Rant

From the Maine Wire, Mon. October 20, 2025:

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Congratulations to the No Kings protesters! They did it! There are no kings in the US. Trump is still our president.

I had to go out yesterday to sign up at a new range. The new range is nice. But they are a membership club; pay in advance for a year, take an orientation class, provide proof you can pass a background check (a CCW or a recent firearm purchase qualifies), and proof of a safety class.

This was a worrisome trip because I would need to head out near the local college town; I knew the “No Kings” idiots would be out protesting the lack of freedom of speech. And they might have become violent. Best to avoid.

I was able to avoid because the range isn’t near the town. It was good to know that I didn’t have to deal with them.

On the way home, pulling into my local town square, who should be there? Those selfsame people I was trying to avoid.

There were some yelling across the street as there were counterprotesters. I couldn’t tell who were the protesters and who were the counterprotesters. Or maybe it was just poor English on the part of the protesters, making their signs impossible to understand.

The sad part is that this nonsense has made it to my little town. My alert posture just went up a few more notches.

Communism, an idea so good it has to use force to keep its citizens in.

The fact is that Communism requires that all dissenting voices be silenced. They are silenced with violence. People are sent to re-education camps, they are disappeared in the dead of the night, and they are grabbed off the streets, never to be seen again. All with the authority and violence of the government.

The image of people being disappeared is what the anti-American agitators are using when they say that “masked men are kidnapping people off of the street.” It invokes images of communist countries doing just that.

The difference is that these people are not being disappeared. They are being arrested. They get lawyers, or they had lawyers.

When ICE agents detain a criminal illegal alien outside a courtroom, that criminal has had due process.

Are these arrests violent? Only if the person being arrested makes them that way.

Soft Violence

When the Tea Party came into existence, I wanted to fly the Gadsden flag. I did not for fear of how it might affect my wife and children. I flew an American Flag instead and still worried.

People were silenced by fear of reprisals. This was the time of cancel culture from the left.

Voice a double-bad-think opinion, and you were canceled. Voice a bad-think opinion, and you might only be warned.

You were made to feel alone, but for a few lonely voices in the dark. You were told by every talking head that you were guilty of bad-think and would be punished if found out.

This is also the screaming and in your face, just shy of physical assault.

Physical Violence

This is where you start to see the laying on of hands. Physical beatings, shoving, and punching. Actual battery.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago, he talks about being stuffed into a cattle car. The violence was being dealt out not only by the guards but also by fellow prisoners.

But they weren’t “fellows” in the classic sense. Most of the prisoners were regular people stuffed in the pipeline leading to the Gulag. These were criminals, and they colluded with the guards for privileges and in exchange kept the rest of the prisoners cowed.

We see that in the criminal attacks in Seattle. Roaming gangs of violent thugs impose their beliefs with truncheons and bats. And if those don’t work, even more.

In Cabaret, the maître d` of the Kit Kat Klub kicked some Brownshirts out of the club. The cowards were not willing to do anything about it at the time. Instead, they waited until the maître d` had left the club, then beat the shit out of him.

They sent the message, “Oppose us, and bad things will happen to you.”

We see this type of thuggish behavior in the cities. We see it when conservatives set up tables to have a conversation and are driven off campus by gangs of feral louts.

And the state defends these thugs. Regular folk who stand up for themselves and others are punished by the state. Look at how the authorities treated prayer groups defending themselves vs. the antifa lice that attacked them. Look at the violence against federal buildings by antifa and then what happened when grandma walked through the Capitol.

This violence is vastly asymmetric, and it is intended to be. At every step of the process, you are told to back down. You are told that you have to restrain yourself. And if you don’t? Ask Kyle what happens.

Murder

Ask Lincoln how Democrats behave when they lose. Ask JFK, killed by a communist. Ask almost any victim of political violence in the last century how Democrats behave.

Unfortunately, you can’t. Most of those people were murdered.

The goal of the left is to create an event to prove the right is the more violent.

The problem is, we are. When we react, we do it with force and with a will to get things done.

Again, ask Kyle. When it was time, he pulled the trigger, and cos-playing degenerates died. That boy showed remarkable trigger discipline.

And this is not new.

In 1977, JoAnne Deborah Byron, AKA Assata Olugbala Shakur, was convicted of murdering a police officer.

This happy little communist worm was a member of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and other groups. She was a murderer, a terrorist, and a bank robber. After she was convicted, she was sentenced to life + 26-33 years.

Of course the standard whining leftists blamed it all on racism.

She escaped, stayed on the lam for a while before moving to Cuba to live the life of a privileged Communist.

