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Journal of shortscreen (2252)

The Fine Print: The following are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Sunday November 07, 21
05:06 AM
Digital Liberty

There exists a sizable population of rubes in the world, often distinguished by their prepensity to swallow every campaign slogan and corporate press release hook, line, and sinker. As of late, an unfortunate fad has taken hold among them, manifesting itself as a sudden craving for authoritarianism.

What has been behind this fad? The answer is, as usual, a billionaire-backed propaganda campaign. While the rubes have dutifully promoted the fallacious narrative attached to this campaign, and specific intermediate goals within it, the ultimate goal is generally beyond their ability to comprehend or articulate. The observable policy agenda and public statements of the puppet masters themselves lay out the details of this ultimate goal. It is an international mass surveillance scheme administered by governments and corporations, best summarized as a Digital Leash, tethered to an invisible master, which shall follow each person from birth to death.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/digital-id-is-the-catalyst-of-our-digital-future/
"First, we need to follow in the footsteps of Estonia and India, with every person granted a unique digital identity so that they have full access to the digital world in the economic, social and political realm."
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/americas-largest-teachers-unions-push-vaccine-mandates-that-will-usher-in-technocratic-digital-id/
"By backing government-mandated vaccinations for school employees and students, the AFT and the NEA are rolling out the red carpet for digital vaccine passports through blockchain DLTs that will be used to aggregate students’ electronic health records (EHRs), “learning analytics,” workforce competency algorithms, and criminal histories into “Social Credit” scores which will determine access to the public square and private markets – a technocratic system planned out in detail long before COVID-19 emerged."
https://medium.com/id2020/immunization-an-entry-point-for-digital-identity-ea37d9c3b77e
"Immunization poses a huge opportunity to scale digital identity — in many developing countries, immunization coverage greatly exceeds birth registration rates."
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/19/health-wealth-digital-passports-surveillance-capitalism/
"They went on to admit that such digital biometric systems would stay in place long after the COVID-19 pandemic was over, and would be exploited for an array of purposes after the rollout"
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_INSIGHT_REPORT_Digital%20Identity.pdf
"Fourth Industrial Revolution digital identity will determine what products, services, and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us"
https://www.yahoo.com/now/illinois-vax-verify-program-worst-200000199.html
“If you have frozen your credit for whatever reason, you have to unfreeze your credit with Experian in order to actually access a vaccination record from this Vax Verify system.”
https://www.transunion.com/blog/statement-of-support-improving-digital-identity-act
Statement of support for the Improving Digital Identity Act | TransUnion

The severity of this threat is not something which can be ignored. It is in the interest of rubes themselves, and everyone who is not a rube, or a slave, or a billionaire aristocrat, that all of the rubes' fallacies must be identified and refuted.

Fallacy #1 - The ends justify the means.
While the rubes are known to express belief in various overarching principles and ideologies, in practice they are willing to discard any of these that may conflict with what they intend to communicate at that particular moment. Their 'beliefs' are more like marked circles on a multiple-choice test form than they are any sort of judgment or understanding of an abstract idea.
Without any honestly held principles to create a solid foundation for good judgment, it is extremely easy to find the 'ends' that will convince rubes to accept any 'means'. For instance, bombing campaigns and blockades can be justified by 'humanitarianism'. In many cases, a single event can bring with it the novelty needed to convert a fallacious and insufficient justification into an accepted one among the rubes. Who would have supported the Patriot Act before Sep 11, 2001? The authors of the bill didn't bother to introduce it. But then a terrorist attack happened and 'something' changed. The Constitution didn't change. The relative military strength of the USA and its foes didn't change. But the rubes were told that the Patriot Act was suddenly justified, and they accepted this.
For the Digital Leash, COVID has been chosen as the 'ends' which justify it. It isn't necessary for the rubes to understand what the Digital Leash is, rather it is enough for them to accept that COVID is 'bad' and 'something must be done'. This is all they know, and so they are in favor of whatever 'must' be done, and will heckle anyone who opposes doing such.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/harvard-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff-on-vaccine-passports-the-delta-variant-and-the-covid-public-health-fiasco_3942556.html
"Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports … they’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else,"
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/539079-vaccine-mandates-federal-employees-biden/
"I am fully vaccinated – but Joe Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates are un-American, unethical and fundamentally illiberal"
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/533903-medical-treatment-denial-unvaccinated-covid/
"Some doctors are openly discussing refusal to treat patients who decline, for whatever reason, to get the jab. This would set a dangerous precedent and shatter fundamental tenets of medical practice."

