A story of hackers and metal:

"In the 80s, BBSes were the most important thing to the hacker world. They were where people met, talked, exchanged information," said legendary hacker Erik Bloodaxe, whose exploits with the hacker group Legion of Doom stirred many imaginations back in the day. "They were the central meeting places where you could find those people who actually cared about the same things you cared about."

Bloodaxe would know. In addition to being "the best hacker I ever met," according to Loyd Blankenship, the technologist and hacker who wrote "The Hacker's Manifesto" that was later quoted in the cyberpunk-slash-teen drama Hackers, Bloodaxe edited one of the first hacker publications, Phrack. Phrack -- named for a combination of the terms "phreak" and "hack" referring to phone and computer exploitation, respectively -- and is an expert at finding information. Especially hidden information, or data that is marginalized because it does not comport to society's view of itself.

I should call these posts "the gateway to Hell" because I end up flirting with the most dangerous issues of our time. The conflict is where the growth is, I guess. I can feel the flames.

Tech is... boring. Sometime around Y2K the takeover by the same people who would have been eyeless MBAs in the 1980s began, and now Google and social media preside over a world that is basically as limited as 1980s four-channel television.

Tech is broke because it has not invented anything new since that time, only refinements of the same, and broken because it has no plan for innovation. Tech is now a jobs program for mediocrities instead of the Wild West that attracted me back in the day.

Science is under threat, but not from where you expect. The federal funding thing will blow over because private business will step up, especially since R&D is deductible. If you pay out the amount of your expected taxes in R&D each year, you will pay zero taxes. That's a non-issue.

No, science is dying from what killed academia, careerism. You must publish to get noticed, and you need some attention-getting radical topic. So you write about how the treatment of bugs in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works is a metaphor for sexism and make a broad conclusion about transgenderism being the ultimate fulfillment of feminism in a Marxist quantum mechanics view. It's buzzword gibberish but you get that full professorship. Now imagine millions of people doing the same, and you have a gibberish engine. The same is now true of science.

There's good happening in tech and science, but I tend to post science news because it is less stale than tech at this point, and I go for all that solid nerd shit. I like creative and realistic innovation like the MIT AIDS vax:

Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it's built on components already known to medicine.

Uses known components, combines them advantageously, and works by training the immune system in the natural way... this is well-done science. At this point, that interests me more than the latest frameworks, AIs, or Twitter-enabled fridges.

The only people I know who camp out on social media these days are Boomers looking for mutual validation of their illusions, whether of the radical Christian or radical Leftist variety.

This creates a situation where censorship is normalized, leading to absurd results:

âoeHello Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,â Vance wrote. âoeSo I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.â

The same crisis has hit the Fediverse/Mastodon, which has become a little hugbox and echo chamber for people who hate anything further Right-wing than Bernie Sanders, prompting a rise of free speech alternatives.

From a post that was downvoted by the usual neurotics, bigots, and spiteful mutants:

Over the past couple decades, as people warned, our security services have turned from defending against foreign threats to enforcing false unity through government censorship [censorship...omplex.org] implemented by private firms:

Governments of democracies have moved from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and de-platforming ordinary citizens and public figures they donâ(TM)t like. In the US, the Censorship Industrial Complex is funded by billions of taxpayer dollars, and is using direct coercion along with the most sophisticated AI tools to manipulate people, label social media posts, and discredit factual information. Just because they donâ(TM)t agree with them. Governments around the globe are attacking the free speech of its citizens. From Ireland to Germany, Canada to Mexico, laws are being passed that are stifling free speech in ways that would make the East German secret police proud. This complex is a network of government agencies, academic institutions, and NGOs that are censoring ordinary citizens on a whole host of issues, all without their knowledge.

This involved a variety of Soviet-style methods like the use of the term disinformation [house.gov] to identify what must be censored:

âoeDisinformationâ think tanks and âoeexperts,â government task forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat the alleged rise in alleged mis- and disinformation. As the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have shown previously, these efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly mutated to include domesticâ"that is, Americanâ"speech.

Not only was the censorship-industrial complex [house.gov] active in the US, but in the UK:

The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

Much of what we know was filtered by censors at Reddit, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other privatized arms of the government, hence the name "censorship-industrial complex":

Enter the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of âoedisinformationâ academics led by Stanford Universityâ(TM)s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americansâ(TM) online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Created in the summer of 2020 âoeat the requestâ of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),3 the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.

With government as a silent partner, many tech firms displaced others [house.gov]:

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.

