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It's important to know what power actually is if you want to take the power back, fight the power, feel the power of love, or just to know when you've got the power and if it's OVER 9000. It's recently come to my attention that some folks don't, so I thought about it a bit and I'll lay the most basic fundamentals out for you all.

Power in the human context is the ability to exert your will on a situation. Nothing more, nothing less.

Direct, personal power (your ability to do something relevant and influential) is the only real power. The primary varieties of this are the ability to create and to destroy. Most other varieties are eventually rooted back in one of these if you follow them back far enough, though they may be notable enough to warrant their own name. Yes, complex interplays of multiple power sources are quite common but we're talking fundamentals today.

The most important of these is probably proxied power. You know, like governments wield. Be it power granted them by their citizens or by force of arms, they only hold this power by the consent of those from which it ultimately originates.

Now, that's not to say there aren't force multipliers, like say having a gun. They absolutely exist but they're not power in and of themselves; they require human agency to mean anything.

I'm also not discounting that non-human or even non-living things can exert influence in the world - the sun does this every day - that's just not what we're discussing here.

One last bit before I save this entry. Money is not power. It can rent power. It can buy power. But it is not itself anything but paper, ones and zeroes, or whatever. Why do I say this? Because the person with the direct power, proxied power, or some sort of force multiplier must first be willing to rent or sell it. Granted, this is so often the case that it's an extremely useful thing to have but don't make the mistake confusing what something can be exchanged for and the thing to be exchanged.

There, hope that's cleared up for you now if you hadn't thought it through yourselves yet. Hopefully it'll make getting to the heart of the matter a little easier in discussions down the road.

Comma.ai founder George Hotz wants to free humanity from the AI simulation

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.

“There’s no evidence this is not true,” an animated Hotz told a crowd at his SXSW talk on Friday, aptly titled “Jailbrealing the Simulation” and billed on the festival’s website as an exploration of whether breaking out of a simulated universe means we can “meet God” and kill him. “It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.”

[...] It’s hard to know seriously to take Hotz sometimes; he strikes me as someone who often says something to get a reaction or to verbalize his inner monologue as a way of making sense of it. And he said as much onstage. “Do I actually believe it? Some days yes,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.”

The crowd didn’t much care either way. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Hotz if he would consider partnering with transhumanists — people who believe in humanity’s eventual evolution by way of merging the body and mind with robotics and AI — to found his church. Hotz was rather ambivalent to the idea; perhaps he didn’t think people would take him at his word. But if he does a start a church, the sermon he gave at SXSW yesterday was delivered to a room of would-be believers.

Smoke weed everyday.

Related: George Hotz's Comma.Ai Cancels Comma One

I doubt there is anyone at Soylent who doesn't purchase anything online. I do, pretty regularly, because I can find things that aren't available in my local area. Things that might be available, I can find for a fraction of the price online. So, I shop online.

Tracking packages is usually pretty straightforward. The vendor sends you a tracking number, which is often a live link to the carrier's tracking site. If it isn't a live link, well, we probably all recognize a USPS, UPS, or Fedex number, so we go to the appropriate tracking site, and copy/paste the number in. Unless the shipper used not-so-Smartpost, we generally know within a day when our package will arrive.

But, overseas shipping? That isn't so very straightforward. Over time, I've learned to recognize some of those numbers, but new ones pop out of nowhere. How do you keep up with all of them?

You no longer have to keep up with all of them. Or, any of them, if you don't want to.

http://parcelsapp.com/en/tracking/SYBAA52472888

Guy named Pavel Tisunov has done all the work, and created a web page, as well as apps for Android and iPhone to track almost everything, it seems. The list of carriers tracked can be found http://parcelsapp.com/en/carriers

Those of you who are multilingual might be interested in his blog - http://parcelsapp.com/blog/

I wish I had found Pavel a couple years ago! It appears that his earliest blog posts were in April 2017. If I could read his entries, I might have a better idea how long he's been around.

Enjoy!

And, thank God for diversity, and for Russians, huh?

There seems to be a major controversy in Maryland right now. The gun grabbers are attempting to - well - to grab guns. I stumbled over the story on this site: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/daniel-zimmerman/maryland-gun-owners-will-not-comply-gun-grabbers-and-legislators-freak-out/

Admittedly, this is a biased site. I happen to agree with the aims of The Truth, but it is biased. So, I did a search for articles on the subject, "We will not comply". I found one "mainstream" media mention of it: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/ac-cn-wicomico-not-comply-20190226-story.html

I've scrolled three pages into my search results, and have not found another mainstream media story. I've found infowars, callmegav, conservativefiringline, rallyforourrights, a related story at investmentwatchblog, dcclothesline, unclesamsmisguidedchildren - in short, hit after hit after hit, page after page of hits. But, mainstream media isn't covering the story at all.

