Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is a moral hazard and election year vote-buying. It’s extremely unfair to people who planned as-if they’d have to pay it all back and did something responsible.

Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is a moral hazard and election year vote-buying. It’s extremely unfair to people who planned as-if they’d have to pay it all back and did something responsible.

I never got to go to college. I was told that if I did, I’d get no help from my parents. In fact, my parents actively stood in the way of me taking a FAFSA grant for years, because they look at your parents’ tax filings until you’re in your 20s, even if you can’t get your parents to help you because they’re a couple of dickheads who ran off after breaking your home and did what they wanted to do and disowned you.

After coming out as gay, my parents did the legal bare minimum and threw me out at 18. Neither one of them wanted anything more to do with me, and even if they did, they had both remarried to people who didn’t want me there. Including my mom’s second husband, who violently beat me numerous times, closed-fist.

I didn’t really stand much of a chance against the guy. I was just a kid and he was a former Army soldier who was a drill instructor. The best I ever managed to do was save my own life from him while he had given me a concussion (I was bleeding all over the place.) and had caught up with me at the front porch of his house, and pinned me down into a choke-hold. I had maybe a few seconds left before I lost consciousness, and with the last ounce of my strength I managed to grab a landscaping rock and smash it against his hand, breaking his hand in two places. I escaped and a passing driver called 911.

My mother took his side and told me I would be homeless if I didn’t go down to the prosecutor’s office and say I had exaggerated and did not want to press charges, so to avoid homelessness, I lied to the state prosecutor, and they reduced his charge to a misdemeanor and made him take anger management classes. They didn’t even convict him and in a few weeks, I was living in my (clunker) car anyway.

Shortly in, I found a slum apartment to live in for the next year, complete with wildlife invasion, old knob and tube electrical wiring wrapped in cloth that blew a circuit breaker if you ran the TV while you were cooking something, and child sex predators living next door (actually next room, it was all one big house with sleeping rooms) because the landlord didn’t care who lived there. Oh, and there was also no heat.

Did I mention that I didn’t have any heat? It’s worth mentioning. It gets very cold in northern Indiana and in winter, my apartment was basically the ambient outdoor temperature. I could run a small heater fan and point it at my face that winter while I slept, and that was about all I could do.

My parents and the government betrayed me and set me back in ways that I still haven’t recovered from, and likely never will.

I’ve had a history of police harassment, and I’ll just leave it at that because I’m trying to delete some of it.

The last series drove me into bankruptcy and made me homeless for two years again and living in a motel by the side of a freeway that wasn’t a lot better than that apartment I started out in 20 years ago.

(Oh yeah, and I’m white. So apparently, “privileged”.)

The people who went into debt to take on student loans are very different people than I am. They typically fall into two categories.

Category 1 are the Jerry Smiths (Rick and Morty). People who are borderline employable and mostly just take up space and figure out how to make the rest of society pay for their incompetence.

They are people like a guy I dated who racked up $20,000 in student loan debt to study Political Science and works a gig job DoorDash while moonlighting as a hotel desk clerk. At least, that’s last I knew. He can’t even hold onto these jobs, but he’s one of those people with a lot of student loan money who is totally unemployable for much more than whatever the minimum wage is.

They keep getting rid of him at that, and he goes to find something else to do, but the $20,000 Political Science crap never helped him make a single dollar. In fact, he owed so many people so much delinquent debt, that he had to do business in cash without a bank account so nobody could garnish him, he had no furniture in his apartment by the time I managed to look inside it, and there was a safe on top of the kitchen counter.

Since he took on a FAFSA to go to University of Wisconsin-Parkside, you’ve already paid to enable him if you’re an American taxpayer, but now Biden will wipe out the rest of the $20,000 and make you pay for that too. And there’s a lot more where he came from.

Even in the 1990s, we had a neighbor whose son was named Lynn. Lynn had a degree in Philosophy, and we used to see Lynn putting his degree to good use, when we went to the movie theater, where he worked for $4.25 an hour as an usher sweeping popcorn off the floor and checking tickets.