Fallacy #2 - COVID will disappear.
This is the fallacy chiefly being communicated by the rubes, because they are largely unaware of the Digital Leash and incapable of understanding the issues surrounding fallacy #1.
Although this idea, that COVID will eventually pass by like any rain storm, was not always a central part of the propaganda campaign, it is a bit of wishful thinking that many of the rubes have latched onto. Every additional edict that comes down the pipeline is imagined to be another stepping stone toward this imaginary future.
"If we wash our hands, COVID will go away."
"If we stay six feet apart, COVID will go away."
"If we stay home, COVID will go away."
"If we wear masks, COVID will go away."
"If we get vaccinated, COVID will go away."
"If we introduce a Health Pass, COVID will go away."
Nearly two years since the virus appeared, it is clear that none of these wishes has come true. There is no reason to believe that these strategies will eventually succeed over a longer period of time. And of course, the rubes will not allow any cost-benefit analysis to evaluate these strategies because, as per fallacy #1, the rubes have already preemptively justified them. Contrary to the rubes' wishful thinking, COVID is going to become endemic.

https://theconversation.com/covid-19-will-probably-become-endemic-heres-what-that-means-146435
"A more realistic scenario is that it will be added to the (large and growing) family of infectious diseases that are what is known as “endemic” in the human population."
https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/endemic-covid
"When will it be over? Unfortunately, the answer may be "never"—many experts no longer believe the virus will ever be eradicated, and instead, will become an endemic disease."
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/covid-pandemic-epidemic-disease-coronavirus/
"Most public health experts currently agree COVID is here to stay rather than likely to disappear like small pox, at least for a while. They expect the number of infections to become fairly constant across years with possible seasonal trends and occasional smaller outbreaks."

Fallacy #3 - The Digital Leash isn't so bad.
Rubes will always downplay any harms associated with the Digital Leash. It doesn't matter if they were previously outraged by voter ID requirements. It doesn't matter if they were previously supportive of Hong Kong protestors. It doesn't matter if they were in favor of privacy rights. As explained before, for the rubes these positions are fleeting and superficial, and devoid of any deeper meaning that might apply to other situations. Rubes will sometimes be angered by comparisons to the NKVD, Stasi, or KGB, but they will be unable to provide a rebuttal except to fall back on fallacies #1 and #2.

https://scroll.in/latest/860672/jharkhand-woman-died-of-starvation-because-aadhaar-based-systems-failed-says-non-profit-report
"In November, the dealer reportedly took Kunwar’s fingerprint as biometric authentication is compulsory for supplying food ration according to the online system in Jharkhand, but did not give her the rice immediately. He told her that he would give it later. She died on December 1."
https://memoryholeblog.org/2020/07/14/social-credit-score-usa-visa-blacklists-my-family/
"This system tracks the “trustworthiness” of individuals, businesses, and organizations. “Trustworthiness” here means total and complete submission to the Chinese Communist Party. If the Communist Party deems you to be untrustworthy, you are denied access to plane tickets, train tickets, opening and operating businesses, and more."
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4?op=1
"China's 'social credit' system ranks citizens and punishes them with throttled internet speeds and flight bans if the Communist Party deems them untrustworthy"
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/565860-coming-soon-americas-own-social-credit-system
"The potential scope of the soft social credit system under construction is enormous. The same companies that can track your activities and give you corporate rewards for compliant behavior could utilize their powers to block transactions, add surcharges or restrict your use of products."