Let me change search terms, and see if MSM is even covering the vote on the bill - - -

Search term used, "Maryland HOUSE BILL 786" Results for MSM stories after scanning two pages of hits = ZERO Are they trying to pass this bill without any publicity at all? Keeping it hidden from voters? WTF?

Several small time news sources located inside of Maryland carry stories. I thought I found a hit at the Washington Post - but that was a false hit, on an entirely different subject.

Odd - if all the rest of MSM is refusing to cover a story, we might expect Fox to carry it. I don't even see a Foxnews hit.

Go ahead, do your own searches. If you can find liberal media stories on the house bill in general, let us know what search terms you used.

If you can find liberal media stories on the We Will Not Comply opposition to HOUSE BILL 786, please, PLEASE let us know how you found them.

It's this sort of apparent coverup that lends credence to the likes of infowars.

Lenovo Unveils ThinkStation P520 & P920 ‘AI Workstations’: Xeon Plus Quadro RTX 6000

Ubuntu Linux based systems shipping with 10 or 24 cores, 128 GB or 384 GB of RAM.

Maybe that will be the new minimum in 15 years.

R. Kelly

R. Kelly denies sexual abuse allegations in explosive interview

R. Kelly was "unhinged" in interview with Gayle King, columnist says (12m36s)

Gayle King talks about her explosive R. Kelly interview on CBSN (7m18s)

Full interview is apparently around 80 minutes and has not been released in its entirety yet. Even Oprah wants the full video.

Turmoil or manipulation?

Previously: R. Kelly Contracts Ligma
R. Kelly Exposes Himself

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras: The most fun you'll have with a history lesson

Patricia Clarkson on leading the Mardi Gras group breaking with tradition

In New Orleans, The Fight Over Blackface Renews Scrutiny Of A Mardi Gras Tradition

Mobile mom says shoes thrown from Mardi Gras float sent her kid to the ER

Popeyes might be onto something with chicken-tender-cradlin’ Mardi Gras beads

Sounds like a great way to get grease all over your shirt on Fat Tuesday.

And so I found a decent Debian Stretch build (from here), and it seems to be much more suitable for my purposes than Ubuntu Bionic. For one thing Debian seems to be actually maintaining an ARM build of Transmission 2.94 even if it is in Sid, something which the Ubuntu Transmission PPA doesn't have, much to my irritation. NextCloud proved fairly easy to install, but I found some irritations with setting up MariaDB as its database backend. The mysql_secure_installation script that is the minimum that one needs to do to secure MariaDB/MySQL is broken. Though it says that it will change the MariaDB root password, after prompting you for a new one, IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO THAT. MariaDB still uses a blank root password even after that rigmarole. You have to do this bit of black magic in order to actually change the root password:

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';
update user set plugin="mysql_native_password";

Then restart MariaDB. I then had to check whether the script even actually did all the other stuff that it said it did. That shit's beyond idiotic.

Moving the old LetsEncrypt certificates I got for the dynamic domain I have with afraid.org from the Odroid to the ROCKPro64 was relatively trivial, as was the dynamic DNS update script I've been using, so now I can get some access from the outside to the NAS.

NextCloud was relatively easy to install after that, but there's some weirdness involving php-imagick and libgomp in Apache ("cannot allocate memory in static TLS block") that I was never able to satisfactorily fix. I've begun uploading pictures from my phone to it with the NextCloud Android app but I noticed that it's dog slow doing that, and it might actually be faster to use the web interface to do bulk uploading of that kind. The app has all sorts of missing in it, as you can't tag pictures with it for one (you have to use the web app to do that for now), and I've been thinking of using tags to organise the rather sizeable collection of pictures Mrs. Wyrm and I have been accumulating. But I suppose it's a start, and I can install it on Mrs. Wyrm's phone and have it automatically upload the pictures on her phone to the NAS whenever she's at home. I'd rather keep such things there than continue to entrust them to Google as we've been doing.

Now, it's off to building Kodi. This is proving to be as big a challenge as I've expected it to be, given the way the current LibreElec builds are described as alpha-quality. Looks like I'm going to have to Use The Source, and the information on doing that is sparse to say the least. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to have built a working X on the RockChips and so Kodi needs to run on framebuffer. I found one reference that seems like it might be a good start, but there's scads of dependencies that need to be installed before Kodi will even build. And so I'm partying in Dependency Hell like it's 1999... More updates on this as I make progress. If I get really pissed at this I'm going to stick to Kodi on the Odroid with my movies and TV shows on an NFS or other distributed file system mount from the RP64. I want to later repurpose the Odroid as a secure auth server for my home machines once I've gotten Kodi working on the RP64, but if this is not feasible I'll have to buy some other smaller SBC to do that.