On September 26th, 2025, she became a good communist. Cuba has reported she died of health complications.

One of the best tools I’ve discovered in my many years of computer work is AMANDA.

AMANDA is free software for doing backups. The gist is that you have an Amanda server. On schedule, the server contacts Amanda clients to perform disk backups, sending the data back to the server. The server then sends the data to “tapes”.

What makes the backup so nice is that it is configured for how long you want to keep live backups and then attempts to do it efficiently. My backups are generally for two years.

On the front side, you define DLEs. A DLE is a host and disk or filesystem to dump. There are other parameters, but that is the smallest DLE configuration.

Before the dump starts, the server gets an estimate for each DLE based on using no other backups, a full dump, or a partial dump or multiple partial dumps. Once it obtains this information, it creates a schedule to dump all the DLEs.

The data can be encrypted on the client or the server, is transferred to the server, sometimes to a holding disk, sometimes directly to tape. I can be compressed on the server or the client.

In the end, the data is written to disk.

Every client that I have is backed up using Amanda. It just works.

In the olden days, I configured it to dump to physical tapes. If everything fits on one tape, great. If it didn’t, I could use multi tape systems or even tape libraries. The tape size limitations were removed along the way so that DLEs can be dumped across multiple tapes.

The backups are indexed, making it easy to recover particular files from any particular date.

More importantly, the instructions for recovering bare metal from backup are written to the tape.

Today, tapes are an expensive method of doing backups. It is cheaper to backup to disk, if your disks are capable of surviving multiple failures.

Old-Time Disks

You bought a disk drive; that disk drive was allocated as a file system at a particular mount point, ignoring MS DOS stuff.

Drives got bigger; we didn’t need multiple drives for our file systems. We “partitioned” our drives and treated each partition as an individual disk drive.

The problem becomes that a disk failure is catastrophic. We have data loss.

The fix is to dump each drive/partition to tape. Then if we need to replace a drive, we reload from tape.

Somebody decided it was a good idea to have digitized images. We require bigger drives. Even the biggest drives aren’t big enough.

Solution: instead of breaking one drive into partitions, we will combine multiple physical drives to create a logical drive.

In the alternative, if we have enough space on a single drive, we can use two drives to mirror each other. Then when one fails, the other can handle the entire load until a replacement can be installed.

Still need more space. We decide that a good idea is to use a Hamming code. By grouping 3 or more drives as a single logical drive, we can use one drive as a parity drive. If any drive fails, that parity drive can be used to reconstruct the contents of the missing drive. Things slow down, but it works, until you lose a second drive.

Solution: combine RAID-5 drives with mirroring. Never mind, we are now at the point where for every gigabyte of data you need 2 or more gigabytes of storage.

Enter Ceph and other things like it. Instead of building one large disk farm, we create many smaller disk farms and join them in interesting ways.

Now data is stored across multiple drives, across multiple hosts, across multiple racks, across multiple rooms, across multiple data centers.

With Ceph and enough nodes and locations, you can have complete data centers go offline and not lose a single byte of storage.

Amazon S3

This is some of the cheapest storage going. Pennies on the gigabyte. The costs come when you are making to many access requests. But for a virtual tape drive where you are only writing (free), it is a wonderful option.

You create a bucket and put objects into your bucket. Objects can be treated as (very) large tape blocks. This just works.

At one point I had over a terabyte of backups on my Amazon S3. Which was fine until I started to get real bills for that storage.

Regardless, I had switched myself and my clients to using Amazon S3 for backups.

Everything was going well until the fall of 2018. At that time I migrated a client from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 and the backups stopped working.

It was still working for me, but not for them. We went back to 16.04 and continued.

20.04 gave the same results during testing; I left the backup server at 16.04.

We were slated to try 26.04 in 8 or so months.

Ceph RGW

The Ceph RGW feature set is similar to Amazon S3. It is so similar that you need to change only a few configuration parameters to switch from Amazon S3 to Ceph RGW.

With the help of Grok, I got Ceph RGW working, and the Amazon s3cmd worked perfectly.

Then I configured Amanda to use S3 style virtual tapes to my Ceph RGW storage.

It failed.

For two days I fought this thing, then with Grok’s help I got the configuration parameters working, but things still failed.

HTTP GETs were working, but PUTs were failing. Tcpdump and a bit of debugging, and I discovered that the client, Amanda, was preparing to send a PUT command but was instead sending a GET command, which failed signature tests.

Another two days before I found the problem. libcurl was upgraded going from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. The new libcurl treated setting the method options differently.

