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Post-modern, post-enlightenment, still Depraved (or Institutions of Inclusion? cont.)

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We recognize mass shootings are a tragedy, but keep overlooking the root issue, the actual cause. What is wrong, morally and terribly wrong is the USA being the primary proliferator of weapons and violence around the world, including here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/…/…/Biggest_arms_sales_2013.png

We don’t only provide all of the weapons, but war and mayhem to perpetuate discord – for aims of racist, careless asshats bent on saving the status-quo at all costs.

Iran-Contra isn’t a conspiracy theory, it really happened.. it’s our ******* legacy! The largest humanitarian crisis in the world is happening right now in Yemen with the US exceedingly complicit in it’s development – http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34011187

Those that supposedly represent US citizens are doing the same domestically. Tearing families apart by sending minor drug offenders to prison under mandatory sentencing is just one example and we’re fine with it. While the businesses responsible for moving all of the money supporting the drug market are too big to be held accountable.

Opioid epidemic or years of terroristic suburban school violence, this is all just the chickens of US policy coming home to roost.

Children are starving, civilians are dying, cities are burning, and our schools are getting shot up because of our collective uncaring about the institutions that perpetuate horrible means to short-sighted, immoral ends. Only when it hits home we become conveniently divided by near-sighted solutions.

The US doesn’t export democracy. The US’s main and most effective exports are violence and intolerance. That will be the legacy humanity will remember for the US in the centuries ahead of us until we finally take a stand and do what is right.

We can change, I know we can. More people just need to study history, study the events, try to search out for the things we do today we may find as barbaric in the future, form well-rounded opinions, discuss disagreements civilly and spend some time caring for our world family.

Using security and the possibility of attacks from other countries is not an excuse for having this blood on our hands. So how many bad things need to happen from the consequences of our actions or inaction before we realize this?

“The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” -Voltaire

Institutions of Inclusion? (or the Travesty only from Hindsight Paradox)

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70 years before the US Civil War, slaves initiated a rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 that had succeeded in ending not just slavery, but French control over one of the most profitable colonies at the time.

The Haitian revolution is considered the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the western hemisphere. It may be one of the most significant and interesting events in recent history that hardly any one knows about. Also I would argue that the colony would have been just as profitable and if not even more successful if slavery, racism and the tension intrinsic never existed. It in fact led to the loss of the colony from the original profiteers and a whoooole lot of bloodshed.

During the fighting many Americans were surprised to learn how affluent and prevalent black families were in the colony. So much so that they tried to prevent refugees from disembarking their boats while fleeing to the US. It was very common for white men to marry up into the affluent families by marrying black women. Once the men started shouting in French that they would not leave their wives, the bewildered Americans had to oblige.

It was the slaves of these and also white affluent families on the island that were organizing a revolution for their freedom.

This all coincided with the French Revolution, yet ironically, sadly, and typically enough, many did not believe the principals of the French Revolution and Declaration of the Rights of Man should apply to those of other races or women, even property holding individuals considered full citizens. As a sidenote, during part of the French Revolution due process of law for executions had been totally abandoned to stop anyone critical of the revolution for the “rights, liberty and freedoms of the individual”  Please see: Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Heads will roll – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzfTPp4moA

Some did agree and the fight for complete realization of these universal and “God” given rights continues to this day.

The Haitian revolution is another example of how time after time events prove that the idea of cultural, racial, gender, sexual or class division is a farce when it comes to the rights provided by states, nations or any governing institution. Only within reasonable regulation that works to correct any inequalities such as school integration, emancipation and destruction of apartheid policies (think South Africa, and also think mandatory prison sentencing, death penalty, repeal of daca) I want to note on daca repeal that I am not a fan of executive orders overriding congressional check and balance, but at any rate…it is here however it got here and should stay while it gets a congressional stamp to approve it if exec orders are “really” the issue.

The issue is that our institutions are extremely racist, sexist, intolerant, non-inclusive and sickeningly immoral. We just don’t see it yet, like our founding fathers didn’t see it when they failed to abolish slavery and provide the ability for all women and men to vote with the new constitution and bill of rights framed under the pretense of freedom and liberty for all.

It would do us a lot of good to contemplate what occurred during the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution to apply what is right not pre-emptively, but as it is required now!

tl;dr : History is neat. If we play our cards right we may not seem like such barbarians for what we don’t see as severe moral injustices, action or non-action, sooooo if you want to check some out –

http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/ (Mike Duncan – Little dry and heavy on narrative but crazy informative and well written.

http://www.thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ (Mike Duncan again, through the entire history of Rome our spiritual Americans)

http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ (Dan Carlin is the man, crazy interesting even for non history geeks. Start with anything but WW1 bc it’s dense.

and my new favorite –

http://historyonfirepodcast.com/ (Daniele Bolleli, not as seasoned as Dan Carlin but really knows his stuff and topics are amazing. His episodes Conquest of Mexico and Caravaggio are sooo interesting.)

psbtw – i didn’t source or cite any of the above, but its good to check what people post so dont trust me – look that shit up!

Ridin’ Dirty with the BPMS150

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I’m from Houston. My blog homepage says I’m from Austin, but I’m from Houston. If you actually want to get technical I’m really from West Monroe, Louisiana or as I like to call it Southern Arkansas.

