JB's Place

The Words of Solon

In the ancient world, stories were told as parables and aphorisms. Whether or
not the subject matter was literally true, it was true in the eyes of wisdom,
and so was true nonetheless. In some ways, one could argue that these stories
were “truer than truth”. One such story concerns a King and a person who was
usually accorded the quality of wisdom–Solon. I will quote the story below:

“Well, my Athenian friend, I have heard a great deal about your wisdom, and how
widely you have travelled in the pursuit of knowledge. I cannot resist my
desire to ask you a question: who is the happiest man you have ever seen?”

King Croesus was already certain that he was in fact the happiest man in the
world, but wanted to enjoy the satisfaction of hearing his name parroted back
to him from such a venerated sage.

But Solon, who was not one for flattery, answered: “Tellus the Athenian.”

The king was quite taken aback and demanded to know how such a common man might
be considered the happiest of all.

Tellus, Solon replied, had lived in a city with a government that allowed him to
prosper and born fine sons, who had in turn given him many grandchildren who all
survived into youth. After enjoying a contented life, he fought with his
countrymen, bravely died on the battlefield while routing the enemy, and was
given the honor of a public funeral by his fellow Athenians.

Croesus was perplexed by this explanation but pushed on to inquire as to who the
next happiest man was, sure that if he wasn’t first, he had to be second.

But again Solon answered not with the king’s name, but with a pair of strapping
young Argives: Cleobis and Biton.

Known for their devotion to family and athletic prowess, when their mother
needed to be conveyed to the temple of Hera to celebrate the goddess’ festival,
but did not have any oxen to pull her there, these brothers harnessed themselves
to the incredibly heavy ox cart and dragged it over six miles with their mother
aboard. When they arrived at the temple, an assembled crowd congratulated the
young men on their astounding feat of strength, and complimented their mother on
raising such fine sons. In gratitude for bestowing such honor upon her, the
mother of these dutiful lads prayed to Hera to bestow upon them “the greatest
blessing that can befall mortal men.” After the sacrifices and feasting, the
young brothers laid down in the temple for a nap, and Hera granted their
mother’s prayer by allowing them to die in their sleep. “The Argives,” Solon
finished the tale, “considering them to be the best of men, had statues made of
them, which they sent to Delphi.”

Now King Croesus was livid. Three relative nobodies, three dead men were happier
than he was with his magnificent palace and an entire kingdom of his own to rule
over? Surely the old sage had lost his marbles. Croesus snapped at Solon:

“That’s all very well, my Athenian friend; but what of my own happiness? Is it
so utterly contemptible that you won’t even compare me with mere common folk
like those you have mentioned?”

Solon explained that while the rich did have two advantages over the poor – “the
means to bear calamity and satisfy their appetites” – they had no monopoly on
the things that were truly valuable in life: civic service, raising healthy
children, being self-sufficient, having a sound body, and honoring the gods and
one’s family. Plus, riches tend to create more issues for their bearers – more
money, more problems.

More importantly, Solon continued, if you live to be 70 years old, by the
ancient calendar you will experience 26,250 days of mortal life, “and not a
single one of them is like the next in what it brings.” In other words, just
because things are going swimmingly today, doesn’t mean you won’t be hit with a
calamity tomorrow. Thus a man who experiences good fortune can be called lucky,
Solon explained, but the label of happy must be held in reserve until it is seen
whether or not his good fortune lasts until his death.

“This is why,” Solon finally concludes to Croesus, “I cannot answer the question
you asked me until I know the manner of your death. Count no man happy until the
end is known.”

Croesus was now sure Solon was a fool, “for what could be more stupid” he
thought, than being told he must “look to the ‘end’ of everything, without
regard for present prosperity?” And so he dismissed the philosopher from his
court.

While the king quickly put Solon’s admonitions out of his mind, the truth of it
would soon be revealed to him in the most personal and painful way.

First, Croesus’ beloved son died in a hunting accident. Then, blinded by hubris
(excessive pride), he misinterpreted the counsel of the oracles at Delphi and
began an ill-advised attempt to conquer King Cyrus’ Persian Empire. As a result,
the Persians laid siege to his home city of Sardis, captured the humbled ruler,
and placed him in chains on top of a giant funeral pyre. As the flames began to
lick at his feet, Croesus cried out, “Oh Solon! Oh Solon! Oh Solon! Count no man
happy until the end is known!”

There are many ways to interpret this parable, but one thing that comes to attention here for me is the accounting of time. 26,250/70 = 375.
Hence, on average, we know that a solar year by the ancient calendar was equaling somewhere near 375 days per year. That means there are 10 extra days,
on average during the life of Croesus. 10 X 70 is then 700 days, which is nearly two years more than we would regard someone who was 70 by our accounting of time. So, we would
conclude that Solon might be telling us that Croesus, richest man in Lydia, was actually 72. This number comes up frequently, as there are 72 years
per one degree of precession on the Earth. This means that the Earth wobbles about and the background stars appear to change such that the pole star
itself eventually changes by one degree every 72 years. Approximately every 26,000 years, the pole star shifts into some other star at this rate of precession.

Do you think it is a coincidence, then, that in English there are 26 letters? There are also systems of thought that appertain to letters mapping to numbers, such as in
Hebrew Gematria, where 26 = to the sum of the letters of YHVH.