Category 2 is people who did well in school, chose a degree where they’ll actually get a career that doesn’t involve flipping burgers and delivering pizzas (there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t need a college degree), and are probably making six figure salaries.

In other words, they simply just do not need our help. Case Closed.

If Biden gave a damn about Public Policy, he wouldn’t be taking money from people who go to work and pay their taxes and handing it to losers and people who don’t even need the help and are in highly paid careers where they can afford to pay back their loans.

What’s worse is that there’s no law passed by Congress that allows any of this. He never even pretended there was one.

He did his debt forgiveness to people who went to colleges that cheated them and are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice first and separately, because that’s the only debt forgiveness that is authorized by statute.

This next phase creates an unauthorized entitlement for which no enabling law or appropriated money exists. It will cost us $362 billion, which is more than $2,000 debt added to the plate of every American who actually pays taxes. Someone is also likely to sue over this to stop it, and let us all hope that they succeed!

When I voted for Biden, it was a choice between two bad options. Trump has changed the Overton Window to the point where people will accept the very worst candidates the Democratic Party has to offer. He may have even lost if Hillary Clinton came back.

That was the lasting damage of Trump. Americans now have only two choices. Being screwed over by the radical policies of the Democrats or the Republicans, both of which are pursuing policies that would have been unthinkable years ago.

Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is illegal, unconstitutional, bad policy, a moral hazard, inflationary, and will add to the long national nightmare of people who pay their bills, pay their taxes, and have to find some way to live because they don’t actually qualify for any welfare programs. Worse, it’s vote buying.

90% of the bailout money will go to people who were too stupid to pursue a legitimate college degree and got bilked by money grubbing universities into pursuing something that they could get, but that wouldn’t help them.

The State of Illinois is making this system yet worse by getting rid of the ACT/SAT, which was designed to help potential students by directing them to remedial education if they would get into a program that they won’t do well in.

It’s finally gotten to the point where people have been so dumbed down that George Carlin’s “Have you got a pencil? Get in there! It’s physics!” joke is frighteningly close to reality.

It’s too late for me. By the time I figured out that I was going to have to spend so much time looking for enough money to eek by that I could never do anything else but fight to stay where I was at, it was too late.

Part of the problem is that college gets more expensive every year, and everyone knows that. And part of the reason it gets more expensive is because they’ll give these loans to just about anyone.

And the reason they would give these loans to just about anyone is because you can’t file bankruptcy on them if it doesn’t work out.

So they scared the hell out of me. I knew that win or lose, if I got in there and didn’t do well, I’d have to pay back a lot of money, with interest, even if they continued into my old age and started sucking it out of my Social Security checks and I didn’t have enough to live on.

The loans, therefore, had an extra appeal to the kind of people who don’t plan on what they’re going to do a week or a month from now, much less years later. And they scared people like me. People who know we’ll always be pinched, and, if they come for our Social Security near the end….what will we do?

Because I know that I don’t do well in structured environments and I was concerned about loading up on debt. So I made decisions accordingly, and decided to just accept my lot in life.

If I knew then what I know now, that some day we’d have “Biden” “forgiving” all the loans for all of these people who are such fuck-ups that even I’m going “God damn!”, I would have gone to school. Where would the risk have been?

But Biden won’t be the president forever, and there’s no guarantee that this will ever happen again.

So it’s a one time Jubilee, and if I take on debt now, I’m still stuck with the same calculation, except I’m nearly 40 years old and I’ll definitely be paying it back forever.

Economists figure that in 4 years, the student debt crisis will be just as bad as it is now, because the people who got the loan forgiveness will have learned nothing except that they got away with it once. Why not try again?

It will also say to the people who have no loans that the government will eventually have to “forgive” it again (not a guarantee!) and they’ll behave recklessly too based on what just happened.