Under old curl, you set the method you wanted to use to “1,” and you got a GET, PUT, POST, or HEAD. If you set GET to 0, PUT to 1, and POST/HEAD to 0, you get a PUT.

The new libcurl seems to override these settings. This means that you can have it do GET or HEAD but no other. GET is the default if everything is zero. Because of the ordering, you might get the HEAD method to work.

This issue has existed since around 2018. It is now 2025, and the fix has been presented to Amanda at least twice; I was the latest to do so. The previous was in 2024. And it still hasn’t been fixed.

I’m running my patched version, at least that seems to be working.

I’ve been working with Grok from xAI. It seems to be better than most of the others I’ve tried. It has done a good job of helping me debug complex systems.

I wouldn’t trust it to provide instructions to pour piss out of a boot.

I was working with it for the configuration of the Amanda backup system. I’m integrating it with my Ceph cluster. While it did an “ok” job of configuring Ceph, for Amanda it was entirely wrong.

Even though it asked, and I provided version numbers, it gave instructions for a configuration method that hasn’t been used in years.

I still don’t have a working Amanda configuration, but I have ideas on how to get there.

Because I’m not a great writer, I use every tool at my disposal to write better. I asked Grok to analyze my article about Charlie.

It insisted that Charlie was still alive and that I was writing some “wish-fulfillment” fictional scenario. I told it to prove that Charlie had been murdered. It did its thing and told me that Charlie had indeed been killed on the 10th.

In the very next prompt, it again insisted that it was a “fictional fact” and that it was merely “alleged” that Charlie had been killed.

One of the things to know about AIs is that the more they need to analyze, the longer it takes and the more “expensive” it becomes. This means that they have a memory or token limit.

This leads to article truncation when it is asked to retrieve web pages.

It told me my article ended abruptly and that it was willing to help write the ending. When it was instructed to print my original article, it showed me the truncated version. When I told it to fetch the complete article, that it had to be a complete <div>, it said it had fetched the article, then proceeded to write its version of the end of the article.

When asked to provide Obama’s statement on the death of Charlie, it showed me three or for articles that only short quoted Obama, leaving out all the context.

AI is an amazing tool. It is still at the verify then verify again stage.

Story Time

I was working with a client on a Magento site. This client was a “digital agency.” They specialized in throwing up WordPress sites for $1500 or so.

They could do this by outsourcing most of the work to an Indian firm.

The CEO was up to give us a talk on using Indian outsourcing. He was very proud of himself for figuring out that these Indian tech firms will claim they can do any technical thing, even if they have no idea what they are doing. You only know if they are any good at the task after you’ve invested in the firm.

He had solved this by going to India and personally investigating a dozen different Indian tech firms before deciding on the one that actually knew how to do WordPress sites.

He had great success using them.

He had asked this same firm, “Do you do Magento?” They had answered in the affirmative. I was the unhappy recipient of their “product”.

My question to that CEO: “Did you ask them if they can do a tech thing? “Yes.” “Do Indian tech firms always say ‘yes’ to that question?” “Yes.” “Did you violate your own rule about trusting Indian tech firms?” “Yes.”

My point is that you can find an AI that does a fantastic job on a task. They might produce great results every day for a month. That doesn’t mean you can trust the next answer it gives. It is just as likely to make it up or lie to you as give you a good, correct answer.

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was assassinated for his speech. He was a moderate that was willing to listen to anybody and engaged in honest dialog.

As Jesus did, he got angry from time to time, and his emotion came out, explaining in clear, short, easy-to-understand words what his point was.

He was a threat to the Left because he was bringing the youth out of the leftist bubble of never-ending lies.

He was winning hearts and minds.

Because he was winning, he had to be silenced. Intimidation did not work. Low-level violence did not work. So they killed him.

How did “they” kill him? They created a permission structure where it was acceptable to kill those you disagreed with. Words are violence, and violence begets violence. “It was Charlie’s fault” that he was killed. If only he had not been so violent.

Immediately after his murder, we started to see the blood vultures. This time they were not dancing in the blood of dead children; instead, they were dancing and painting themselves in Charlie’s blood. Dancing in joyful celebration of the death of a moderate conservative.

It was and is disgusting. They were in the FA stage, knowing there was no FO stage.

But Charlie’s death changed that. And the FO stage became very real. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs for being vile, disgusting subhumans.

That paint of blood they so proudly wore was used to fire them. And they whined.

They whined about “free speech”.

Here is the short, simple truth: they used their right to free speech to slander and attack Charlie and his family and us. They took joy in the death of a good man. They clearly expressed their hatred for over half of this great country.