So, what does all this have to do with Croesus? Well, there are many people happy on the Earth with riches who may well die in a fire. If that is so,
then though they were very happy for a long time, dying in a fire is gonna leave an unpleasant mark on the experience. One simply cannot say that a life was
either good or bad until the end is known–and with our above understanding of time the end may be SOONER than we anticipated since the accounting
of time from an ancient perspective may be different. We are assuming many constants that may well change. A different take on accounting for time
according to Solon may be found here: Quantum Leap

Lincoln: Circa 2019

After what seems to be an unacceptably long time, I was finally able to finish the book on Lincoln that I got back in 2019 by Goodwin.
I was not sure where to post this review as in the past I have used Goodreads, but I a sick of everyone else owning the information I write, so I
figured that the best spot would be here on my website. I can always “syndicate” the content OUT from here if I feel like being especially social.
As I mentioned before, this blog is less social, and more “here is a microphone on a platform” oriented. Back to the book!

2019

My church took a trip to see the Lincoln museum in Springfield Illinois. This was in the deep beforetime of all the Covid nightmares which seems like quite
some time ago. The museum offered us the chance to join some sort of Lincoln Friends of the Museum club which they referred to as the Time Traveler’s
package or something like that. The idea was that you could come into the museum with special privileges since you were a time traveler and bring guests.
Neat gimmick, right? Right. So we joined, as a church. For joining, you got to pick from several items, and one of the items availabe was this book. I
therefore procured this book, and it got left in the back seat of my car up near the back window for about a year as everything went topsy-turvy with lockdowns
and what I would term “cluster fucks”.

Reflections

So, Lincoln kept staring at me from the reflection in the back window of my car and I kept thinking “Boy, I need to read that.” Between working on
some computer networking and doing some grounds keeping, though, it seemed I rarely got the chance to do any reading. When I finally DID get to start
reading it, 2020 was coming to a close and the fun of 2021 had begun.

What About The BOOK?

This book is well researched in the sense that it contains some interesting perspectives and source details on Lincoln. For instance, it mentions a barn
fire where Lincoln kept his horses in Washington, which is not a frequently mentioned matter. The characters are brought to life in a multidimensional way
such that their characters feel organic. We learn about the facets of the characters around Lincoln as well as those within the Lincoln family. Mary Lincoln
makes some appearances, but hers are fairly narrow in scope and do not seem to be able to avoid the standard interpretations of what Mrs. Lincoln was or
was not like. Mostly, the standard vituperative hell cat is present when it comes to her. Occasionally, the author says that perhaps her actions were
warranted given climate X.

What Lincoln Was Reading

What Lincoln was reading and why is often a topic of discussion as well within the book. Against the backdrop of Stanton, we learn just how pissed off
this made everyone because they regarded Lincoln’s sense of humor as being some impropriety to the post. Of course, had Lincoln been as grave as the
undertaker, it is likely they would have also found that objectionable since he would have been as humorousless as a stump. What you learn about the
history of the Civil War is that everyone is extremely opinionated about something, and someone else is to blame. The buck stops, of course, at Lincoln’s
desk for most of the stuff people wanted to complain about. First, we learn, Lincoln is not radical enough. Then, later, he is too radical. Still later,
he is too conservative. Later yet, he is not conservative enough. Mary Lincoln falls under a similar light. Everybody has some bitching to do, and of course,
everyone knows how to solve the problem except no one appears to be doing it EXCEPT Lincoln and that is only after wrestling with what is essentially the
entire nation.

Risks In Scholarship

Goodwin avoids taking any especially risky steps in her scholarship except addressing the ridiculouss claim that Lincoln was gay because he slept in the
same bed as Joshua Speed. Shocker, he was not gay. That is about as far as her risk taking from the standard Lincoln narrative goes. Why is that disappointing?
Well, I will tell you why.

Everybody Wanted Lincoln Dead

Everybody around Lincoln had a reason to want Lincoln dead since everyone saw him as an impediment or some chess piece to be overcome or used. However,
the guys responsible for the death of Lincoln are primarily two: His Secretary of War–that is to say Stanton, and his Vice President–that is to say Johnson.
There were plenty of others who were complicit in his murder such as some of the Radical Republicans. They all somewhat knew what was going to happen
at the theater that night, since nearly everyone refused to go sit in the box with the President and Mrs. Lincoln. Standard scholarship does not address
these matters because it paints the history of the US in a very, very distinctly different light from the story that is handed down. When you understand
Stanton was actively plotting the death of Lincoln so he could, in his mind, become President you understand why he was weeping so much after his death.
His own sin was before him. Likewise, you understand why Johnson seemed like some drunkard during his speech. He was drunk with the desire to become
President which he would later do.

But THE SOUTH!!!

Yeah yeah, the south had reason to want Lincoln dead, but Lincoln was literally wounded to death in the house of his supposed friends due to ambition
and envy. Then, the story was covered up. Goodwin does not get into any of these matters, but I cannot believe it was because she did not encounter
any of the evidence of these issues in her research. Rather, nobody wants to make movies about the truth as a general rule, because the truth makes
people squirm in their seats when they learn that all these “Fine Christian men” plotted a murder of the man who brought them through the most troubled
time the nation had then known. Booth, in the end, was just a patsy who thought everyone would love him for what he did. He did not think he would simply
be another pawn in the crimson red game of chess being played.

