Well, when you have a major presidential candidate acting like a crazy person you wind up with feelings of being scared. I think those feelings may be justifiable. After all, during a speech over the prior weekend we had the ex-president and leader of the out-party loudly talking about elections that never happened, calling convicted felons patriots, and otherwise sounding like an escapee from a psychiatric care institution.

The local Republican Party picked up a bunch of new partisans in the primary election on Tuesday. That major presidential candidate got a relatively large amount of the vote. Quite a lot of people are drinking the kool-aid.

In times like this I recognize that my programming abilities are not up to snuff. I can handle LaTeX fairly decently. What I am looking to have done isn’t handled in LaTeX, though.

There exist scripts like rss2email to take the output of an RSS feed and convert it into e-mail messages to be plopped into your e-mail account. I found an rss2imap variant that somebody made in Haskell that simply plops things directly to the IMAP server for you to read.

What I am more interested in is having things archived. As we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign the likelihood of active information operations by adversarial powers is pretty much assured. I want something akin to rss2email or rss2imap that takes the item, converts its source page to WACZ format, and then includes that somewhere it can be accessed in a systematic fashion. For bonus points, I would definitely want something akin to El Paquete Semanal where a single WACZ file could be built per day containing all the observed RSS items seen that day with an appropriate index.

How would I do something like this? Ideally I would want the software to build data packages like that running at least on a VPS located outside the geographical boundaries of the United States. I would want to build multiple routes to access that VPS including NNCP and probably over the air too.

Why do something like this? The Steve Bannon strategy of flooding the zone with crap is going to be going into effect pretty soon. People are going to have a very hard time telling what is ral and what is not. All the generative artificial intelligence stuff out there is only going to accelerate the impact of the Bannon strategy. It’ll easily impact social cohesion in so many bad ways.

I guess I’ll need to look at hiring somebody when funds become freed up. That’ll be some day off in the future, alas.