I returned to the United States in 2016, directly into the excessively long election season. I’ve managed to avoid listening to American politics for years, but the other day I was with some friends watching the 4th democratic debate between Hillary, Sanders and some random governor no one cares about. I’ve had friends constantly promoting Sanders, so I was curious if he was different in any meaningful way from the oligarchy I had grown up under. After watching the debates, I realized that Sanders is nothing new or special. He is a breed of the same war mongering that has been part of the American regime since before my birth.
American media has a plethora of films depicting authoritarian states, dystopian societies and Orwellian narratives. I remember when V for Vendetta was released to the theaters in 2005, many of my friends told me that I should really see it. I had read the graphic novel and found that the film held to the original spirit of the comic while relating to the relevant world of today. While it may seem like watching such films raises general awareness about the types of propaganda that influence us, I see it having a counter effect. Derek Sivers once did a short TED presentation on goals in which he said the following:
Jekyll is a powerful static website generator geared towards programmers or those with technical backgrounds. It also has support for automatically building SCSS. I wanted to use Jekyll with the Foundation CSS framework, but I found that most of the tutorials available were out of date, used older versions of Jekyll or Foundation, or recommended forking an existing Github repository. The following tutorial goes through the process of adding Foundation to a Jekyll website and having Jekyll automatically build all the necessary assets. It uses Jekyll 3.0.1 and Foundation 6, and may need to be adjusted for future versions.
E-mail is completely broken and unreliable thanks to big players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
Shortly after the NSA spying revelations, I decided to move off of Gmail and back onto my own e-mail server. It wasn’t for privacy, as e-mail is often transmitted plain-text and has no more security than a postcard, but just a general desire to distance myself from Google services. I had run an e-mail server in the past using Postfix and Courier-IMAP back around 2005 (as well as Amavis-new, Spamassassin and ClamAV for spam and viruses). When I attempted to setup an e-mail server in 2013, the stack was pretty much identical except Dovecot now replaces Courier and additional tools such as DKIM, DMARC and SPF are now necessary for outgoing e-mail validation. However the largest challenge I faced wasn’t from my own technology stack, but with my e-mails becoming unreliable against both Google’s and Microsoft’s over-aggressive spam filters.
The recent shootings and bombings in France have left over a hundred dead. This was immediately labeled as a terrorist attack by ever major news feed. Within less than a day, blame was attributed to ISIS and such evidence emerged as suicide bombers being found with passports on them. France declared a state of emergency and the world suddenly declared solidarity in a story that feels downright unbelievable, and may very well be.
Human beings tend attach themselves to relationships. We become loyal to our work places, schools, families, sports teams, religious institutions, political parties, favorite product brands and nations. More often than not, loyalty is one directional. Once loyalty is given, there is an implication of staying true to that person or idea, even in cases where rational decision making would say otherwise. Gaining loyalty based on some arbitrary societal vector can often lead to a means of control and even subjugation.
I’ve been writing a lot of Jekyll related posted lately, because I’ve recently switched all my websites over to Jekyll from Wordpress. My latest challenge has involved footnotes in excerpts. Kramdown, the default Markdown implementation in Jekyll, supports footnotes in Markdown, but they unfortunately show up when using post.excerpt inside Liquid templates. The following is a plug-in I wrote to strip footnotes, as well as the superscript links leading to them, for use on templates with post previews, such as an index page or RSS feed.
On November 4th, 2015, an Allied Services AN-12B cargo plane crashed while making a flight from Juba to Paloich. Police reported that 41 people were killed in the crash. I found it interesting that many news and media outlets mentioned it was a “Russian cargo plane” even though neither the transport company nor the countries it was flying between had anything to do with Russia. If a 737 crashes, news articles don’t immediately read that an American made jet crashed. If an Airbus crashes, news articles don’t mention a French made jet crashed. They cite the origin country of the airline. Then another plane incident occurred. Metrojet (Kogalymavia) flight 9268 crashes and the United States immediately blames it on an ISIS bombing, a claim Egypt says is premature. What we are seeing is propaganda in the making.
Do you have an old Wordpress blog? Are you migrating it to Jekyll? Tired of spam? Don’t want to moderate comments anymore, but you don’t want to lose all those comments from people who have contributed so far? The Jekyll-oldcomments gem is for you!
Sky over Amsterdam, The Netherlands - 30 June 2015
When I visited Amsterdam, I watched the sky fill with long streaks extending for hundreds of kilometers behind air traffic as they carried passengers to the furthers parts of the Earth. I had seen documentaries such as What in the World are they Spraying with interest and discernment. In my own research, I traveled the spectrum of belief and unbelief. I analyzed the arguments and came to my own conclusions. What bothered me most during this journey was the polarizing debates and ad-homonen arguments used to frame the people with beliefs on one side or the other, rather than addressing the facts. Terms like debunking serve no purpose except to discredit the intelligence of a person who makes an argument, simply because one believes he or she is wrong has a predisposition to one’s accepted view of what is true.
Newer