Still…

Still, even though Goodwin did not have the courage to go into the eye of the storm on these issues, that hardly makes her unique among Lincoln authors.
All the ones that DO go into these subjects seem to wind up marginalized. It is a little like the Russian Collusion narrative concerning Trump. Whatever
the truth of it is, you better not go near it because it is as radioactive as a subject matter as you can hope to find. Wouldn’t that normally make you
suspicious? Anytime there is something so touchy that just the mention of it makes people bristle, somebody, somewhere is trying to hide something.
If you do not believe me, just catch your children with the hands in the cookie jar.

When Murderers Get Along…

Murderers get along when they are facing a common foe. It was so with Lincoln and his Cabinet. When the danger has passed, though, that is when the “chickens
come home to roost”. Indeed, the chickens all plotted and schemed to get the war over with Lincoln at the head, and then everyone thought that they could
do the job of Reconstruction. Instead, they all caused a rift in the nation that still has not fully healed to this day. Great job, guys!

Do You Think It Is Any Different Today?

Do you think, today, that the world is any different? Everywhere things do not make sense, someone is hiding some motive for some reason. You cannot
swing a dead Talaco–ahem, I meant CAT, without hitting something that does not make sense. Conclusion? Some very ambitious people are still trying to
do the Lincoln act. Problem is, they, and by extension everyone else, is out of time for that.

Check Out The Book…

If you wanted detailed, cowardly scholarship that is not taking many risks. In other words, check it out if you want to basically understand a modern
academic understanding. Other than that, you would be better off reading something like Dark Union which is courageous enough to advance another sort of
thesis. Right or wrong, at least that work tries to explain something that has historically made little sense.

Github of Yore

Human beings are inherently social creatures, for better or worse. When they are NOT being social, it is most often the case that there was some reason
that led inexorably to their new default unsocial state. Github, then, the version-controlled codebase which is social, would seem to be the most
prosocial network ever invented for a usually inherently anti-social people–computer programmers.

My Github Entry

I came into Github back when their structure was officially this:

GitHub, Inc. was originally a flat organization with no middle managers; in other words, “everyone is a manager” (self-management).]
Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them (open allocation), but salaries were set by the chief executive.

In other words, I started participating lightly in that community back when people could work on what they wanted to. A few years later they would
trip over hosting something like 3 million files and then after that in 2018 Microsoft swooped in and bought them up.

I have had to rub elbows with people who have had to rub elbows with those in the upper echelons of Microsoft in the past. I did not like the company
in the 90’s, I and still don’t like it now. I don’t like it for precisely the reason they bought Github. They come in and have infinite amounts
of resources that they offer to buy the work of people who otherwise are going on about the business of coding, and they introduce the Golden Apple
of Discord right on into Paradise. When they get done, everybody who was formerly doing their own thing have turned into some sort of Microsoft Borg
collective. For this reason, I hate dealing with Microsoft and so I rarely use their products.

Linux and Microsoft

Lately, though, Linux and Microsoft had been in bed with one another in odd, disturbing ways. For Microsoft, the advantage is obvious–they want to find
some way to take all the “Free code” out there and look like they are being some kind of open source philanthropists because they “love the community”
so much. Linus helped develop git, which is the version control system implemented to help share code with others collaboratively.

My Latest Go

When Github announced that Microsoft was taking it over in 2018, I deleted all my files I had hosted there. I moved the bulk over to Gitlab. The
problem? Well, the Federation. The wha? Did you just move into some Star Trek domain, JB? I suppose so.

Github

Github is an excellent “walled garden” in the sense that it allows you to share code with most anyone in a way most people now understand. Gitlab is a
self-hosted alternative that is not as widely adopted, but also is not owned by Microsoft and is instead owned by CERN folks. Given the choice between
the makers of such items as the Atomic Bomb and the Internet and Microsoft, I will pick the former. That gives you an idea of how much I hate Microsoft.

Git Changes

It has been some time since I used Github, and had cause to today since I wanted to “Fork something” and then make a “pull request”. Basically this meant
I wanted to pull some code, branch it, change something about it, and then merge it back to where I got it from with the change included. Trouble is, I
don’t use Github for much of anything and instead tried to use Gitlab. Guess what? Gitlab and Github don’t “federate”. In other words, Github, in specific,
won’t let you play with other services. How Microsoft of them!

Github and Tokens

When I was younger, occasionally we would go to Show Biz Pizza place. There were lots of robots there that played various songs and many games that
would spit out tickets. To play the games, you had to have tokens. Kids enjoyed it, but it was pretty much an adult nightmare. When I got done with
Githubbing the stuff I needed to Github, it told me that my password technique that I use to access the service is only something old foggies do. Apparently
all the cool kids are moving on over into “tokens”. I have seen tokens in other applications, and I have also seen the use of SSH for all manner of
networking needs. So, I get it from a security perspective. On the other hand, I felt like I was back in Show Biz with the creepy robots and the
“fun” all the kids ought to be having in the ball pit. There was always something vaguely disturbing about the seeming natural combination of kids
and robots. Nowadays, with all the discussion concerning “sex robots” for human beings, I think that perhaps Show Biz might have had more sinister
undertones than any of us imagined back then.

Github and Changing Too Much Crap

Github and other technology places are changing things so frequently that it is hard to keep up. Most of this is in response to the web warfare raging,
but it is not as though Microsoft was not warned about this frequently and ignored it. One only need to recall the hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow
to remember how all the warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, Microsoft threw money at PR to say there was no problem, until it was undeniably in a
situation where the problem was all too evident. The web itself is an infrastructure that is not secure nor what is really designed to be. If you want to
fix that problem, it is going to take more than Show Biz pizza tokens.