So not only did this distort the news and information people could receive, but it also distorted the markets. Some of the journalists investigating it opined that the censorship-industrial complex is merely the military-industrial complex [racket.news] grown up for an information age:

The âoeCensorship-Industrial Complexâ is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the âoehybrid warfareâ age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the âoedefenseâ sector, the âoeanti-disinformationâ complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have âoemilitary limitations.â The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign âoedisinformation.â Itâ(TM)s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemyâ(TM)s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like âoetoxicity monitoring,â replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a âoenose for newsâ with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like âoenewsworthy claim extraction,â and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the âoeredirect method,â which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward âoeconstructive alternative messages.â

In any case, YouTube was part of this and now that it has lost funding, they are seeking a new revenue model in the Musk-like style of new Twitter. Does this mean a serious commitment to free speech, ending viewpoint discrimination, and free expression? No, if the funding comes back, they will just delete all of the controversial videos about genetic inequality and go back to churning out propaganda for stimulus bucks.

Every now and then, when I have a turd of a day, I read this article for the brief levity of righteous but funny mockery:

The tag team of incompetence from tech support and development perfectly encapsulates the overall culture at LinkedIn.

I wish the author had used "cascade" instead of "tag team," but this is a minor and debatable quibble.

Big point is: User Interface / User Experience sucks ass across the web.

However, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend... or at least the self-identified enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

User interface designers and user experience experts generally make everything worse.

What does not? Old school web sites like old Reddit, Slashdot, Plenty of Fish, Craigslist, and so on.

These are mostly function and low interface drag.

Interface drag is really high on all the millennial (millennials can't code) websites. They fancy them up and add "accessibility" pretending they care about the disabled, but really it is merely job security. Everyone suffers.

And the hidden factor? Oh, that's easy: management makes compromises in committees and that results in paradoxical design, basically gryphons and chimerae all the way down.

Oftentimes the bad user experience is simply bad function, sort of like how Amazon broke its search algorithm and often ends up generating empty webpages while it waits for a resource. The company ran better under arch-fascist-crusader-warlord-jihadist Bezos.

You know what improves user design? Clear statements of purpose, simplified methods, and low interface drag through not projecting all of the needs of the designers and executives onto the users.

Rant over, thanks for coming to my TERD Talk, subscribe to my newsletter with the button below, etc.

Leftists invented, after the French Revolution in 1789, modern nationalism to replace organic nationalism which previously was tribal:

In fact, the situation in France was not so simple - in 1789, most inhabitants of France did not speak French, but some other language such as Breton, Occitan, or other patois unintelligible to the French speakers of the north. French national identity was created by simply incorporating such people into France, and making them all speak French - in Brittany, for instance, local Celtic names were banned.

Any time some conservative starts talking about "Christian nationalism" or "civic nationalism," or even assimilation/integration and other colonial-era Christianization narratives re-branded, remember this!

I know drugs are bad (m'kay) and many of you have known people who have self-destructed with drugs.

However, criminalization clearly is not working, and legalization failed to get rid of the illegal drugs trade because when you tax stuff like a politician, you make it more expensive than what the free market offers.

I suggest we decriminalize all drugs, both recreational and medical. This means that we do not "legalize" and regulate, but simply do not make them illegal. People can make them, use them, store them, sell them, and give them away, and government gives neither the thumbs-up nor thumbs-down. It would be like geraniums or homemade apple pies.

The reasons are both complex and simple:

1. Stop giving power to a police state. The more cops are running around trying to stop the massive drug trade, the more they are going to have to compete with gangs in terms of firepower and surveillance.

2. "Freedom." I think freedom is a false goal but a good method. Why intervene anywhere where we do not have to? Let people make their own choices, and then the rest of us will react based on what we see. If great-uncle Edbert manages to kill himself with heroin, the whole community will know that heroin is probably a Bad Idea.

3. Social Darwinism. Many people who are currently alive are useless. Most of them really love drugs, gambling, alcohol abuse, and eating horribly unhealthy junk food. Let them. Let them do what they do, isolate the damage by reducing the cost of it (no sin taxes, no criminalization), and then let nature deal with them as it must. If we can, breed more coyotes, bears, snakes, and other predators to consume the unwary.

4. Misdirection. When we view our future in terms of managing negative problems like drugs, we stop thinking about all the positive stuff we should be doing, and the voters fall for this every time. Remember the Satanic Panic? COVID-19? Y2K? Panics are part of humanity and they make us negative, so we need to double down on constructive (production, creation, maintenance) activity instead of focusing all of our energy, time, and concentration on negatives.

Who's with me? Don't all shout at once.

Yes, I know you want to get off this rock and in the long term, that is a necessary goal for not just humans but other species that humans want to preserve. You want a universe that always has cats and hummingbirds.

But in the meantime, humanity is near the tipping of The Ecocide, which is the displacement of the complexity of life on Earth (biodiversity + internal variation) by human overpopulation and urbanization.

E.O. Wilson posited "Half Earth," a simple but complete solution: leave half the land and sea for nature, with no human intervention. Let the forest fires regulate the forests, the predators eat the prey, and so on.

But with humanity at 60% urbanization, producing tens of thousands of "heat islands" across the globe that displace jet streams and send heat waves across open land, we need to act soon and stop mucking about with "climate change."