What America needs is not Joe Biden’s debt “forgiveness”.

It needs to stop giving out loans to people who plan to major in English and spend credit hours reading Jane Austin, which they can do at the public library for approximately $0.00.

I’m absolutely in favor of making trade, vocational, and some community college courses “free”, and while we’re at it we should stop assuming that everyone’s parents will help them just because they declared a lot of money on their taxes last year, unless we’re going to make another law that says the parents are on the hook to spend down some of that money on their children’s college funds.

There must never be another “debt forgiveness” and there must also never be another story like mine.

But our country is very dysfunctional. Absolutely nothing has been fixed. The promise that this country used to have has been gone for years.

Instead of giving people a hand up, Cancel Culture makes people develop strange and radical political ideas and foments the hatred it claims to want to stop by making people get angrier and angrier about being mocked, and then tries to shove them off the Internet so that they can’t talk about those. I have another post coming up soon, maybe the next post, about this problem.

People who see the system failing them over and over get mad.

And then they want to tear it down. They don’t care what replaces it anymore.

All of the shit I had to crawl through in the past 20 years and now this.

Biden hands these people who completely screwed themselves with student loan scams a free pass.

The entire “deficit reduction” part of the “Inflation Reduction Act” was about the size of the federal loss that was just taken on so that he could give movie floor sweepers with Poli Sci degrees a bailout.

And in return, the IRS will comb through your PayPal wallet to see if your mom handed you some money for getting her car fixed and spotting her for her Medicare premiums that year.

Of course, it’s obvious that this will cause more consternation in political circles. Almost nobody who didn’t rack up student debt or has paid theirs off with their own money is happy about this. In the end it will cause more harm to the Biden Administration than it was worth.

Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

(The US Supreme Court is dismantling the Bill of Rights, starting with a major opening salvo against your Miranda Rights recently.)

In one recent post, I linked to an archived Nitter mirror showing that a company called FAMA doxxed a man’s Twitter account for “bad language”, “risky likes”, etc, and sent his employer a 350+ page printout.

Pointy Hair Bosses are too dangerous to be allowed access to information like this.

They get snookered by con artists at companies like this in order to fire or refuse to hire people based on what that person’s legitimate beliefs and speech are.

If you can’t find a job, or get laid off, can you say definitively that FAMA wasn’t the reason why? That was rhetorical. You aren’t even supposed to know that they exist.

What starts happening to you when Landlords start using it to see if you are “trouble” without getting to know you?

The answer, of course, is that Twitter, which is already worth nothing, is definitely causing people to become unemployed, and potentially homeless.

I certainly hope you’re hearing about FAMA from me and not after it’s already too late and you’re living in a box under the CTA train.

Nobody should want to live in a world where things like this exist, and the only way to be safe from ambush “reports” like FAMA is to have no “social media” presence on Facebook or Twitter. It’s likely that even if you “go private”, Facebook is selling them data. You can opt out by refusing to participate in your own drumhead.

However, other sinister uses of “Social Media”, primarily centered around Facebook, but also Twitter and some others, involve regulations formulated by the Social Security Administration during the Trump presidency.

The Republicans have been looking for ways to knife Social Security for years, and one of their repeated talking points centers on convincing people that anyone with a severe mental impairment is faking it and should just find a job. Let’s set aside the fact that 20 million Americans who would like to work lost their jobs under Trump in addition to the 18 million who would have liked to have one and couldn’t before him, and most of those jobs haven’t returned. (140,000 jobs short in Illinois alone vs. March 2020), and we’ll focus on what Social Security is doing to try to play gotcha game bullshit under Trump’s regulation created by former Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul (who was locked out of his office and fired by President Biden).

The first prong of Trump’s attack on the mentally ill involves Facebook. It says that the SSA shall look at the Facebook pages for anyone on Disability and comb them over for evidence that contradicts the disability they claim they have.

In other words, did you have a good day and go mow the lawn and end up in Facebook with pictures mowing your lawn and having a beer?