In Summary

When I got done using Github, it reminded me a little of having gone to Show Biz as a kid–like I ate a little too much cheese pizza, played a few
too many games that cost too much–didn’t have enough tickets to get anything cool, and like I needed to watch my six at all times for any incoming
bogies. Oh, and let’s not forgot the feeling of seeing a bunch of robots on stage…

Once Upon A Time

When I was about 16, I was elected as the state representative of Kentucky to go to Whitewater, Wisconsin and discuss World Affairs. I was one of two people selected to go,
and it was, among other things, a very memorable experience. The time period of this journey was during the Clinton years, and there were two large things going on as far as
regional concerns/competitions at that time. One of those was the thing for which I mentioned I was chosen above, and the second thing we had going on was something called “APES”
which stood for “American Private Enterprise System” or something pretty close to it. Right around the time I was preparing to go on this trip, they had another conference for
APES where they sent who was the acting county attorney to come talk to us. He decided, among other things, to argue about the morality of the Clintons.

Whitewater, Clintons…

In Whitewater, we were also discussing the Clintons as the scandal involving President Clinton’s sexual proclivities was becoming known. The height of that scandal would come a few
years later, but people were already thinking about what was or was not impeachable with regard to the conduct of their Commander in Chief. I was not a Clinton fan then, nor am I
one now. Back then the hot topic issues concerned Free Trade and Constitutionality of what was or was not impeachable.

The Attorney Arrives

I remember the attorney arriving to speak with us, and he decided he would argue the sexual morality of the Clinton’s with us. While we were discussing the matter, I referred to the
definition of the Commander in Chief concerning having a “moral core”. In other words, it was widely known and also defined somewhat in the job description of the President of the
United States that he also had the duty to be the chief moral citizen of the country. In other words, he did not have to be perfect as a human being, but he ought to be trying
pretty hard to live the values of the United States in an ideal sense within his life.

The Rebuttal of Mr. Miller

Mr. Miller, which was his name, replied that he was “not aware of any moral clause” that concerned the morality of the Chief Magistrate of the land. Now, had we been in a court of law,
we know that a court would say ignorance is no excuse when it comes to legal matters, but Mr. Miller used this ignorance as his raison d’etre for dismissing my argument. If I had
given him commentary from sitting presidents, do you suppose it would have mattered? How about the Constitution and then the duties of the president as defined in that document?
Here is the role of “chief citizen” which encompasses having a “moral core” defined somewhat: https://8rolesofthepresident.weebly.com/chief-citizen.html
In other words, throwing a baseball is part of the “chief citizen” deal–along with the American ideals that go along with whatever that game represents.

Meanwhile In Whitewater

Arguments ensued about Adam Smith’s economic theories and whether “invisible hands” really governed the flow of things and was the right way for economy to be wrangled and how such
ideas did or did not work against matters like NAFTA. Since everyone there was relatively young and from across the entire world, most all arguments were being driven by ideals of
one kind or another. Most people of the Democratic mindset were quite concerned about the environment and saving the Earth from impending climate change. There were keystone speakers
who spoke on certain topics and some had interesting perspectives and some did not. Regardless, everyone was given a chance to speak. I left the event with a much larger view of the
world as I had met people from all nationalities and I understood something of the trouble the world has when it comes to governments. I did not feel, however, that we really accomplished
anything other than talking about variables that ultimately we would have no control over unless we somehow convinced other people who were not there, and did not have the frame of
reference, to listen to our experiences.

And It All Came Down To Mr. Miller

And the problem all ultimately came down to Mr. Miller. At a local level, attorneys are paid to win arguments. They should have a code of conduct and understand basic constitutional
premises, but they do not necessarily care to do that or have a need to do that since they are not there to represent the people. Though I had seen the national level, the local level,
it seemed to me, was the place to start making a difference.

Mr. Miller and His Personal Life

The little town I lived near at that point was always gossipy, and so there was some less than pleasant gossip concerning Mr. Miller and his own sexual inclinations. I would learn
about this matter later, and I suppose it would not matter to me except for the fact that was the very thing he was arguing. I am left to wonder then whether he had a vested interest?
Was he arguing the situation to help teach us, or to defend something about his own life that would threaten his position potentially?

Which Brings Us to a Central Point

What you choose to do with your sexual life is your own choice. However, when you are a public figure, when your own choices are interfering with world policy, I think you are an
unfit leader and constitutionally should not be allowed to continue in your position. At both points, there was a sexual discussion going on that should have had nothing to do with
political matters. Our leaders, one through being drunk on power and the attorney who I would say was drunk on winning the argument no matter how silly his objection to my argument
was, are really both microcosms of each other. I do not know whether they were also both Democrats, but that would be another layer to the analysis.

And The Biggest Point of All

If everyone with power is weaving a web to cover one another’s asses because they can’t control what they put their dicks in, they REALLY cannot represent the people of the United States
and this land. We would not put up with that behavior out of grade school children, so why do we rationalize it at national levels? I understand human beings are multifaceted and
sexual things happen, but in the friggin’ OVAL Office? Come on now. Ignorance of the law, Mr. Miller, of what the US Constitution does or does not say should have disqualified you
from teaching kids and practicing law.