Fallacy #4 - My convenience is your obligation.
For many of the recent authoritarian measures, up to and including the Digital Leash, rubes have relied on a novel piece of illogic which attempts to relieve each person of the burden of managing their own risk. They have asserted that members of the wider public must alter their behavior whenever there is a perceived benefit for any one member. One may notice that this thinking is in line with 'woke' efforts demanding alteration of languages, for the stated purpose of accomodating the objection of some tiny minority. It is also the polar opposite of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The wrongness of this idea is easy to illustrate.
The number of Americans with food allergies is greater than the number who are likely to die of COVID. We could completely ban common food allergens from the market. This would be less costly than a COVID lockdown. Do we do it? No. We leave it up to each person who has a peanut allergy to use their brain and refrain from eating peanuts, and to take other precautions like carrying epinephrine. This is a policy that would work well for handling COVID, since the at-risk population has several options to protect themselves, with additional treatments also expected to become available. It was advanced by many experts, but rejected by rubes. Rubes do not want to take precautions to protect themselves as this may be inconvenient. Instead, they want others to make sacrifices on their behalf.
When Alice and Bob meet at a restaurant, it is reasonable to assume that Alice values this meeting above any perceived risk (from COVID or any other cause), or she wouldn't have come. It is reasonable to assume that Bob values this meeting above any perceived risk, or he wouldn't have come. You see, there is a role for each person to play in managing risk. That role is to manage their own risk. Having some guy a hundred miles away order the restaurant closed because he has a peanut allergy does not compute.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/harvard-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff-on-vaccine-passports-the-delta-variant-and-the-covid-public-health-fiasco_3942556.html
"But there was this naive belief that they would protect the older people. Because of that, we did not implement basic public health measures to actually do what was necessary to protect those older high-risk people. And because of that, many of them died unnecessarily from COVID."

The rubes are wrong as always, this time dangerously so. There is nothing more to say except, if we arrive at the rubes' future dystopia, "I told you so."

Sunday September 26, 21
05:38 AM
Code

An eight-legged koala bear has appeared!

        mov [rsp+0x10],rdx
        mov [rsp+0x8],rcx
        sub rsp,byte +0x78
        mov rax,[rsp+0x80]
        movdqu xmm0,[rax]
        movdqa [rsp+0x20],xmm0
        movdqa xmm0,[rsp+0x20]
        movdqa [rsp+0x40],xmm0
        mov rax,[rsp+0x88]
        movdqu xmm0,[rax]
        movdqa [rsp+0x30],xmm0
        movdqa xmm0,[rsp+0x30]
        movdqa [rsp+0x50],xmm0
        movdqa xmm0,[rsp+0x40]
        pxor xmm0,[rsp+0x50]
        movdqa [rsp+0x60],xmm0
        movdqa xmm0,[rsp+0x60]
        movdqa [rsp+0x10],xmm0
        movdqa xmm0,[rsp+0x10]
        ptest xmm0,[rsp+0x10]
        mov eax,0x1
        mov ecx,0x0
        cmovz ecx,eax
        test ecx,ecx
        jnz L_0540
        mov byte [rsp],0x0
        jmp L_0541
L_0540: mov byte [rsp],0x1
L_0541: movzx eax,byte [rsp]
        add rsp,byte +0x78
        ret

I'm no compiler, but I feel like this could be optimized.

Friday August 13, 21
03:03 AM
/dev/random

“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals!” - Edward Snowden

In 2019 the world saw how corrupt government officials and complicit media had looked the other way while the sex trafficking of minors took place in the Epstein saga. Turns out, all of this has happened before.

The Franklin Scandal
by Nick Bryant
629 pages

my summary:

Nebraska, 1985. Crooked banker Lawrence E. King, who would later be convicted for embezzling more than $30 million from the Franklin Credit Union, had a cousin named Barbara Webb. Together with her husband, they looked after no less than eight foster kids, whom they abused incessantly. After an incident where children had fled to a neighbor's house and spoke about the abuse, police were called and visited the Webbs. Some of the children were removed from the household but no charges were brought for child abuse. After a second incident and a visit by social workers, still no charges. After a third incident and visit by both police and social workers, more of the children were removed from the household. Then one of the girls told her new foster mother that she had been molested by Mr. Webb, and furthermore that she had been taken to parties by King where minors performed sex acts with adults. After the allegations were shared with police, a judge removed the remaining kids from the Webb household. However, a county attorney still declined to bring charges against the Webbs, much to the dismay of the social workers.

Details of these events would eventually reach the Foster Care Review Board whose members were duly horrified. In addition to the aforementioned allegations of sex trafficking, the board would also learn of a report written by a Boys Town employee who conducted her own investigation into accusations of child sexual abuse, as well as allegations from another victim. They handed this information off to the Nebraska legislature and expressed their desire that law enforcement get off their asses and treat allegations of child abuse seriously. But the state attorney general's office and the Omaha PD responded with various statements akin to 'nothing to see here, move along'

By now it was the beginning of 1989 and the Franklin Credit Union had collapsed financially. The legislature formed a committee to run its own investigation into both the demise of the credit union and the sex trafficking. A lawyer and a cop were appointed for this purpose. The FBI and local news media joined in the chorus of 'nothing to see here, move along', mocking the committee, and lambasting the general public for spreading 'rumors' and falling for 'conspiracy theories'. Soon, the investigation seemed to be going nowhere and several members of the committee resigned after an internal dispute. Then a private investigator named Caradori was brought on board.