Their employers used their freedom from association to get rid of their sorry asses. They weren’t fired to silence them. They were fired because their employers didn’t want them contaminating the workspace.

Health facilities had no choice. The legal liability of keeping a health care worker after they express an interest in harming people who are not part of the sheep herd is greater than they could risk. Other employers looked at losing 50% of their business and decided they were going to cut their loses.

Nobody in the government ordered this. Reasonable people in the government decried the vile, evil, disgusting statements of these subhumans. They did not step on the First Amendment.

We took the left’s tools and used them. And employers were able to get rid of the trash stinking up the workplace.

Of course some bigger names couldn’t help themselves. An author of horror novels lied about Charlie. The pushback was verbal, but he was smart enough to read the writing on the wall. But far too late, the damage was done.

A movie based on one of his pieces has just come out. People are choosing to avoid it. Nobody called for a boycott. His movie is still being screened.

It is being screened to nearly empty theaters. Theater owners understand that upsetting 50% of the country is going to reduce customers.

The momentum kept growing; more and more FAFO was happening.

A late-night political hack opened his failing show with his normal monologue. He lied about the murderer’s affiliation. He attacked 50+% of the country.

His show had been falling in popularity for years. He was avoiding his job of “comedian” to focus on being a political hack.

Broadcast TV still exists. There are very few independent TV stations. Most are owned by larger groups. These stations get their content from multiple sources, but the primary one is their national affiliate, such as ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Every TV station is entitled to preempt a broadcast with their choices. If they would rather not air “Why The Racist, Evil People Are Racist, Evil People,” they don’t have to.

That is their choice. When they go to their advertisers and their advertisers say, “We don’t want our advertisements aired on that show.” They might not have any choice. That is where the slot is.

At that point, the advertiser might choose to pull their ad. To spend their money elsewhere.

When the station starts to hemorrhage money over political content, they might decide to preempt.

If the station preempts a show, that means they don’t show the broadcaster’s advertisements. That means the broadcaster is losing money.

They don’t like losing money.

So they took this political hack off the air.

The government didn’t. Trump didn’t know about it until he was briefed on the hack’s firing. He didn’t request it.

While the FCC has been considering investigating the broadcaster’s lying about known facts, they hadn’t done anything. This was a stupid statement to make, but it happened.

So here is the situation: According to the left, this political hack being let go is the definition of destruction of free speech. Charlie being murdered was just the consequence of being a “Nazi.”

You see, they are the real victims of political violence, not Charlie, not you, not I.

Lyrics

I was scanning TikTok when Charlie Kirk was shot. One of my conservative ladies gave out the news on an unexpected “live” thingie, and I went looking, panicking. Yep, it’s real. Damn. God damn. God FUCKING damn!

My lizard brain is currently doing shots of imaginary coke right now, hopping itself up to keep me aware of everything going on around me. I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye and it turns out to be dust motes. I’m trying not to shut myself down right now, but also not to get so caught up that I lose track of life.

Why’s this under “prepping” today? Well, we need to be aware that when violence happens, we tend to REact. And frankly, I don’t believe we (and when I say “we” right now, I mean everyone who isn’t an absolute nut job, regardless of political stance) can afford to react. Act, yes. React, no. Reaction is instant. It’s brought about by the aforementioned lizard brain. It engages our “fight or flight” mode, and if we are reacting, we are not thinking.

When we’re in a personal emergency, that’s a good thing. It gets the adrenaline going, gets you up and moving, and might save your life. But with something like this, it’s just not useful. It hypes us up with nowhere to go. And while I trust the people I generally hang out with to be “head on a swivel” without being nut jobs, I don’t trust everyone else. I know too many on the Left who are excited and happy over this, and too many on the Right who have been itching for an excuse and who are using Kirk’s shooting as that excuse and damn the realities. NONE of it is good. Not one damn motherfucking bit of it.

I have enough EMT training to know that he wasn’t going to survive that shot. He lost so much blood in that initial burst that there was simply no way. The second hint was that his team picked him up and moved him. They don’t do that if there’s a chance he’ll survive; instead they form a shield wall and let the EMT do their work. There are lots of rumors out there (see my previous post on rumors) regarding what happened, who did it, and the reasoning behind the assassination. Like Chris, I’m waiting. I need to hear good, quality information from reliable sources, as difficult as that may be.

I will tell you what I think happened. I think a nutjob (very possibly with a septum ring and ties to the Left, but no guarantees) decided that the First Amendment was not worth protecting, and decided to make Charlie a signpost about what happens to people who don’t lap up the narrative from the Left’s breast. I think it was meant to do a few things. First and foremost, I believe it was meant to enrage the Right and hopefully spur people into doing stupid things (those REactions). Second, it took out someone who was effectively teaching young adults to think for themselves (because Charlie always listened to people and encouraged them to support their points). Third, it has been done in a way that makes it a chilling effect.

