Whatcha doin????

I had to chuckle at the thought of the man who appears to have achieved nothing in 47 years suddenly finding a list of things he wanted to achieve in his first 100 days. Presumably his previous 17,000 days were all leading up towards these 100 days.

 

Reading more about some different encryption options. It looks like Bitlocker is going to cause problems because I'm using Windows 7 Professional rather than the Ultimate, or more recent versions of Windoze. So I'm looking at VeraCrypt to see what I can do with it. Maybe what I need to do is get myself the SSD, migrate my boot partition, tinker with encryption and then transfer my data across once it's all working. It would be nice to let the SSD do the work of encrypting the entire volume while also having the option to keep other individual files and folders more secure with extra encryption.

 

You said, "....."

I heard, "[hwa wha wha hwa hwa hwa]" aka Charlie Brown's teacher.

I'm constantly amazed at the technical knowledge of a number of our brothers here. You guys rock.
But if you ever need to understand the subtle nuance of the difference between 12th and 14th century motets, well, I'm your huckleberry.

 

Technical knowledge? I thought it was speaking in tongues. Paul wrote a lot about that sort of thing, and about how edifiying it was(n't)...

 

If you gwine be tongue talking, you best be 'splaining to boot.

 

Au contraire, the gift of interpretation is a totally different thing.

Didn't you ever wonder why we play tag-team with this stuff?

 

Got that right, bro.

 

It would be, although I'm not sure Joe Biden is the man for that.

True, he certainly provided plenty of source material.

I don't know that I'd go that far. Certainly the sky didn't fall in during either Obama's or Trump's time in the WH although I think it's a little naive to claim that whoever sits in the Oval Office has no capacity to make life better or worse. There are often implications regarding employment, taxation etc that can make life easier or harder - just look at the endless executive orders from state governors that have ruined businesses and presumably left their owners struggling to survive financially.

Can't argue with that.

 

Ehhhh. For all of theTrump gaffs, of which people particularly like to remember only 'covfefe', which was a Tweet, Biden, leading up to the election, completely garbled parts of his speeches, mis-spoke what he was running for, etc. And now, post-election, his speeches on COVID, his vaccine strategy, etc., haven't exactly been inspiring. I mean sure, he doesn't talk with a 'this guy is the best, I know this guy, he's just the greatest', but we've gone from 3rd grade to kindergarten as far as I can tell. That is, they're both capable of speaking in complete sentences, I would just hesitate to get on the 'Biden is obviously better than Trump' bandwagon when that's not obviously the case, short of Biden's and support of hot-topic issues which makes him in the eyes of many - without much critical thought - better de facto (or, anyone is better than Trump, de facto). I'm not convinced. For everything that was leveled against Trump, I think there were good reasons behind much of what he did, and those reasons haven't been given proper consideration.

For example, my favourite topic: Biden has reversed Trump's ban on transgender individuals joining the military. Great news, right? Trump only banned them because he's hateful and transphobic, right? Well, if you're in the military, do you want your squad to potentially include people who statistically have a suicide rate comparable to those with mental illness? What do you do if one of these people isn't able to get their HRT and their endocrine system either begins reverting or crashes (mood swings, weight changes, muscle-mass, bone-mass, risk of DVT, etc.)? What about the specialist medical care that's required in light of the surgeries involved with transitioning? Surely only because Trump is transphobic... right?

Of course that doesn't hold true of all of Trump's decisions, and not being American I don't particularly care for US politics or Trump.

That he did. Remember Obama's drone/weapons program, and how the media went all moral and crazy and talked about how xenophobic he was? How about those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with Bush and Blair? Heyyyy how about Clinton? Again, I don't particularly care for Trump.

Interesting how election hacking is suddenly no longer a thing now that Trump lost. I'm not saying the election was stolen, but do we really think the Dems care about it as much as they said they do, now that their guy won? Nope.

True, true.

 

All true enough, except when you remember orangemanbad and notice that Biden is definitely less orange than Trump, it logically follows that whitemangood. Except when dealing with race relations, in which case whitemanbad, but that doesn't apply to Beloved Leader because orangemanbad beats whitemanbad and so whitemangood. Besides, he ran alongside the candidate his party rejected for the top job and we all know blackwomangood under any and all circumstances.