Caradori started uncovering leads left and right, locating and interviewing additional victims. He was harassed and threatened by the FBI, smeared by the fake news, but he kept plowing ahead. Can you guess what happens next? Caradori dies in a plane crash. How convenient.

By this time a grand jury had been formed, seemingly to reach the preordained conclusion that the Franklin committee was wrong about everything and that there was 'nothing to see here'. Although King was a crook who stole millions, the FBI/police/fakenews were adamant that he absolutely, positively, did not pimp out kids. What their ostensible motivation was for rushing to this guy's defense is never explained. Though in actuality we know that King was a GOP hotshot, and that participants in the pedo parties, as described by victims, were Important People in Nebraska as well as national politicians.

So the special prosecutor called witness after witness in front of the grand jury to trash and discredit the victims. The FBI convinced two victims to change their stories and testify that they colluded to fabricate their claims as part of a get-rich-quick scheme. Nevermind the fact that these two victims didn't even come forward until three years AFTER the earliest documented allegations.

That is an extremely condensed version of the first half of the book. What follows is a detailed play-by-play of a trial whereby the state persued perjury charges against one victim who wouldn't recant her story. Then the appeals. But also the Washington DC angle...

Around the same time King was harvesting disadvantaged Nebraska kids (including from Boys Town) to use for pedo orgies and satanist rituals, there were dirty deeds going down in DC, where King also had a townhouse. Self-proclaimed CIA asset Craig Spence was hosting orgies in a bugged house in DC. He was famously found dead in a hotel room from drug overdose, having left a cheerfully vague suicide note. Henry Vinson ran a male escort service in DC until being busted for credit card fraud, at which time the Secret Service seized his files that would have revealed the identities of clients.

Vinson describes his connection to King and Spence.

Other tidbits:

One supposed lover of Lawrence E. King and two family members of victims died in strange "suicides". One victim suffocated while sitting in a hospital room.

The book contains scans of various affidavits, letters, transcripts, etc.

Conclusion:

There are many heroes in the story, upstanding citizens who tried to do their jobs properly and ensure justice was done. But in the end, they lie defeated or dead, having been outgunned and outmaneuvered by deepstate villains who largely got away with their crimes (and got promoted).

Thursday July 01, 21
01:04 PM
News

Fox infamously argued in court that someone exposing fake news could not be considered a whistleblower and, more recently, that Tucker Carlson shouldn't be taken seriously.

MSNBC chose to rely on that same argument to excuse Rachel Maddow for her Russia Russia Russia fairy tales.

Saturday May 22, 21
02:44 AM
Business

Big Brother and Big Retail (and Public Citizen WTF?) want to saddle small online sellers with more mandates and red tape.

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/dem/releases/durbin-cassidy-grassley-hirono-coons-tillis-introduce-bill-to-ensure-greater-transparency-for-third-party-sellers-of-consumer-products-online
https://www.securingindustry.com/cosmetics-and-personal-care/online-retailers-take-issue-with-inform-consumers-act/s106/a13286/

Curiously, there is no requirement for brick&mortar CEOs to display their phone numbers on every advertisement and storefront.

Friday January 01, 21
03:18 AM
Hardware

This is a journal entry about VFFS baggers and associated gear. Once upon a time, I worked with this stuff. Now I don't, and will probably forget all about it eventually.

VFFS stands for vertical-form-fill-seal and refers to a machine which forms flat packaging material around a vertical tube which is open at the top for product to enter. At the bottom of the tube, after advancing a certain length of material, it is generally sealed shut with heat and then cut loose to make one bag. Gusseted or flat-bottom bags would involve an additional step of folding the material, whereas a simple bag without any folding is called a pillow.

