Jim's Blog

When driving, I got tired of the CD, and turned on the radio, to hear the voice of authority calling on the public to report doctors who doubt the vax, or who prescribe safe and effective drugs for Covid, to the medical malpractice board.

This sort of thing makes it difficult to get data.  When you search the internet, nothing comes up except a storm of absurd and outrageous official lies, but I ran into the following posted on Gab.

Total US army deaths from covid itself, over the entire time it has been around, about twenty.

US army deaths and sequelae of vaccination that are likely to be lethal per day, about fifty.

This is roughly what I was expecting from anecdotal data.

Following the wise advice of Prince Charming, I edited a custom personal 256 bit secret into the php code of Avatar Privacy avatar generator, so that now it actually works as it is supposed to.

So now we have avatars, and actually do have privacy.

My own personal experience in security is that your boss orders one to do something inexplicably stupid that introduces a subtle flaw, an order that one would not expect your boss to give, or even to understand, but the flaw does not flat out report everything directly to the NSA, and the flaw is arguable – one is not flat out breaking security, it is just subtly weak, in a way complicated to explain and not entirely trivial to exploit.

And when you try to explain the problem to him he does not want to listen, and is unable to understand.

I conjecture that this is what happened to the Avatar Privacy plugin.

The flaw, explained by Prince Charming and checked by me is that the salt does not salt – it is same salt for every user, and the salt is quite short, thirty two bits, and thus can be easily reversed by exhaustive search. Given one known email, one can reverse the salt. Given the salt, one can reverse the hash of the any email. You have to throw the entire population of potential email addresses, which may well be enormous, at the hash of the email, but this does not take that long.

The central authority has a list of everyone they could do harm to, and try the list against the hash of the emails of the blog commenters who have offended by displaying inadequate holiness.

I could have fixed the salt part, and perhaps I will, but instead used a 256 bit site wide secret prepended to every hash directly in the source code.

return \hash( 'sha256', "my custom secret"."{$this->get_salt()}{$identifer}" );

This results in everyone randomly getting a new avatar, which will likely be different from the old one.

My blog has been down for a while – the perils of being your own system administrator.

Because of political events, I have moved the blog onto a server physically located on the boundary between the US empire and the Chinese hegemony, in a country that piously proclaims fealty to both, and tends to be left alone by both.

(Which means we are now being spied on by twice as many people, but they will probably forget about shutting me down and all that.)

While I can blame lots of other people for lots of things that went wrong in the move, the chief errors were my own.

If you have problems viewing this site or commenting, clear your browser caches (except for passwords and such)

Some browsers cached messed up data during the transition.

I am feeling optimistic about my safety, because I have taken some additional precautions, and the move seems to have taken me off the radar. About America, not so much.

After the Republic died in Rome, it took a long time for a new political order capable of cohesive action to appear, and even after Caesar Augustus took power, it took him twelve years to get things in some sort of order.

Elections and due process have gone down, and most of the civil service is in similar shape.

Sulla restored the Republic the only way it could be restored, at swordpoint with considerable slaughter.

The restoration lasted twenty one years, then the Republic died again of the same causes.

But for fourteen years after it died, until shortly after the assassination of Caesar, everyone acted as if the dead Republic was still alive, as if due process and free elections were still in effect.

Frequently with fatal consequences.

The politically correct story of the Roman Republic is that it died of ambitious generals with troops personally loyal to their general.

This just is not true. There was a terrible vacuum that demanded a general to restore order at swordpoint and enforce at swordpoint the cooperation that makes collective action possible, and that vacuum twice persisted for an extraordinarily unreasonable time before a general finally did. The Republic died twice, but things superficially appeared to keep happening as they used to for a while because of old people with old habits acting in ways that used to make sense, but were no longer sane or safe in the new reality.

Because the CEO, the sovereign, cannot be everywhere at once and decide everything he constructs a process that will generally produce an acceptable result if everyone follows it.

But, not everyone is going to follow it.

There is an interesting mathematical theorem from computer science that it takes at most one third of the parties engaging in Byzantine defection to subvert any process. It does not take majority defection, and unless the process is robustly designed to resist Byzantine faults, like the processes of the Venetian Republic in the days of its greatness, which requires immense amount of bullshit and heavy overheads, it takes far less than a third defecting.

The reason is that the people defecting from the process necessarily have a considerable advantage in getting their way over people who do not defect, an advantage that can be mathematically proven is always at least two to one, and is usually far more than two to one. Getting it down to two to one requires smart people designing the process.

A process that can resist one third Byzantine faults always has enormous overheads compared to a process that assumes no Byzantine faults.

If Trump’s people play by the rules, and other people do not play by the rules which is what has been happening, Trump’s people are going to get screwed.