Some Days It Feels Like You Wake Up In The Twilight Zone

Today, one of the first things brought to my attention are various articles about how HIPPA does not prevent a business from asking about your Covid vaccination.
The first thing that I thought about that was “Well, duh, HIPAA is mostly law about how hospitals and medical places have to handle your medical data.” In other words,
if you transfer medical information around, how are places that get that data to handle the info? The legislation says “Very carefully!”. So no, a business asking about
your vaccination status has nothing to do with a HIPAA violation, because you would be voluntarily giving them the info. They do not all ready have access to said info
from your healthcare provider. On the other hand, we can imagine a situation where it is a violation…hang on to your hats!

Excuse me, M’am, I Was Wondering If You Had An Abortion?

WHAT? HOLY SHIT! GET THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER! BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES! CALL IN THE NATIONAL GUARD AND TEN ATTORNEYS! HEADS WILL ROLL! HOW DARE YOU! 9th and 14th Amendments!

See what I did there? I simply changed the situation a little to discuss ABORTION–you know–killing the unborn because it is inconvenient in some way or another and with instant
clarity you know your rights. Hell, you even get a slogan “My Body, My Rights!” Really? So like, I don’t HAVE to get the shot? Do you HAVE to get an abortion?

But That’s NOT the Same!

Sure, you say that your decision not to murder your child is your choice and it does not affect anyone else, right? What about all the people the kid could have interacted with,
or societal things they might have done? You might just have deprived humanity of a Nobel prize winner, or a future politician who can help mend broken things. So, your abortion
and your choice does, in point of fact, have a consequence to me. Let us not mention the whole “murder, guilty feeling” you are going to have that will form the nexus of the rest
of your life experiences. In the same way, getting or not getting the vaccine affects others potentially. Why is that? Well, for certain abortion affects life in a way that you
cannot undo it. The vaccine, though we cannot get firm science saying it works, most affects whether or not YOU personally get COVID. Why just you? Because at a certain point, as
any doctor can tell you, herd immunity kicks in. If it does not kick in, something else is going on. So, at a certain saturation point of people with immunity which can came from
getting the vaccine or not–whether you get the vaccine or not matters only to your life. Your body, your choice! Don’t like that fact? Too bad. My body, my choice! Right?

A Little Education On the Amendments

The 14th Amendment disallows discrimination to classes of people in addition to outlawing slavery. We fought a whole war over it. You should look it up sometime. The Ninth Amendment
concerns protection of rights not otherwise written into the Bill of Rights. In other words, just because we could not think of every right does not therefore mean there are other
rights which the document does not protect. When you put these things together you get fun legal precedent such as “A woman (gender class 14th amendment) has the right (9th amendment)
to choose what she does with her body. (murdering the unborn). By the same magic we can say “People who do not want the vaccine (14th amendment) have the right (9th amendment) to
refuse it. But it affects other people who might die? Tough shit! Give me back the Nobel Prize winner who would have come up with the vaccine to this within the first week that you
aborted! Can’t do it? Well then, maybe this whole thing is more like a cultural kind of retribution from a power much greater than anyone here discussing things. Might oughta have
a chat with /him/her/it and see what /he/she/it thinks. I did not capitalize those pronouns you noticed, because for all I know you may pray to a shoe.

As An Aside

Usually plagues have a certain curve to them. They do not keep “changing form relentlessly” especially when the news cycle shifts into a story that might be more interesting than the plague.
If you are not yet smelling something rotten in Denmark, my guess is it is only because you all ready could not breathe.

Those That Build

Before I even begin writing this post, there is necessary background. It comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, the classics.

With this deep viewing follows a necessary axiom: Your users will never want nor be satisfied with what you build. Ever.
Here is the next one: You are going to rebuild a tower over and over and over and each time you are going to convince yourself the software or solution is better.
It isn’t.

What Do I Mean?

Recently, I was thinking about the internet and social interaction. Historically, I was thinking about how pubs were the places that people would go in order to interact with others.
When you were physically at the pub, it was understood that if you started talking in a manner that you should not, some guy might just beat the shit out of you. If he did not do that,
he might challenge you to a duel. Either way, what you spoke was potentially going to have consequences.

A 24hr Pub

The internet, I am afraid, has turned into a 24 hour pub. The problem with that is that not everyone knows they are on a pub or that they might have had too much to drink. Likewise,
they do not understand that what they are doing in the pub does not go away when you “leave the pub” for the simple reason that you can never leave the pub. Since you cannot see
your fellow pub patron, you do not necessarily know when you might have spoken in a way you should not have. Worse, it could be the case that because you cannot see the pub patron,
you do not really care how they react to anything you do or say. This could create some situations, clearly, that would have resulted in the old pub backdrop in getting your face
punched or your guts shot. In other words, there was some very established norms of behavior and solutions for those problems.

Enter the Indie Web

So something that seemed like it might solve some of these concerns are the ideas behind the Indie Web. The problem though, is I was all ready on the Indie Web in 2004. We had tracebacks,
callbacks, webmentions or whatever you want to call them. We also all had blogs. Then, smart phones came onto the scene, and the attention span shrank to the size of the flea. Blogs
basically dried up, along with all the blogrolls and so on that were present. The idea behind the Indie Web movement though, is that you have a definite identity that is yours. If you
start talking smack, I can hunt you down and see who or what you are talking to. You have skin in the social interaction game. That seems positive, right? Well of course it is. The problem,
though, as I mentioned, is that in 2004 we all ready went through all this. We built a tower, and it fell into the swamp. Before that, Geocities had us building a tower, and then that too
fell into the swamp. Then we started giving away all of our personal info to be social and that model is in the process of falling into the swamp.