The packaging material is like a roll of toilet paper sitting on a spindle at one end of the machine, but instead of paper it is usually made of plastic (think candy bar wrapper), and depending on the size of the bag being produced, the roll might be 10-20" wide and weigh 50lbs. As it unravels, it passes across some parallel rollers before being curled around a forming tube. On the side of the tube, the two ends of the material meet and overlap, then this 'seam' is closed up with heat. How do we advance the material? Some machines had a carriage underneath the forming tube which would grip each bag and pull it downward before then sealing it with heated jaws and cutting it with an actuated blade. More common designs used a rubber belt pressing against the forming tube to accomplish the pulling action. Some also use a perforated rubber belt and vacuum pump to make the material 'stick' to the belt. All of these machines also used some combination of spring-loaded rollers and/or a second unwinding motor to regulate tension on the material as it feeds through the machine.

Sound simple so far? Once you have a machine that can spit out bag after bag, without much operator attention, the next step is to crank it up to eleven. Higher production rate equals more profit. This is when the timing of the machine becomes critical. The bagger has to synchronize with upstream equipment which is supplying the product for each bag, and possibly with downstream equipment that transfers the bag to a packing/loading area. It also has to keep its own functions synchronized. You can't pull the material too fast, it might tear. You can't pull it at the same you're cutting/sealing it (well, maybe you can, see below) or it gets jammed up. It also takes a certain amount of time for motors, solenoids, and pneumatic cylinders to do their thing. If yesterday the whole thing was tuned to perfection but today your cylinder is gunked up then the timing might need readjustment. In addition to the parts of the process described so far, many machines would be setup with additional bells and whistles which also had strict timing requirements. Examples would be a device to stamp a production code on each bag, an air nozzle that would blow into the tube at a certain time to help puff up the shape of the bag, or a 'shaker' that would oscillate to help settle product inside the bag.

Early computerized baggers carried forward the concept of a 360 degree cycle corresponding to each bag. Prior to the computer control, you might have a machine with a large wheel inside it that turned one revolution per bag. There'd be holes in the wheel in which to insert a peg, and each time the wheel went around the peg would make contact with a lever which would cause something to happen. That would be how you set your timing. With digital controls, you just enter a number on a keypad instead. Advance the material from 10-100 degrees, engage the seam seal bar from 110-220 degrees, engage the stamp at 250, and cut the bag at 300, etc. In some cases the length of each bag would be determined by the programmed operation of a servo or stepper motor like this, but there is also a lot of packaging material manufactured with registration marks which are then picked up by an optical sensor to get a more consistent bag length. Later machines abandoned the angle-based timing specs and allowed settings to be entered in terms of inches, millimeters, or milliseconds instead.

In order to get past some of these limitations and increase production rate further, continuous-motion machines were introduced. These advance the packaging material at a fixed speed instead of starting and stopping with each bag. Instead of a seal bar which pressed against the material while it was stationary, a thin metal band is used which is also driven continuously. The mechanisms which close and cut the bag also have to keep moving downward during the time they are making contact with it.

The UI on these things ranged from a something similar to an old pocket calculator, to an embedded 486 running a DOS program and a touch screen, to a Celeron board running Windows XP. They were generally not great, as many common operations required a long series of button presses or navigating several menus. While old machines had various cranks used to manually adjust the position and alignment of components, for accomodating different bag sizes and whatnot, newer machines replaced these with servos which were supposed to automatically adjust. Of course, for that to work correctly required a certain amount of patience and luck. On one type of machine which was prone to rudely ramming components together and jamming up, I saw some manual adjusters (made from spare parts of the old machines) get welded on to prevent this.

How does the product get into the bag? It is dropped in from above by another machine, for instance the Combination Weigher. I've been told that these were invented by Ishida in the early '80s and ran off of a Z80 CPU. The way these work is that product (peanuts, pretzels, and other such loose solids work well on these machines) dumps onto the center of the machine and then, with the aid of vibration, makes its way outward into one of many hoppers arranged along the perimeter (usually 14 hoppers). Hoppers dump their contents into a scale below. The scale sends a signal to a 16-bit ADC which gives the computer a weight/mass value in tenths of a gram. At any given time, there is essentially a random product weight sitting in each scale. The computer picks up to 10 of them and calculates the total weight that would be produced by dumping each possible combination of scales. If you have 10 scales and at least one of them has to open to dump something then there are 1023 possible combinations. It picks the combination that most closely matches the target weight, without going under. Statistically this works out well enough that it can dump something within a few grams of the target weight nearly every time.