So, by and by, everyone stops playing by the rules, as in the recent exposes of NSA misconduct, as in the recent election, as in the recent court decisions, and too many other instances to count.

But if everyone stops playing by the rules, then collective action becomes difficult. As the Russians complained of America under Obama, “America is not agreement capable.” Notoriously the State Department is owned by Israel. And by Saudi Arabia. And by China. And by assorted Hunter Biden type grifters. All the mutually contradictory conspiracy theories are simultaneously true.

Now in a private company, when you detect Byzantine faults you suspect Byzantine defection, and fire people till it goes away.

Obviously this does not happen in the public service. So the public service tends to become corrupt and incapable of collective action, incapable of serving its purpose.

If Biden gets in, then the people pulling his strings will find that the way they got in makes it impossible to get anything done. Until they start shooting judges and public servants, which I expect to start happening around 2026 or so if Trump fails to start shooting people sooner than that.

In the Roman Republic, the processes stopped working. Caesar incorrectly assumed that it was still impossible for respectable people to publicly murder other respectable people in public. And his assassins incorrectly assumed that after they assassinated Caesar, it would once again become impossible. He was wrong.

And they were wrong. Interesting times ahead.

This blog, and the associated email addresses are going away until it becomes apparent which way the wind blows.

I am going to sell the domain name.

When it becomes apparent which way the wind blows, a similar blog, with all the original content and comments, will re-open on a less valuable domain name in a safer administration.

Bets on the outcome of current events should be settled in 2020 january 21 with ushwx@protonmail.ch
gpg fingerprint: 0D6ABF58AA31AF9594E70E4673E4BC62E92B87D7

The blog will go into maintenance mode in due course. If things go well, it should start redirecting to a domain with a cheaper domain name on which the blog is no longer in maintenance mode. If things go badly, I am pursuing a course of action based on blockchains and cryptography, while waiting for a Sulla, a Cromwell, or a Stalin. If a Cromwell or a Stalin, I will prepare the way for a General Monck or a Putin.

Whether this domain name will start redirecting to a new domain name depends on my judgment of events. A new blog with all the original content will probably open somewhere, but you may have to discover it.

This blog has never been in the business of covering today’s news, but rather of covering the long sweep of history, and putting today’s news in the long sweep of history.

And today’s news amounts to the fact that we are not going to get a good look at the ballots printed at midnight after the voting finished until and unless Trump proclaims the Insurrection Act:

The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it-

so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

We have a conspiracy hindering the execution of the laws of numerous State, and of the United States within those States. And the conspirators need to be detained, preferably in Alaska as far from Washington as possible, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, and questioned, by military intelligence and loyalist federal cops.

And now, back to the long sweep of history.

A King creates a virtuous elite, as King Alfred the Great and Charles the Second did. A virtuous elite, having internal cohesion and trust, is quite capable of running the country without much Kingly supervision, and the King is apt to be quite content to focus on fornication, partying, and hunting, so the Kingdom gradually becomes a Republic, at first de-facto, and eventually in name and truth.

But a Republic lacks effectual means of dealing with misconduct in the elite, so cooperation and trust in the elite breaks down. They turn to the masses to resolve their internal conflicts, and the Republic becomes a democracy. As evil flourishes, and cooperation continues to break down, it eventually comes to pass that the stakes on the table are too high, so the Republic, or the Democratic Republic, dies.

Democracy requires a level of trust and comity between the parties that no longer exists.

The loser has to believe that loss will not be total, permanent, and result in his destruction.

Because the Democrats have been indulged by law enforcement for a long time, they have committed all manner of crimes, and will go to jail if law enforcement is done in an impartial manner.

Because law enforcement is not done in an impartial manner, the Republicans will go to jail if it is not fixed. If Republicans lose power now, they are permanently and irreversibly out of power, and many of them will wind up in prison or worse. Paul Rand times ten thousand, because the man who attempted to murder Kyle on video is free as a bird.

Caesar became an enemy of the Republic by crossing the Rubicon, but he had to cross the Rubicon because otherwise would have been charged and convicted of no end of political offenses.

However this thing ends, one side or the other is going to jail, and if it ends with Trump out of power, Trump’s family will eventually be executed. Initially they will only be imprisoned, but as $#!% continues to hit the fan, they will eventually, like the Romanovs and the family of Louis XVI, become too dangerous to live.

Fixing law enforcement is going to require proclaiming the Insurrection act, and it may well become necessary to call out the unorganized militia and organize it. Nothing less is likely to suffice.

Too much is on the table for democracy to continue, and it has not continued. To restore a genuine Republic requires the creation of a well behaved elite. It will take at least a century, even if we start right away.