I Do Not Want the Indie Web on This Blog

On this particular blog, I do not want the Indie Web. Why? Because it is not inherently social. If anything, it would be selectively social for comments I felt like advanced the conversation
of the material present. That, however, puts the onus on me to regulate those comments. I have enough to do in my life all ready. Figuring out whether some comment is genuine or from
a bonafide douche bag is down on my list of things I enjoy undertaking. yet, all this underscores something about the nature of this blog. This blog is more like a platform where someone
has a microphone. It is my identity, and you get to listen/read my speeches. I do not want nor care to hear what you have to say back in most cases unless you write me an email. Even then,
if it is not on the topic of the matters I am discussing, I do not care to receive your email.This is a marked difference to the Indie web idea of “Let’s all be in a community and read one
another’s stuff.” And yet, there are some things that are only germinated by such an interaction–like the American Revolution.

The Solution?

The internet began as a kind of academic web. The identity of the user base was pretty easy to understand. Nowadays, we are trying to have too many identities in too many different ways
that do not really an identity make. If you own a domain on a server, that is a unique identity. You have a website. Yet, with that identity, you might not want to be a part of the model
of interaction that has been promulgated. The only thing left at that juncture is to fragment your identity across different solutions–hence all the different social networks we have.

The Actual Solution?

We still have not totally integrated technology into our lives in a reasonable way. We use it in our careers and for social reasons, but we are simply not made to be in a pub that
is open 24 hours–let alone one with a perfect memory and no immediate accountability to quickly, and ironically, kick our asses or shoot our guts out. It gives us the illusion that
our words have no consequence. After all, if you get rid of some social contact that lives across the country, do you really miss them all that much? Not as much as if you saw them
each day. That, at its core, is why the internet is a weird thing to try to exist upon, and why the tower will always be rebuilt and fall into the swamp. The problem is in the wetware,
not the software.

A Podcast On A Previous Domain

In about 2015/2016, my wife and I conceived of an idea to have an online podcast show. We decided to call it Nearly Sacred. As I mentioned on another post on this site, that website was attacked and then the domain was stolen. Keep in mind, this happened before Trump and de-platforming had become a common occurrence.

The podcast discussed sacred matters such as things hidden and plain sight as well as the daily news and speculated on whether something may or may not be a conspiracy theory. Answer: A group of people did conspire to take down the podcast and to steal the domain. As the company who wound up with the domain’s founder says–he was just a greedy guy who liked money. So, evidently, somehow, someway, our podcast must have been threatening someone’s idea of money–or else they were trying to keep us from monetizing our content.

Later, Our Store Also Faced This

Later on our brick and mortar store also faced the same process. Local police and law enforcement along with government were useless. Actual threats were made. What is your recourse when the legal avenues that are supposed to work for enforcement are lackadaisical? Same thing with government institutions.

Society Sometimes Goes Crazy For Awhile

History is replete with examples of society periodically losing its mind. So, the natural thing to do is to get another website and start over. The problem is, though, if something is rotten at the level of the Domain, you cannot start over since censorship inevitably comes through another means. The web is supposed to enable everyone to speak, but what about when it does not, where do you go?

Well, You Can Go Decentralized, Sorta

So this site along with many of my other sites is decentralized. It is easy to push and pull the code and the only expense I have for it is strictly the domain name itself. If the domain name goes down for some reason, I just link it on up to some other form of domain name. The problem with this is that many places that help serve decentralized sites may not be so decentralized. Github, for instance, is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft is not known for its support of freedom. The bigger issue even before all that is you need a connection and some place that provides internet service.

The Web Was Supposed to be About Freedom of Information

The web was supposed to be about freedom of information and FREEDOM from tyranny. The same thing was true with the Declaration of Independence. Other documents that have something like that in mind might be the Covenant in the Bible. This new world we are inhabiting is allowing the technology to “wag the dog”. There are places like IPFS out there, but “normal” people cannot use those places. There are cryptocurrencies out there, but “normal” people struggle to understand the vocabulary.

I Finally Built A New Domain

After all of the above trouble, I was able to eventually build a new website domain. The trouble with getting there though, was immense. First I tried Heroku, and it promised a free domain but it proved very difficult to point any other domain at it without paying additional fees. Then, it seemed it would work if I had the latest “Flat DNS Alias” record, but then it did not after changing name registrars. In essence, there was a lot of “being run around” for something very straight forward. Keep in mind, my degree is in IT and if I am having trouble, you better bet your ass someone else who does not have a degree in IT would have serious difficulty.

Ultimately…

Ultimately I went with a hosted platform that I installed things to, but even there there were several glitches. I really just wanted to host my stuff on my own webserver at home, but the ISP I use made that impossible by their agreements and crippling the router used.

We Have A Serious Free Speech Problem…

I have always been told that we are free to disagree with people, but the weight of the arguments should help us decide the truth. What we are not supposed to do is “silence people” even those with whom we disagree. If we are going to start doing that, then where do we stop silencing people? What a boring world that would be–where everyone agrees with you or is abducted from their home in the middle of the night because they do not. That is not a way to build consensus. It is not even American. Maybe Soviet. Not American. The people who do this are traitors and should be treated as so and deported from the United States to some other regime that their actions might gain them favor. If we do not do this, how is anybody ever supposed to build anything to have a life? If I can come in and knock down everything you do and then “shut you up” by censoring all of your means of communication and then further not having any law enforcement do anything about any of it, then what good are rights? Answer: They are useless. I do not care what rights you fought for. If this fundamental right is gone, none of the rest matter.