Did you go on vacation for 3 days and smile once while you were at a restaurant and you didn’t want to be the party-pooper so you smiled on command, even though you weren’t actually, you know, in the mood?

Well, all of that is “evidence” against you.

Trump tried to go further than this in a regulation canceled by Biden. The canceled regulation says that Social Security was to start harassing mentally ill claimants every two years, doing a full 11 page Continuing Disability Review, and basically what that is, is where they go digging through your life every few years looking for reasons why you may no longer qualify for Social Security benefits.

Some people get better, enough to work, but most people don’t. 99% of the people pulled for a CDR are found to still be disabled, because being approved for Disability in the first place was a tough row to hoe and so putting people through this is not only barbaric, but it’s a waste of money too.

Congress never gives the SSA enough money to do much more than spot check people with long form reviews 5% of the time, and the rest of the people who get full reviews are “scored” by a computer program based on a number of factors that produces a “statistical likelihood” of medical improvement.

To clear their backlog, they send out “short form reviews” as well, and these ask basic questions designed to probe to see if they will put you through the ringer. If you don’t make any comments, have been seeing your doctor regularly for the condition you were approved for, haven’t worked, and haven’t gone back to school, you’ll very likely be waved through.

I have an Aunt who has Schizophrenia. It’s very bad. On top of this, she has severe Osteoporosis, and a number of other problems. She’s had Social Security for years and would not be able to support herself without it. She’s in her early 60s. What would have happened to her if Trump got a second term?

Many lawyers advise their Social Security clients to either delete Facebook and Twitter, or at least make their profiles “Friends Only”, so the government can’t go combing through them.

The problem with the “Friends Only” advice is that the government is the government, and if Facebook or Twitter have information on you, the government is going to get it. It’s only a matter of time.

So the only way to be safer from “Social Control Media”, which the police also find very handy if you read the news even badly, is to stay off of it. The government isn’t the only threat, but it is a big one.

The other threats can be psycho exes that stalk you or creepy in-laws like mine, who are members of a cult that arranges to have people assassinated. My sister-in-law tried to blackmail/extort us for money. When I refused, she tried to take reprisals. Then she took out a million dollar life insurance policy on her brother, which I shut down.

She forged his signature to obtain it, and I have no idea what she planned to do.

Was she going to arrange a hit, or just try to wait it out and hope he died?

I set his profile to “Friends Only”. I’ve encouraged him to ditch Facebook because she’s crazy and the police did nothing when I went to them. Absolutely nothing.

The best I could do was report the fraud, shut down the policy, get him on an insurance company blacklist, and then get a FOID card.

We don’t live in the safest neighborhood.

One day when I looked out my peephole, there was a scary looking man just standing there staring at my door, like he was waiting for someone to open it and come out.

Did she send him? I don’t know. He eventually left after staring at my door without any possible good reason to be doing that, for over 20 minutes. I felt helpless, I felt scared. I firmly believe that everyone should use their Second Amendment rights to never have to be a victim of violent crime, property crime, or rape.

If people can’t obey the law and stay out of your stuff and home, then they should expect what’s coming to them. Some leftists can’t agree with that publicly, but the fact that Illinois is now the #1 state in America for legal gun sales and background checks tells us that people vote one way, and then when it comes to their own safety, they act in another one.

Biden isn’t the one panicking people into buying guns. It was the rioters, the looters, the carjackers, the rape gangs, that the police and judges in Illinois either can’t control or aren’t interested in punishing and imprisoning.

There have been a lot of home invasions in my city. Even if she doesn’t send someone to pull a hit, there are people who pretend they’re with the city and get you to open the door. Or say they’re with the water or gas or electric company and they just need you to come to the door for a minute.

I’m not coming to the door, and if they insist on breaking in, they won’t like what’s on the other side of it.

All you can do, really, since the police are useless, is arm yourself and make breaking into your home to hurt you and your loved ones the last mistake the criminal will ever make.