Indeed, when supply chains get broken (as the vagaries of war have a tendency to do at times) it's one thing to figure you don't have enough basic supplies but when a particular member of the team needs very specific supplies that can't be foraged, taken from the enemy or sourced by any other means, chances are it's not going to end well for the unit or for the individual.

You're still not getting the hang of orangemanbad. Because orangemanbad and republicansracistsexist it logically follows that Queen Hillary must win an election against orangeman. Because she lost it logically follows the election must have been hacked because there's no way she could lose. When orangeman lost this election that's the correct result and therefore there couldn't have been any hacking, or the hacking to make orangeman win didn't work so it didn't matter.

 

Why would they care? Since there have been no examples of systematic, large-scale fraud why would they pursue the matter? Excepting cases where judges were tossing suits due to lack of standing, all the other ones seemed pretty frivolous, or seeking a ridiculous remedy. And anyways, are not election procedures ultimately up to the state electoral officers anyway?

 

States, yes.

And there will be political blood feuds in the state legislatures next two years.

 

It's just interesting to see all the howling about disinformation when orangeman won but when orangeman lost everything was just peachy. Not only that but we were even treated to experts from the Ministry of Truth explaining why the election was the most secure ever.

 

Keep that up and it will be Room 101 for you, w1nst0n.

And for you, Sir Tango, I think that would be locked in a room full of folks from IHOP, and I'm not talking pancakes.

 

There wasn't last time either, yet we heard about it for four years starting on the night it became obvious that Hillary lost. Remember the claims back then? Trump, again, alleging fraud, by the way:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37682947
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/us/voter-fraud.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...results-illegal-hillary-clinton-a7545246.html

No such evidence of fraud. But there's always the CCCP, er Russia.

How did Hillary handle that election? Four years later: "Because I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from. I was the candidate who won nearly three million more votes." Good old Hillary and that appeal to the popular vote. Do you think she's met Sanders?

At the time, she should have called for a recount, right? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...vote-recount-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/...n-push-for-wisconsin-ballot-recount.html?_r=0. This is the same Hillary that hasn't accepted the results of the election and claimed that doing so would threaten democracy https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/el.../clinton-calls-trump-threat-to-democracy.html. I guess that's true of her and Trump, and ~half the US? Or should we only care that what was said in 2016 was said again in 2020? From Meuller:

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election," read the report. "Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."

- https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

So what, Russia was doing what both sides of the American process already do to each other? Yes, I can see how Trump won because of Russia's disinformation and propaganda campaigns. It totally had nothing to do with the fact that the Dems put up Hillary Clinton.

It's the same story, repeated. Do you recall all the de-platforming, fake news, fact-checking, etc., back then? Me neither. Mistakes on everyone's part, I guess. But I'm about as sure as I can be that if Trump had won again, we'd go through the same process: more investigations into outside influences, or perhaps this would be taken as evidence of that influence! No large voter fraud, so they would again turn to the great enemy mother Russia. Russian, being the America that much of the rest of the world has known since 1930.

Even then, if we accept the narrative, then why wouldn't those nefarious forces that saw Trump through to power (sorry again about those primaries, Bernie -- fraud, huh) try again in 2020? Have we heard about how we stopped those forces this time, compared to the apparent failure that was 2016? How is it, that this was only a significant concern for the 2016 election? If the concern in 2016 was Russian influence, then what of influence within America itself from, say, social media and search companies? Do we allow some influence and not others on the basis of whether the person we want to win, wins? Seems pretty choosey to me.

The way election fraud was brought up, is kind of like how some science fiction show put stakes on 'the whole multiverse will be destroyed if...' It argued for too much. If the 2016 election was affected, then so too were the elections before, and so too would the elections that followed be. There's just no way that American elections haven't been influenced in the sort of way that Russia is accused of influencing the 2016 election. So, where are the reports on how the 2020 election addressed the attempts to influence the election similar to the 2016 election?

Election fraud is boring, but spy games are interesting. Why no spycraft this time?

 

No spycraft because the Ministry of Truth says no spycraft. That's all you need to know, comrade.

 

It looks like BF is finally toast.

 

Requiem en skubalon

 

Oh? I tried to see for myself but realised I can't even remember the URL. Shows how long it is since I've been there.