1. It's foreign. This should be enough. It is from a half-Arabic people in the middle east.

2. It's dualistic. Symbolic Heaven plays by different rules than Earth, causing people to reject reality. This is schizophrenia.

3. It's exoteric. The idea that normal people can understand religion forces a constant dumbing down.

4. It's universalist. It rejects hierarchy, except from the church of course.

5. It's individualistic. The personal god rejects the idea of unity with the world, and you bond to a symbol instead.

I am religious, and believe in gods/God, and think all religions state the same basic message, but Christianity (and Abrahamism generally) add on weird controlling middle eastern stuff that is best avoided.

Diversity -- the presence of multiple ethnic groups in a nation -- does not work, which means it can never achieve the function it was intended for.

Even worse, it destroys those nations by erasing culture, allowing bureaucracy and commerce to take over.

Eventually, diversity leads to conflict between these ethnic groups through passive-aggressive means.

Finally, the groups hybridize, and you get humans with none of the distinctive traits of any of the constituent groups.

It is like putting everything in your refrigerator in the blender, tossing in a rat and a bird, and making a smoothie.

You think you will get the power of everything combined, but you get the power averaged which turns it into nothing.

Diversity will do the same to your nation if you allow it.

— Diversity Does Not Work

The normie Right is a fallacy. The underground Right seems obsessed by National Socialism and Christianity. Beyond both of them is the actual Right which is based on realism and pursuit of the good.

• Endorse individualism and everyone goes insane
• January 6th was not an insurrection but a riot
• Diversity slowly erodes everything we have in common
• Are UFOs real? We explore a masterful deflection
• How following the science led to civilization collapse
• For the new year, a resolution to ignore popular illusions

This is not my day job, and it makes no money. However, it is the best I can do to represent reality, even if I do not particularly like the conclusions at which I arrive.

Me: searches for an article with the name of a victim killed at Joe's Crab Shack.

Both Bing and Google: here are four pages of results about how to find your local Joe's Crab Shack and 4,096 competing restaurants, and there's a new article hidden in there somewhere.

The spammers took over the internet. They now work at big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

Google specializes in indirectly promoting standards like HTTPS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and AMP that do nothing but raise the cost of hosting. This centralizes content by forcing content producers to go to big sites like substack, medium, and social media.

That allows them to spam further.

Bing just imitates whatever Google does. MBAs do badly at thinking outside the box; repeating, reciting, and recombining textbook knowledge is how they got to this point, after all.

Turns out Eternal September took almost thirty years to kick in, but when it did, it trashed the Wild West and School of Athens that the internet was, and replaced it with daytime television but now with twice the number of ads.

Consider the possibility of nihilism:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

• Relativity: what seems true in one time, location, and angle may not appear so from another.
• Bell Curve: also see the Dunning-Kruger Effect. People perceive unequal levels of detail and are able to make unequal levels of connection between them based on where they fit on the g scale.
• Experience: until you have experienced running your own company, raising a child, and extinguishing a house fire, your viewpoint may be limited, for example.

For two glorious weeks, I was a Twitter user again. Having succumbed to the ideological purge five years ago, my account had languished in "verification ban" territory, where Big Tech insists that you enter a phone number and jump through hoops so the DOJ can track you. I declined to do that, since they already have an email address which is perfectly functional, and so they kept the account in limbo.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter and mass panic ensued, I momentarily left my Mastodon account and moseyed over to Twitter where I applied for an exception, and was reinstated. It was kind of anticlimactic, as was my response to social media with The Algorithm for the first time in years; it was cool to have constant spicy content scrolling past, but very little of it was informative, more clever quips between people fighting for their simps, stan, and social or political team.

Just as I was getting bored, however, the account went back into verification ban because someone complained about my standard riff on how to fix human civilization, which you can read in its full form on a free speech host, Gettr, or if you want Twitter, although you will have to click around the "This account is temporarily limited" verification ban notice (Facebook used the same technique on me years ago, now that I recall it).

The best part was seeing how rules are selectively applied, not that I would censor this particular image. The comedy got compounded with Germany and Europol getting into the action too.

In looking back, Twitter feels dated now. There is not enough of a culture of goodwill and trying to communicate to shout over the din of all the influencers, griefers, spammers, repeaters, and hipsters. It was nice while it lasted, but in the end, my sanity and health -- as well as my ability to communicate with the few other remaining sane people -- seem better served by avoiding Twitter.

Some of us write "the further Right-wing opinion on the Net" here:

* http://www.amerika.org/

We have a Reddit/Lemmy style political news channel here:

* https://ruqqus.com/+Conservative

You can find me posting on the following:

* https://freespeechextremist.com/amerika
* https://www.gab.com/alternative_right
* https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right

I also write about heavy metal music on deathmetal.org, and have a personal site at brettstevens.org for those who want to keep track of my freelance activity.

Thanks for reading