Learning IT

My suggestion is to learn a basic form of guerrilla IT. What would you do if you were in a Third World Shit Hole where some dictator is coming in targeting the local population? How would your infrastructure work then? You can use the established channels, but have these other means of broadcast in mind. You never know when your life could suddenly be ruined because you have run afoul of the thought-police. Of course, they also never known when their time is up…

Open Source Astrology Software

I have, in studying the realms of astrology, come across different programs or had cause to use one more so than another. I have always felt since the universe gives you your chart
for free, the basic information ought to be available for free. Analysis, of course, requires expertise and experience. Such a thing is something that does not come for free since such a
skill set is acquired at the expense of time.

Time Is Money

Astrology is quite literally a reckoning of time. The orbit of the planets dance in predictable way. These dances form cycles and patterns that in turn can be helpful in understanding the nature of the life
of the person who has the chart in question. Many people read these patterns with various success and multi-faceted intent. My specialty appertains more to soul evolution. It is something I have developed
in the over fifteen years I have read charts.

Tools I Use

Fist of all, I do not tend to use windows for much of anything. I have, in the past, used Solar Fire on Windows XP/7. Certainly, it is a great capable software, but it also comes at quite a high price tag. Since I rely more on Linux types of OS’s,
I am interested in software that comes for free with the open source movement. For that, it narrows the field to Openastro. Openastro does not build on current Ubuntu distros well as of this writing. On the other hand, Arch Linux distros run
Openastro quite well out of the AUR user repos. The issue I ran into that apparently someone resolved in the AUR concerned library versions in the tarball source files when I tried to run the software on Ubuntu. If you are on Arch, install an AUR helper like yay. You
do that by typing pacman -S yay or something close to it. After you get yay installed, then simply run yay -S openastro and you are off to the races. The nice thing about yay is that it takes care of all of the package dependencies of Openastro. No downloading of
Ephemerides and so on for you! That’s for Schmucks!

How I Use Openastro

I use Openastro mainly for Natal charts although there are many other options present. Certainly there are not as many options as SolarFire, but what do you expect for free? If you have 90% of the functionality and zero the cost, that sounds like a pretty good deal
to me.

The Other Thing I Use

Now we move on to the other thing I use. Most of the rest of the Linux tools out there for astrology have not stuck with me. However, using wine as an emulator for Astrolog I can get any other functionality I might need. Astrolog has
many fixed stars that it will display. It is not a Linux native application, though, which ideologically somewhat diminishes it. Still, for free, this thing can do some pretty amazing things some of which is not necessarily in commercial level software. With these two
basic tools and an Arch linux distro, I can get by and get the majority of anything I might want to get done for free.

Free Ain’t Free

Of course, I all ready said time is money. Hence, people working on this software are investing time. If you want them to continue to do that, you should give them something to show you value that time–and not “less” because it is free. Do you want a world
where people only pay more because everyone demands at least $400 for their skill set? Why not simply get into a Mexican standoff and point gun at each other and have an auction for who will get to fire their bullet? Right. So value the free stuff! Help the labor of loves out!

The Web In The Beforetime

In the later 90’s, the web was a place where people created things. There were no firm rules or search engine rankings or Twitter identities to incorporate. Rather, there were people making and creating and writing about matters they loved. There was no expectation for any of those creations to “do anything” and yet the result was that much of what was created was a remarkable well of knowledge from which one could find all manner of facts and inspiration. Nobody was especially concerned about monetizing their website since monetizing a website did not really exist.

Corporations

Then, paradise was rudely interrupted by corporations. Most of these corporations were concerned with how to monetize the internet to make money as corporations tend to do. Gradually, the hobbyist type sites were eliminated because they were no longer profitable to host. All of this was akin to a flower garden being destroyed so that a new parking lot could be put in its place. Passionate people making things and exploring and compiling were becoming rarer. One blockage to that process concerned that one gradually needed to be not only able to create in the sense of writing, but also one needed to understand something about coding and web standards. Gradually, the idea that one should code if they wanted to say anything at all became the new paradigm. Of course, this misses the point of technology serving human beings and instead makes human beings serve technology. An antecedent was established perhaps in the industrial revolution. As opposed to making factories to serve people, people were turned more into machines to serve factories.

But Wait, It Gets Worse And There Is More

More recently, we have not only decided people need to be able to code, but they also better be especially politically aware of the climate at all times. In particular, it is not a good idea to be straight, white, male, or Christian or have some other specific spiritual faith that is “conservative”. If you happen to have an off day and your tweet can be used for social justice, get ready for a wild ride. Now the internet has become a tool of “gotchas”. If you do not have a social media profile, maybe you have something to hide so you should not be hired. By the way, have you thought about money in the past three seconds? You better answer your email and make sure you field all calls because you no longer have an excuse of having been away from a phone.

On Some Level, We Have All Consented to this Dystopian World

Deep inside all of us, we somehow think this is right or normal human behavior. Actually no, no we do not. However, we are willing to put up with it and then wonder why we feel lifeless. So here is a confession–I am one of the few people in technology who can say I liked Macromedia Flash. No, I am not talking about the plugin and I am certainly not talking about the security features. What I am talking about is the ability for someone with some artistic ability to come into some software and make something. Flash was especially good for this. Indeed, there was programming language to be had behind its interface, but one did not necessarily have to delve deeply into that unless one wished to. Instead, one could “play around” with Flash and then see if learning the language was something that added to that play or not. Now that Flash is dead, everyone seems to think that we have progressed in security and the web. From the standpoint of code, sure. From the standpoint of human beings using tools to be creative, no. Rather, it is a step backwards.