Opened my mail, and found "Dissenter is a Gamer Changer". Hmmm - from Gab. New member or something? Sorry, not much interested . . . scan on down through the list of emails. Slide the mouse toward the top of the page to select another tab, and I notice "Dissenter is a browser extension".

Alright, curiosity piqued.

GAB

Earlier this week we launched our new sister app, Dissenter. Dissenter is a browser extension and website that allows you to comment on any URL online and also see what others have commented. This includes Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, Tweets, YouTube videos, CNN articles, and more.

Many people are saying that Dissenter.com is a “game changer” for the internet. It empowers the voice of The People and makes surfing the web fun again. At a time when most websites have removed or heavily censored their comment sections, Dissenter brings back the wild west of internet comments.

We fundamentally believe that Dissenter is going to be revolutionary for free speech online, but don’t take our word for it:

Dave Cullen says Dissenter is “incredibly innovative and important.

Styx says “I believe Dissenter has the capability of becoming the next big thing in tech.”

The Financial Times says “There is a clear demand for this sort of freedom. Some argue the concept is therefore a billion dollar idea with the potential to completely disrupt conventional media's control of its comment real estate.”

Discover what the entire internet is talking about, literally. Visit Dissenter.com and download the Dissenter browser extension today.

Alright, didn't we do this once before? I very specifically remember an extension that permitted people to comment on a page, but those comments didn't show up on the page unless you had that extension installed and enabled. It was kinda cool, but, I dropped it for reasons - probably security related reasons.

Alright then - let's look at this reincarnated potential security disaster that will lead the NSA right straight to my front door . . . I think maybe I'll test it with Chrome, keep it away from my Fox family . . .

Youtube "tutorial" on the extension here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsdpKfe0w4

Hmmm - to comment you have to create an account. That isn't looking really great. If I wanted to leave anonymous comments, I'm kinda screwed. I usually sign my name to stuff anyway, but, I may just feel like visiting the White House to tell Donald Duck how damned STUPID he is for - oh, I don't know - appointing Ajit Pai? I can tell him nicely, and sign my name, or I can tell him rudely, and remain anonymous, except I can't do so with this extension.

Hmmm again. Can't seem to sign up and/or log in with the fork of Chromium that I installed to. I can read comments, but can't make comments, sign up, or log in. It *appears* that a Gab login credential might work to sign in - which is not good. Signing in to use the extension should be separate from any site's log in credentials.

Let me try this on another browser . . .

Ahhhhhh - Browser extension installed on Iron browser, and it works much better. I attempt to log in, it rejects my first login attempt, so I sort through some of my logins. Naturally, since I'm already suspicious that my Gab credentials will work on the extension, I try one of those credentials first. And, I'm in.

I'm presented with a popup:

Dissenter | Comment On Any URL Online. is requesting permission to access your account.

This application will be able to:

Read access to your profile and feeds
Send new posts
You can revoke this app's access later under Settings / Authorized Apps.

Nahhhh - I'm mildly impressed with Gab, and I agree with their stated purpose in life - but I don't trust them with the ability to track me around the internet any more than I trust FaceFuck. Cancel. Errr, wait. Maybe I'm being hasty. I don't USE Iron for anything. In fact, it doesn't have a single login saved. This login to Gab is the first and only login it has.

Nuts. "Authorize". See what I see, I guess.

Hmmmmm - still broken. I have "signed in" repeatedly, but still can't make a comment. Does Dissenter rely on something that my forks of browsers have ripped out of the browsers?

Ehhh, time to uninstall, and purge the browser's cache history. I've devoted more than enough time to this thing already.

New CPAC stars: Black gun rights activists

For a few minutes at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, the message was more Malcolm X than William F. Buckley.

Sporting a red hoodie, his hair in cornrows, Maj Toure touted his group, Black Guns Matter. "We go where there's high violence, high crime, high gun control — high slave mentalities, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and inform urban America about their human right, as stated in the Second Amendment, to defend their life."

A besuited interviewer seated on stage next to Toure told him, "You don’t look or sound like your stereotypical Second Amendment advocate."

[...] Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, said Trump was one driver of black interest in gun rights, along with general anxiety about the state of the world. "They are seeing the uncertainty within society across the board," he said. Smith, who did not participate in CPAC, founded his group in 2015, hoping he might attract a few hundred members. Membership quickly climbed into the thousands, and it tripled in the months following Trump’s inauguration. He said the group now has about 30,000 members.

Smith said that 60 percent of his members are black women, who often feel the most vulnerable to violent crime.