An Introduction

The old blog is gone. These things happen. I wish they didn't.

This is the attempt at doing something different.

Saturday, November 16, 2024 (Overnight)

My passport arrived Friday. This is very much a good thing. This allows evacuation planning to proceed.

The clown car continues to fill up as the new administration continues to take form and shape. Frankly this is horrifying.

This weeks edition of The Gazette showed up late as it was in the mailbox Friday instead of Thursday. We're seeing the death of news play out before us here in Ashtabula County. The problem is that for the most part people don't care locally. Having a dearth of active news entities also corresponds to high voter turnout for Donald Trump and that hypothesis is born out here in Ashtabula County.

I'm not sure what all is coming. That simply seem to be dark clouds on the horizon. Optimism seems totally out of place at this time.

Friday, November 15, 2024

The nomination of RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services is quite dangerous. Will this impact the ability of providers to treat The Unmentionable Condition? Oh, more than likely. I can't see this guy allowing the Orphan Drug Act to properly operate let alone other resources in HHS of special interest to me.

We've progressed beyond the clown car to something more insidious. I'm not even sure what to term it. This is just bad overall.

The passport should be arriving soon. This helps move plans forward.

Is it time to cross the Rubicon? It seems so if they let this craziness proceed. I can't take bets on whether or not the badness will happen but right now this isn't making much sense.

Thursday, November 14, 2024

The appointments dribbling out from the apparent president-elect, Donald John Trump, have been truly frightening. I'm not quite sure where things are heading. It doesn't look like they're heading anywhere good.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024

Evening

No, I haven't been taking well the news of Donald Trump apparently winning the presidency. This is likely to lead to many, many problems. Contingency plans are now happening.

Overnight

Let's talk about the cyberpunk-style things I'm going to have to be doing now. There's so much work to be done to get ready. After all, there's risk that we're going to see Trump invoking 47 USC 706 to start shutting down communications. That statute can only be invoked during a state of war. Technically the country has been at war for 70 years as the Korean conflict has never ended. He has means of invoking that provision legitimately.

Things to consider as options in light of all the craziness potentially looming include but are not limited to:

  • Get a FreedomBox set up
  • Rig up something akin to a PirateBox in a strategic location
  • Set up a "captive portal" wireless access point
  • Start building scripting around NNCP

That's a limited initial list. There's likely plenty more to be done yet.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Overnight Hours

I think this might actually work. I have fontspec rigged with an appropriate set of fonts to make this look pretty. There is a stanza before the preamble to allow arara to trigger properly. I've got the directory structure laid out as logically as I can make it.

The next steps will be to get GitHub Actions in play to rebuild this whenever I commit new changes and stick the result in a GitHub Pages branch. There would be a decoy index.html file to hide that there is a continuously integrated PDF file that people could review. Making an updated RSS feed would be tricky, though. Eventually I would either figure that out or simply forego it.

Much to think about, I suppose. I can't ruminate on the election. I have to think about something else...

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Early Evening

Here we go again. Thanks to the blog having to be taken offline during the quiet period of the political season I am shifting to this. It isn't good to keep everything in my head. I have to write at least some of this down somewhere.

Yes, I am afraid of a Trump victory. The dude is following the Nazi playbook. I am frankly amazed that we may well see a killer like RFK Jr. be put into a role over health policy. Sweeping under the rug the amount of deaths he caused in Samoa during the measles crisis in 2019 does not make it okay to put him in charge of health policy in the United States of America now. For someone with a rare disease like PTEN Hamartoma Tumor Syndrome that could be quite complicating if that mean is put in charge of policy.

The passport renewal is in play. All I can do right now is wait. Once that is back I can look at bugging out. There does seem to be nowhere to realistically go, though.

Efforts are under way to build media acquisition channels in the event of him winning. The light of freedom has to stay on somehow. If I have to hide a satellite receiver somewhere to pick up Deutsche Welle and/or France 24 then that is what may well come.

I didn't want the crazy to come back yet here we are. People actually want this. Are these truly my people?

The Old Blogroll

This was the blogroll that existed in the old blog as of October 7, 2024. A rather non-comprehensive judgmental sampling of blogs and podcasts from both my feed reader tracking https://code.launchpad.net/~skellat/+git/FeedReadingFeeds and my podcast tracking monitor https://code.launchpad.net/~skellat/+git/Podcasting included but was not limited to:

Redacted List of Monitored Podcasts