Because the scales have one tenth of a gram precision, the computer adds a programmed safety margin to its internal target weight and samples the ADCs a second time before dumping to verify that the weight is still at or above programmed weight. This tends to add a few/10 grams of indicated weight in each bag. The actual weight being dependent on the accuracy of the machine and other factors (like some of the peanuts bouncing out and landing on the floor and never making it to the bag). If you're an MBA puke you might be tempted to devise an elaborate scheme to defeat this safety margin to "save money" based on faulty assumptions and government regulators letting you get away with shipping a certain proportion of underweight packages. Don't be an MBA puke.

That's good for now. Maybe later I'll have more trivia to post.

Sunday December 20, 20
12:43 AM
Hardware

Every year or two I'll do a search to find out if the damnable 16:9 fad is going away yet. This time I got some hits!

4:3 movies? https://noamkroll.com/why-the-old-school-43-aspect-ratio-is-coming-back-with-a-vengeance-right-now/
This horrendous article informs me that 3:2 laptops exist: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/are-16-9-laptops-on-their-way-out/
Microsoft is even pushing 3:2? https://www.windowscentral.com/pc-makers-need-shift-32-aspect

Huawei is selling 13" and 14" laptops with 2160x1440 resolution. Nice! Too bad about the keyboards and near total lack of ports though.

I don't know if 2160x1440 desktop monitors exist, since when I search for that term I get results for 2560x1440 instead because search engines suck.

BTW, there seems to be a minor bug in SoylentNews. The upper left of the page above "SoylentNews Journal System" still displays "~cafebabe (894)" whose journal I viewed previously, while I'm writing in my own journal.

Thursday October 29, 20
09:56 PM
News

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept

Reality check, folks: news has long since been replaced by narratives. Journalism has been replaced by cheerleading.

Tuesday October 13, 20
11:54 AM
/dev/random

Billionaires back Black Lives Matter

the decision to advance the racialist program of Black Lives Matter is aimed at dividing the working class and preventing the emergence of an independent and unified working class movement against the capitalist system.

A timely article dated Oct 11...
.
.
.
.
.
.
of 2016

Friday August 07, 20
03:05 AM
/dev/random

Jimmy Dore: Yeah, I mean, everybody's behind that goal. Like I said, if it was 75 to 74, if it was even 80 to 70, these are overwhelming... there doesn't seem to be any light at the tunnel... at the end of the tunnel and the train is going full speed. So we're heading for a crash. Right now they're getting ready to kick 27 million people out of their houses, while also not giving them healthcare, while also not giving them a UBI or extending their unemployment or anything, and that's coming from the top of the party. There's no one inside the party in congress who will even push back against this a little. Bernie Sanders will not call out Chuck Schumer. He will not call out Nanci Pelosi. In fact Bernie Sanders voted for the biggest upward transfer of wealth in the history of human kind and then he lied about what he did. So, 96 to nothing, when do you start realizing this is a failed strategy, Brent? I mean I love you and I loved your work, and I think it's great that you're exposing their corruption. But this is a fool's errand. You knew what the... result of this thing was going to be before you went there. It's NUTS what's going on. And you know the only way... there's... this doesn't make any sense. What is the success rate? Zero. We're going backwards. Hillary Clinton offered us 50 and over for medicare, Joe Biden won't even give us 55. We're going backwards. So if you hate Trump and you hate right wingers and fascism, we're going to get a worse one in four years. It's not going away. Joe Biden and Barack Obama made it possible for Donald Trump to send... goons into Portland and arrest them and throw them in rented vans. Barack Obama signed section 1021 of the NDAA. He knew what he was doing. The ACLU knew what he was doing. I knew what he was doing at the time, so did Glenn Greenwald and everybody else. Here we are and nobody's talking about it. This party is not a party. The people want it to be a party but it's not. This is an organization setup by rapacious oligarchs to screw you. So what the Democratic party is, is the car in front of the ambulance that won't get out of the fucking way. Because everybody knows we want medicare for all and a UBI and debt relief, and mortgage relief and they won't goddamn do it. They're the ones stopping it. Nanci Pelosi was the one who stopped the UBI. Nanci Pelosi was the one who wanted to means test every goddamn thing they gave to working people, as she funneled 5 trillion dollars upward to her husband. That's what's going on in this party. This is not a political party, as much as you want it to be. So what is your strategy going forward?

Brent Welder: You know, and we haven't even started talking about superdelegates...