But back to Social Media. It’s not that every Social Media platform is disgusting and terrible.

There are some open ones that could be called a social platform, including IRC chat. They go way back, many of the old ones have never needed a “Code of Conduct”. If you don’t like what’s going on there, leave.

The governments have been trying to push people off of things like IRC, because it’s much easier to plant spies and censors (often automated) into centralized “servers” like Discord, Facebook, and Twitter.

Some platforms, such as Mastodon, may be too small for companies that make fake background checks for your Pointy Haired Boss to bother trying to monitor. They may rely on your PHB only ever hearing about Twitter or Facebook. But you still need to watch what you say, and use a pseudonym.

Element (formerly Riot) has alternative servers other than the official ones. If the room and private chats use End to End encryption, that’s a lot better than nothing.

The safest thing to do is go dark, but if you won’t go dark, run silent and run deep. Use an anonymizing VPN or Tor Browser. (Although spyware in Microsoft Windows makes these worthless! Use GNU/Linux.)

Use open source and decentralized services, and E2E encryption, never use your real name, and never trust that anyone is really who they appear to be.

I feel that people shouldn’t have to hear this, but you hear how people get busted and convicted of crimes every day for shit they posted on Facebook or Twitter, or told someone in an app (which can also never be unsaid), without which the police would have otherwise had zero evidence to show the court.

Considering that such “services” are essentially useless wastes of time where, at best, you’ll show off, or show what an asshole you really are to the world, or post pictures of your vacation that literally nobody else cares about, except maybe as evidence, can you really afford all of the potential consequences of “using them” (they use you), both foreseeable and unforeseen?

If that answer is no, or you can’t decide, then odds are you should not be on these vile platforms.

Out, out, damned Facebook! Out, out, damned Twitter!

New York State passes law to take away Second Amendment rights based on your Social Media posts.

New York State passes law to take away Second Amendment rights based on your Social Media posts.

It’s now officially too dangerous to have a Social (Control) Media account in New York State.

This idea of including handing over your Social (Control) Media handles to the Illinois State Police was floated as a proposed amendment to the unconstitutional and impotent FOID Act.

The bill stated that FOID Cards would be revoked at the discretion of ISP based on whether you had posted any “disagreeable content”, with no definition of what this means. That bill never passed, but since the Democrats always use tragedy as an opportunity to pass their sickening and intolerable agenda, expect this one to come up again.

Basically, the police will arbitrarily decide if you’re too dangerous to have guns based on your posts.

Then all the Democrats have to do is tell the police that if you’re not posting pro-Democrat things on your wall, to deny you a gun permit.

Honestly I could take or leave Facebook. Nothing important happens there and it is a window into your thought process and life that the government is coming up with nefarious uses for, such as this, or deciding whether a person who is on disability and posts vacation photos should have their benefits ceased.

(Every time they fuck up and stop Social Security benefits, usually due to one of their own scandals or due to mismatches based on looking for recipients with open arrest warrants, innocent people commit suicide. So you can imagine what will happen when they start using Facebook and TikTok and Twitter as “evidence”.)

It seems New York Democrats have responded to the striking down of one unconstitutional law with several.

Almost like they’re saying “Don’t bother because once you strike down one piece of Democrat Party bullshit, we’ll have a dozen more where that came from!”.

Brave Browser is not a platform for extremists. The Southern Poverty Law Center is way off base. Libertarians are not evil.

Brave Browser is not a platform for extremists. The Southern Poverty Law Center is way off base.

When the SPLC listed the Brave Browser on its list of “applications that are used by extremists”, I nearly spit out my coffee.

It’s just a Web browser. It’s open source. (MPL 2 license, like Firefox, along with various others.) It does not promote a political ideology.

If anything, I think most of the people I’ve seen using it have a strong Libertarian bent.

Libertarians are not extremists, unless you mean extreme case of non-aggression.

