorited groups coffers full of public cash. I tend to think lawful corruption and lawful ways of stealing elections is much more common illegal means, but who knows, this just makes me suspicious.

I feel like I let the year slide between my fingers 🖐️

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I feel like I let the year slide between my fingers 🖐️

It’s been a tough year. Inflation and high gas prices have taken a bite out of my budget – the things I spend the most on for my trips, gasoline and food have gone up dramatically. Work has been busy, remote work has gone away and I don’t like to battle traffic to head up north and set up camp after dark on Friday evenings. My truck is getting old and more mechanically dubious with bigger repair bills, jacked up by inflation.

Part of the problem is its getting harder and harder to find novel, memorable things to do close to home. I’ve done a lot and seen a lot over the years and while new, memorable things make the time more worthwhile, they are harder to find during these times.

At this same time I’m trying to cut expenses to address inflation and the sometimes sluggish growth of the market these days. The flip side is buying new investments is cheaper due to the down markets and because I’m making really good money, relatively speaking at work. I’m well aware of the benefits of compounding over time.

Too often this year gone by I’ve taken the easy way out, the low stress, low planning way. The free walk to the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center or the Nature Bus to Thacher Park. Or when I do trips, I stick with the most familiar route that requires little planning. I’ve done little to find new paths, just instead staying the course, working towards a better future.

I have made getting my steps in and learning R programming and geostatics a major part of my learning experience this past year. I’ve tried to advance my knowledge about computer programming in a wide variety of languages and advanced techniques. Certainly having YouTube on my phone has made it easier to advance such things. My knowledge of R programming has made a lot of complicated tasks easier both at work and for map making and analysis for the blog.

I probably should have done a lot more during the summer that was. But I was busy and I’ve not transitioned as well as I would have hoped back to working downtown with the lack of flexibility of remote work from camp and the Adirondacks. The ailing truck has become more of an issue but the truth is lately I’m just so damn busy and when I have free time I like to relax and not rush places.

An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where

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Exclusive: An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where

On Monday at about 10 a.m. EST, two dozen FBI agents and technicians showed up at Donald Trump's Florida home to execute a search warrant to obtain any government-owned documents that might be in the possession of Trump but are required to be delivered to the Archives under the provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.)

The act establishes that presidential records are the property of the U.S. government and not a president's private property. Put in place after Watergate to avoid the abuses of the Nixon administration, the law imposes strict penalties for failure to comply. "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined" $2,000, up to three years in prison or "shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."

Indictments from the January 6th Uprising

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Indictments from the January 6th Uprising

The GW Program on Extremism has been tracking court cases from the January 6th Uprising where angry pro-Trump protestors overwhelmed the US Capitol Police, swarming the building, damaging property and leading to heart attacks and other injuries of government workers ill prepared for such a large angry crowd. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this data and make a random dot-plot map of the indictments to see where the criminal cases were, and provide an interesting visual perspective on the wide-spread participants in the protest from across the nation.

You can get the source data here: https://extremism.gwu.edu/Capitol-Hill-Cases

To be clear, Donald John Trump is one of our nation's biggest jerks, and he got a lot of ordinary, often working-class people in trouble with the law over his asinine protest, over the election he lost, mainly due to his incompetent handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic that lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying and millions getting sick. Competence matters in our elected officials, especially our President, and I can't imagine Joe Biden would ever get such an angry mob of protestors amped up to the point where they destroyed property or cause personal or other injury. Protests are an important part of democracy, but they shouldn't result in protestors getting injured, arrested, prosecuted -- nor should they lead to property damage or injury and death to the government workers.