Trying to fix ballot counting requires sending a pile of people to prison, which ups the stakes even further. There is no way to bring the stakes down to something consistent with a Republic, because our elite is corrupt, degenerate, and decadent. You have to create a new, virtuous, elite. Start by purging Harvard, or leveling it to the ground and building a new Harvard, a Harvard run by men who are married, God fearing, Christian, and have well behaved children. (Or, in the case of India, gods fearing.) The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. We are going to need a Caesar Augustus, and Caesar Augustus is going to need, like Constantine, a state religion that works to produce a virtuous elite.

Caesar’s problem was that all the genuinely virtuous gods fearing people were on the side of the Republic. He had only bad people. And the problem that all the genuinely virtuous gods fearing people had is that they were on the side of a Republic that had died a long time previously. Don’t do what they did. Trying to fix harvesting and registration is doing what they did. You cannot do it unless you purge or dismiss the the three letter agencies, and if you purge or dismiss the three letter agencies, the existing Democrat organization is going to jail.

Marius failed because he upped the stakes so far that the Roman Republic could not continue. Sulla’s problem was that he restored a dead Republic. Caesar’s problem was that he was an enemy of the (undead) Republic and had only bad people around him. Augustus Caesar succeeded because he “restored” the Republic – but made sure the fact that it was dead was not a problem.

But Augustus Caesar had a problem in that insofar as he had a live state religion, he had a hostile state religion. He tried emperor worship, the equivalent of Deng Xiaoping theory, but nothing worked until Constantine adopted Christianity as the state religion. Constantine also built a new capital far from the swamp.

What Putin is doing, making Russian Orthodoxy the state religion, is working. What Deng Xiaoping did looks like it is sort of working so far, but, like Augustus Caesar’s emperor worship, obviously fragile. Deng Xiaoping theory is “learn truth from facts”, which is a mighty good start, the main fact from which they learned truth being that socialism does not work, but the since the state religion is incarnated in the head of state, the facts are what the party says they are.

Charles the second instituted the rule “Nullius in verba”, which obligates you to check stuff for yourself, or at least identify the person who checked stuff himself and listen to what he said, rather than what someone else says he said. I walked in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci and Lyell, and I myself verified with my own pickaxe and my own eyes that the Earth is immensely old, not because I had any doubt that I would see what they saw, but because I was raised to believe that one had a moral obligation to use primary sources or, better, much better, one’s own observations, that the Wikipedia style reliance on highly derived sources is not merely unwise, but wicked.

I told him, your friends are your enemies, and your enemies are your friends.

A few hours ago, he shut down his blog, Slate Star Codex, because the New York Times came after him.

Every year I have lived, it has been getting crazier, faster and faster. If Trump fails to become Caesar Augustus, Scott Alexander will not very long afterwards be killed by those he regards as his friends, unless rescued by those he regards as his enemies. Reflect on Venezuela. It started in Venezuela with pulling down statues, renaming streets, and revising the curriculum. And pretty soon they were revising the people.

He neglects to name the reporter: “(out of respect for his concerns, I am avoiding giving his name here.)”

Come on Scott. Everyone who works for the New York Times is evil, and you cannot appease them, because they hate everyone, including themselves. Being nice to reporters just gives them more opportunity and incentive to hurt people, starting with whoever is being nice to them. You should have encouraged and enabled your readers to take vengeance, not to maximize utility by protecting the next hundred people this reporter will destroy, but because vengeance is the right thing to do, when authority will not provide justice.

Scott, when a crazy fat woman in your circle of friends started accusing people in your circle of sexual harassment and sexual assault, what did you and your friends do about it? How did being politically correct on that turn out for you and for her? And do friends who respond in that way qualify as friends?

Scott is a smart guy, and a good writer. If he starts blogging with stronger anonymity, using a domain name purchased with bitcoin laundered through Monaro on a cloud computer similarly paid for, he might he able to be more wary about his “friends”, and less hateful to his “enemies”.

Americans back in space on an American rocket, launched by Musk, who was protected from Nasa by Trump.

The reason he can successfully launch stuff from the Nasa launch pad, is that he could launch stuff from a pad where the Range Safety Officer is Space Force, rather than Nasa, a pad that gets blown up from time to time. The space suits they are wearing have Nasa logos, but they are SpaceX suits, were personally designed by Musk as the prototype for Space Force’s space uniform. The primary design criterion for SpaceX space suits, is that they can be worn by heroes in space. The primary design criterion for Nasa’s space suits, is that they can be worn by morbidly obese middle aged lesbians larping space travel and no one can notice the difference between a hero and a morbidly obese middle aged lesbian.