Libertarians tend to view the world in a lens of non-interference and not manipulating others to go along with things by way of threats and perverse incentives.

Since the Republican and Democrat parties in the United States prefer to launch drone strikes all over the world and kill people, including our own citizens, and haven’t met a threat or free market manipulation/perversion they don’t like, it seems like they have to hurl accusations of “extremism” at Libertarians.

Nobody knows what the price of milk really is.

It’s subsidized, by you, no matter how much you actually consume.

Nobody knows what a Pfizer COVID shot really costs because the government negotiated to give several times as much of your money away to Pfizer as you would have paid if it was optional.

If you don’t take it, Biden wants you to lose your job. That’s a manipulation.

Few people know what the wars we enter into are about or how much it really costs their family, or how many Americans die pointlessly. The news is censored, and essentially an organ of state propaganda.

Libertarians don’t want the wars. Libertarians are “extreme”.

Libertarians generally don’t want there to be no government at all. We would like the government to have a low and flat rate of taxation that is fair, and less than what the average person pays now. We would like a system of policing, laws, and courts that protect people from violent crimes, rape, property damage, and uphold contracts. “Extreme!”

The whole point of big media and GAFAM/Big Tech is to spy on people and to mentally corrupt them and dumb them down so much that they are governable by the shitheads we have in DC and our state capitals and city halls. They operate by buying you off or clunking you over the head. That’s a “great” system. Anyone who opposes it must be “extreme”.

Libertarians don’t have to be “Climate Deniers”. There are market solutions to lower emissions. Quit subsidizing oil and stop making millions of people around Chicago get in their cars and drive for 20-30 minutes with the engine running to get their emissions sticker being just a couple. “Extreme!”

The far-left paints Libertarians as “far-right” to try to lump it in with the Republicans, who are also vicious psychopaths like the far-left, but Libertarians were the first party to support marriage equality in the United States, said all along that the drug war was ridiculous and the government was paying massive incarceration fees and losing tax revenue and destroying lives with little impact on crime, and says that people should be able to get all of the abortions they want with their own money. And we like immigrants who obey our laws and want to reduce the barriers to legal immigration, and protect them from violence. Clearly racist and horrible and extreme. In fact, I married one.

If people with an agenda want to attack Libertarians as extreme, don’t buy it! There’s nothing “extreme” about being a rational person. Well, I guess you could be extremely rational.

Anyway, I think that they get the idea that people who want to be left alone, and who say “to each their own” (the horrors), are very interested in Free and Open Source Software, encrypted messengers, Tor, and VPNs. They’re probably right.

The reason the fascist left and SJWs twitch so much about the idea of personal freedom is because it’s the last thing they want. To not be able to push you around and steal from you anymore. As such, anything that gives you personal freedom must be wiped off the face of the earth, like Free and Open Source Software and strong encryption.

Encryption is cheap (computationally).

I use several layers of it routinely (VPN, Tor, HTTPS, tox, E2E in Matrix, Secure IRC, etc…) on my Internet traffic just because I can. If it can confound even just some creepy ISP like Comcast or T-Mobile that wants to sell my browsing history, it’s worth something to me. If it prevents a security breach, it’s nice.

Who I talk to or what I talk about is only the business of me and my audience who I am speaking to.

I also think that SPLC may have an ax to grind with Brendan Eich personally over some money he donated to Prop 8 in California, which ultimately got struck down. That happened 13 years ago. People who live in the past and support Cancel Culture don’t impress me. Also, I’m gay. Not “extremely” gay. Just gay.

Let us also pay no mind to the fact that there are gay people working at Brave Software.

There may be some technical reasons to criticize Brave, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

And for the most part, I agree with what they’re trying to do. They’re taking a very bad platform, Chromium, and trying to defang it of APIs dumped in by Big Tech companies in order to spy on you, and they’re trying to put in features that protect you from surveillance capitalism.