Fancy Metaphors

I have been around the computer scene long enough to see all kinds of buzz words come and go. The bottom line, though, is that the concrete metaphors tend to stick and the abstract ones tend to go by the wayside. There are exceptions to this rule. Hypercard, for instance, was a technology that allowed common people to understand how to put together presentations and basic software. It got axed, though, ultimately because a select group of people thought that it was too messy from a programming standpoint. So, why could not people who want to use these technologies be given some VM area of the machine to use them if they are security risks where there are basically built-in firewalls or firejails? The code might not need to be fixed in the sense that the interface is enjoyable to use. Maybe instead we need to think about how to make a walled garden around “messy apps” so people who are creative can use tools they understand.

All Of This Pertains to Starting New things

Why? Well, because when you start new things, you often ask yourself questions like how it will make money. The funny thing about starting new things is that questions like that tend to kill them process before it begins. You do not make things to make money necessarily. You make things because on some level you enjoy the process of creating things. You hold a job that hopefully allows you some in between of doing a skill that you are good at and also supports you financially. If your creation suddenly takes off, that is always a bonus. Odds are, though, if you find it fun and valuable, somebody else somewhere does as well. Whether or not they will reward you with actually units of exchange or whether they simply want to share in the pleasure of the thing, though, is a different matter with societal scope beyond the all ready long piece.

Back To Stuff That Is Sorta fun

So, I am going to personally go back to the Hypercards and Flashes and Visual Basics of the world. I do not care if is sloppy or encourages bad programming habits. I do not care of some arbitrary code aesthetic is violated either. What I do care about are the simple joys that some of these interfaces bring. After all, a thing does not have to be perfect in order to be a fun creation. Computers somewhere along the way have become about endless work and money. Of course, that was not at all about how they started, so how do we account for winding up in this digital wasteland?

Is It Flattery When People Steal Your Stuff?

More than a few times in my life, I have been stolen from. The usual remedy for when people steal from you is to take them to court. Of course, that assumes you want to pay money for attorneys and court
fees. It likewise assumes you believe the court is or will be just. I stopped making that assumption long ago in the case of courts sanctioned by men. The reason is fairly simple. The incentive to lie is
high for many involved. Why? Because money tends to follow lies. It often does not follow truth.

Some time in 2014, my wife and I conceived of the idea of having a podcast. The domain we requisitioned for this podcast was nearlysacred.com. You probably guessed that was the name on the basis of the
large screen capture provided. Here is a wayback link from 2016. The place I purchased the domain from was Hostgator.

Website Gets Hosed

Sometime around 2017 or the end of 2016, our website which at the time used Wordpress, was Denial of Service attacked. This was the tip of the spear concerning other attacks both digital and otherwise
later. The attack also took the time to inject some unwanted code into the website with the idea of leaving some trojans behind. I simply deleted the site. No biggie. It was backed up anyway. I decided
after changing my email and other accounts around as a precaution that I needed to change web hosting providers as well. The only complication there was the domain and that should be easy enough.

Old Email

Problem was, my old email was listed as the contact, and the purchasing card for the website domain was entangled with an old account whose card credentials did not belong to me. No biggie there either. I
ought to be able to prove I am who I say I am, since this is the digital age. We all have digital footprints the size of entire states. Hostgator, though, refused to accept any specific proof of who I said
I was. After trying with tech support over the time of probably around three months, I decided since it was close to renewal time on the domain that I would simply have to settle for renewing the domain
and then putting in my updated credentials. Hostgator had, apparently, stringent security which should be a good thing. I could not fault them for that entirely, although it seemed a tad unreasonable
given all the documents I had provided proving that I was who I said I was.

Domain Is Gone

When renewal rolls around, the option to renew the domain through re-upping it does not appear. In fact, the domain would not be available until 2020 and if I wanted it before then it had an asking price
of about 2,000 bucks. Since I purchased the domain for around 15, I was somewhat flattered that it was that valuable, but also annoyed that someone had taken something that belonged to me and was now
essentially ransoming my property. I strongly suspected that Hostgator had not allowed me to prove who I said I was because they had some agreement with agencies such as these. Think about it, you are
a company and you invest a lot of time on your web presence and suddenly you cannot get your domain due to changes that are company based–a fairly common occurrence. If you refuse to accept any proof
of someone’s identity, then you have a real interesting scenario open to you where you can then ditch the domain to shady Gus and then ask for thousands of dollars. Maybe Gus greases your palm in return.

To Today

As you can see from my screen capture, the domain is still owned by someone else, but the interesting thing is that this domain registrar claims to have owned it since 2015. Really? I think they are
trying to re-write history. The company that bought the domain has an illustrative quote from the owner of the company:

“I’m just really greedy,” said Mann, a man no one would describe as modest. “I want to own the world.”

I guess at least the guy is honest? Here is a link to an article discussing him.
And here is a link to the company he founded.

So I guess the business model is to lie and manipulate and steal things other people build into something valuable and use Hostgator as a sort of “fence”. The only way I can see this situation being
other than this is if Hostgator uses this company for their domain registration, but if they do, why oh why would they want to? Are they in some domain name mafia together?

In the end, I suppose it does not really matter in the sense that I have a new domain for our podcast. It is just interesting to see how business is done. The new domain, if you are interested, is at
nearlysacred.us.