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Ally is in tears. I’m angry. I haven’t been this angry since somebody tried to take my kids from me 15+ years ago.

We are seeing a breakdown of our societal norms. We are no longer a high-trust society. As the Magic Eight Ball used to say, “All signs point to yes.”

My father used to say that he was made colorblind by an act of Congress. By this he meant that as an officer in the US Navy, he was legally bound to ignore race when interacting with those that reported to him.

In my entire life I believe I’ve only seen one reaction from him or my mother that was race-based.

In 4th grade I asked my parents if my friend from school could come over. They agreed. The parents were in contact with each other, and Mom and I went to pick up my friend.

He climbed into the car, and we had a great playdate. Afterward my parents said something about, “We weren’t expecting a black kid.”

In all my descriptions of my friend, I never mentioned his race.

I feel like I remained colorblind until middle school. In high school I was exposed to N* for the first time. They enjoyed picking on the white kids. They were crass, rude, mean. I hated the bus ride, I hated school, and I hated everything to do with the N*s. But here’s the thing: I use that word today; I didn’t at the time. Those monsters destroyed my opinion of black people. It took years before I recovered.

I did recover. I was able to look beyond race and judge people by their actions. I didn’t see racism until I was at University and was introduced to the term “Oreo” by a friend. He was describing how N*s described him.

Even when I was living with Section 8 people, the people were people. The N*s dealing drugs across the street from me and my family? Not so much.

The other day, an evil monster with black skin was riding the light rail when he decided to murder a young white woman. He took a lockblade from his pocket. He opened it. He then prepared to leave the car at the next stop.

As the train stopped, he stood, took a step to his right, leaned forward, and stabbed Iryna 3 times, murdering her before walking off the train saying, “I got that white girl.”

I have been seeing videos claiming that Iryna deserved it, because she was white. There are images out there of this evil black monster with a crown on his head and red glowing eyes praising his actions.

And I’ve seen videos made by blacks calling the white people that refuse to sit in front of them “racist.”

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being told that I’m evil and uncaring and attempting to silence people who are saying everything they think out loud and in public.

I’m not willing to make a fuss or call them on their hate-filled screeds. It isn’t worth it.

Charlie was willing. Charlie was very good at it.

He would debate anybody who came to talk with him. Ben Shapiro is good at winning debates. He isn’t nearly as good as Charlie was at bringing people to the right.

Ally watched more of Charlie than I ever did. I didn’t watch because I can’t stay that calm in the face of such idiocy.

Today we lost Charlie.

And I’m scared. There are people from the middle that are running from the far left loons as fast as they can. They aren’t conservatives, they are not right leaning, but they sure as hell aren’t with them.

I don’t know who shot Charlie. I’ll wait to find out. I am passing judgment on the reaction of the “left.” I’m passing judgment on the rhetoric of the left, of how they constantly use the language of violence against the right.

I don’t hate them; they are not worth my energy. They say they hate me.

What am I scared of? I’m scared the light switch has been flipped in far too many people.

The left treats violence as a dimmer switch; they turn it up until it starts to look like it might be too much, then they turn it down. They use it to keep things at a low boil without things boiling over.

Unfortunately, the response isn’t on a dimmer switch. It is on a toggle switch to 20,000 volts.

It is the people who are comfortable taking 300 yard shots with Grandpa’s old hunting rifle.  It is the people who walk into a place and understand egress planning as well as sight/shot lines. It is people that respond without thinking to threats as if they had been in dance class together.

These are the people who go silent while they make target lists. These are the people who will spend the time and effort to plan every part of their operation to the final degree.

And that target list is huge. It would include people who wouldn’t dream they would be on someone’s target list.  They are just a talking head on MSNBC or CNN or any of the other outlets that spew hate and lies. It includes all the low-level politicians who aren’t relevant enough to be on a target list.

There is a powerful scene in Unintended Consequences where two hunters are out deer hunting. They look across the river into the backyard of a politician. They decide that they want to become part of the resistance.  So they line up to take the shot, just as if it was a deer. It was an easy 250-yard shot.

They then just walked out of the woods, another pair of hunters.

How many opportunities will present themselves over the coming months to people who have had the switch flipped?

I pray for all of you to do the right thing. Stay strapped; keep your head on a swivel. Stay away from stupid people. Stay away from stupid places. And don’t be there at stupid times.