Mozilla, on the other hand, is a party styling itself as “Social Justice Warriors” who have done nothing for your freedoms and online safety lately. They fell so hard, so far, and so fast in the last 7 years, that they’re all but unrecognizable at this point in those terms.

Free and Open Source Software should appeal to Libertarians. It’s not Communism, as Microsoft tried to frame it.

If anything, Microsoft is a Communist company. They get state bailouts and Five Year Government Plans to buy failed products like HoloLens. They bribe elected officials, and then Microsoft gets government contracts. The FBI got “hacked” the other day, and their email system was used to send scam emails out.

The US government is incompetent with cybersecurity, yet issues directives, even as the FBI can’t even protect its own networks because the government buys Microsoft products.

Free and Open Source Software is something that people are paid what they think is a fair amount of money to work on, and so they do it. Or they might be a hobbyist. Most are paid though.

Their employer makes money selling products or services based on it, and then we can benefit from it too. Debian is an organization that people voluntarily fund which produces a coherent GNU/Linux operating system based on FOSS.

Proprietary software tends to be unloved software. People who produce it keep it proprietary to avoid having to compete with others. They have a right to attempt this, it’s not illegal, but people should know that it almost always does something wrong to them.

Being proprietary by itself hides how the program works, and that helps obscure the further wrongs and harm it commits. For example, Windows Telemetry only gives you a vague idea of what it transmits to Microsoft. They use strong encryption to prevent you from seeing what’s really in those compressed archives. What’s in there?

Without even being able to know, people jump in and defend it. Think it’s sketchy? “EXTREMIST!” “PARANOID!”

What Microsoft _admits_ their Edge browser sends back to them is enough reason not to use it. What people have found it doing by digging a little deeper is even worse, but it too can hide the true extent of the snooping.

Aside from backdoors that proprietary software hides, the software also tends to be incredibly bloated. Windows has dozens of GB of crap in it that is mostly legacy junk, where security holes can lurk. The US government (among others) finds them and hoards them and then weaponizes them.

The Flame and Stuxnet malware were pieces of art. They evaded all antivirus solutions on the market for years, infested lots of systems, and then when Iran chose to run Windows in their uranium enrichment center, President Obama ordered a strike.

The United States didn’t need to send bombers. It just needed to push a button, and state malware for Windows, laying dormant, sleeping, for years, woke up, and spun the centrifuges too fast, and broke 94% of them beyond repair.

Many faults in the underlying OS end up propagating into the programs that run on it. Web browsers deal with Web sites. Web sites can run anything you’re not blocking. Almost every release of Firefox mentions some CVEs that only affect Windows. These are inherited from the OS, and since nobody but Microsoft can fix the OS, or sometimes it was designed wrong and can’t be fixed, the solution is usually a hack to hopefully block the exploit, but it only protects the program that was patched to avoid triggering the OS bug.

Content Blocking lists have to be updated frequently to keep up with new threats. It turns out that the US Intelligence Agencies run ad blockers to lower attack surface. Not just “malvertising”. Companies can gather data just by placing bids.

During the COVID lockdown, various government agencies in the United States monitored whether people were complying with it or not by bidding on and/or buying data collected by advertisers through Web sites and mobile ad networks.

I use Tracker Control on my Android phone. I went through disabling or uninstalling most of the crap I found from Samsung. They even include a Facebook “Service” you can’t remove which monitors the apps you sign into, even if you don’t have Facebook on your phone, and associates it with your Facebook profile. I deleted the data and disabled that. But that’s what lurks in your Android phone. Not all of the crapware can be turned off, but Tracker Control can block tracker libraries from phoning home, and I pulled the plug on Internet access from all apps I don’t use, and most apps I use are also from the F-Droid store.

The situation on iPhones is worse, because you can’t run Free and Open Source Software, and very nearly all apps in the App Store have Apple and Google trackers in them.

On top of this, Apple plans to add a scanner that goes looking through your phone and reporting in. They claim anyone who objects is probably a “pedophile”. Such a system can and will be used for other things. China will use it to hunt people down for having pro-democracy protests. Muslim states will behead gay people who Apple turned over for the right to keep selling products there.

The government also paid Facebook to help them locate undocumented immigrants. It has geolocation data. They collect it every time they damned well please if you have it on your phone. You’re walking around telling Facebook everywhere you are, even when it’s not open.

The government may or may not have legal grounds to get a warrant, but it hardly needs to. It’s spending your money to buy your data so you can help get yourself arrested, deported, ratted out for being outside during COVID “emergency” powers that Illinois Governor Pritzker keeps giving to himself.

If you want to avoid this, or even limit the harm, you’re an “extremist”.

So, really, the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to shut the hell up. They aren’t helping. There’s really not much of a way that “software” and platforms usually have an extremist agenda. Extremists might _use_ software and platforms. But extremists/terrorists, whatever those are, use Windows, Macs, Android Phones, iPhones….

Almost all of the government’s criminal cases involving January 6th rioters involved Facebook and Twitter somehow. We know that now. But at the time, they told us it was Parler’s fault for not taking the posts down, when actually it was almost all being coordinated on Facebook, which left the posts up.

The far-left pushed to have Parler taken down. They got it booted out of Big Tech app stores, Amazon Web Services deplatformed it… They had to end up being hosted by some company that hardly takes anything down, and then the agitators made hay about that!

And Parler was actually not even close to being the source of the problem, of course narratives get changed around and people are easy to mislead with Big Media on the side of the state and the billionaires.

To clarify, I am not on Parler and I am not planning to be. I don’t accept their Terms of Use. But this example shows what Big Tech and their state allies will go through to maintain hegemony for PRISM companies.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is very obviously some sort of Democrat think tank that would love for you to police your kids for them, unwittingly.

I’m not against parents trying to protect their children, but there are other dangers out there than Internet perverts. Proprietary software is an injustice and Social Control Media platforms that turn people into the product are big problems, indeed.

If you want to block something at the firewall level, block Facebook because FACEBOOK the company is evil.

Quit using Google search. Quit using Skype and Zoom. Replace applications and operating system software with Free and Open Source software.

Use social platforms that are really social, not open sewers.

Encryption, VPNs, and Tor are your friend. They’re tools to block surveillance.

There’s a saying that it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. I would go further and say it’s probably a poor parent who blames Brave, the Web browser.

Children are human beings too, and I think that what horrifies parents is that they won’t turn out carbon copies of themselves if their kids are exposed to a marketplace of ideas.

Most parents unfortunately succeed, and turn out children who are narcissistic, self-centered, one-dimensional, and materialistic mindless consumers. That serves….the state. It really does. They’re happy with things exactly like they are right now.

I think it’s pretty extreme to destroy the human experience to create more wards of the state, who keep toiling away in the fields, and get to enjoy very little in the way of reward for their own labors.

Paying taxes to a central government that’s thousands of miles away and does almost nothing to help them.

Most people under 50 barely know it, but those taxes include a Social Security program that’s got about 10 years left, maybe, before everyone on it gets a 23% benefit cut, and the folks who draw it in retirement now can’t even live off of it.

I think that they should be allowed to save and invest for themselves. They could even leave it to someone if they pass away. My Aunt paid into it for decades, died in a car accident, and they paid nothing.

The program’s “trust funds” which are actually imaginary promissory notes, earn 2-3% interest on “special” government bonds.

The stock market’s average return is over 10% per year.

Am I an “extremist”?

Maybe to some. I mean, the state, the rich, they want people broke all the time. They want people distracted with porn, booze, drugs, and fights with the neighbors. We live in a country that entertains itself by watching the police invade the wrong house and attack people.

I think that’s extreme.

And again, all the fault of the Brave Web browser. After all, the Southern Poverty Law Center produced a white-paper and briefed a bunch of Congress Critters who are all rich and don’t have to live in the world they create for us. Very compelling.