The Houston Texans are my football team even when they aren’t winning. The Spurs are my basketball team, unless the Rockets are winning so then the Houston Rockets are my basketball team.

I went to the University of Houston and I have lived in the suburbs of Spring/Woodlands, the Heights, Montrose, and the urban sprawl of Westchase. My first corporate job was in the oil industry.

Every year there is an event that occurs in Houston that everyone knows about. No it’s not the Renaissance festival. It’s not Hurricane season. Every year offices and families across the city, even the nation are preparing for the ride of a lifetime and for other’s lives.

This event is called the BPMS150. From the BPMS150 website:

“The BP MS 150 is a two-day fundraising bike ride organized by the National MS Society, South Central Chapter. The ride is the largest event of its kind in North America, with 13,000 cyclists, 3,500 volunteers, and countless spectators along the route and at the finish line in Austin. The fundraising goal for the 2017 BP MS 150 is $16 million dollars to bring hope to many who are affected by multiple sclerosis.”

Truth day – at the start I really was more interested in riding my bike for ~150mi. from Houston to Austin more than anything. Of course I like supporting good causes, but really until recently I only knew of MS as a degenerative nervous system disease. My main motivator above all was to ride, but there is nothing wrong with that. This is part of the success and brilliance of fundraising events like the BPMS150.

The MS society does an outstanding job of generating awareness within and outside of the event. While riding you find sponsors of the event with portapotties dedicated to their name at break stops along the route. The line to warm water showers include information and stories of people living with MS. You find these sorts of publicity easter eggs all around.

Some bike riders are riding in memory of their loved ones and include photos with mementos affixed in various ways to the back of their bikes.  All of this gave me a much stronger appreciation for what we were really riding for.

13,000 cyclists rode in the BPMS150 and many others were present to support the event. The logistics to accomplish such a feat is nothing less than impressive, especially for how smooth everything went. This is from the start day, the campout in LaGrange, and through to the finish line.

You would think that 150 miles is impossible and that you would need to be in incredible shape, but that wasn’t the case. All anyone needs to finish the ride is pure determination. People from all walks of life, of all shapes, ages and types were finishing the race. You will be 12 hours in, butt sore and tired from peddling non-stop for hours, then look to your right to see someone’s granny outpacing you without breaking a sweat.  Not sure what can be more motivating than that at the  time.

The weather for the time of year was phenomenal. That is, except for the wind. We had a torrential headwind the entire ride. This isn’t hyperbole. Some other riders said that was the hardest ride in years. Baptism by fire, so next year should be a breeze.

I loved it, I absolutely loved the ride. I loved what we were riding for and got to get up close and personal with the countryside of my favorite state. The thing about bike riding that makes it better than all other forms of transportation is that you are going at a pace that is slow enough to let you enjoy your surroundings, but fast enough to not be impatient.

One day I will ride clear across Texas, but the BPMS150 made going nearly half the state extremely safe and obtainable by anyone who has the desire to try. It was a beautiful and inspiring time that may be one of the most memorable moments in my life. A lot of this had to do with the team I rode with. Some of the most amazing people I know. I’m happy to be part of such a good cause. More information about the MS Society, the BPMS150 and MS can be found at http://www.nationalmssociety.org/

A Post of Pwns and Passwords

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Password Mindfulness

A larger awareness of security is something relieving to see with the ubiquity of internet access and it’s use for important networks like financial institutions. The general public is just now taking proper password security seriously, something security experts consider common sense for a long time now.

My inspiration for writing this post was a recent episode of an awesome podcast I follow called Reply All .  If you have never heard of or listened to it, I highly recommend you try it out. It may be one of the most entertaining podcasts that I have come across and I listen to a lot of podcasts.

To be or not to be Pwned

Accounts like your Gmail email account are constantly being compromised. The vision that plays out in most people’s minds when it comes compromising accounts is using computers to guess or crack the user password. Something like what John Conner does here to brute force this PIN in Terminator 2

 Surprisingly reality is not too far off.

From Wikipedia:
In cryptography, a brute-force attack consists of an attacker trying many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found.

Although running through a list of 9999 PIN codes is fast and easy, add the alphabet to that set and it jumps to 36×36×36×36=364=1679616 . That may still be fast for some computers, keep adding another more characters to the password string and the time it takes to cracks jumps exponentially, literally

(I want to point out that the above chart is not my own work. Credit goes to: http://www.rafayhackingarticles.net/2012/03/cracking-facebook-account.html)

So if you want to protect your account use strong passwords. Give the amount of time it takes to crack even a weak password, this probably won’t be a risk unless you were targeted specifically.

It’s suspected that most consumer account compromises are the result of a single data breach at some service provider or website service like the recent Adobe Online or Yahoo attacks. There have been quite a few more to accompany these and these large breaches seem to get more and more common.

Access to any system can be accomplished in different ways.

Social engineering is the act of manipulating personnel into giving up useful information or access to a bad actor. Network attacks involve attacking vulnerabilities in the software or hardware of any networked system.

Even at low level access a malicious user can try to exploit other software on the system for privilege escalation which gives them higher access than they had before.

This could lead to the ability to access the database of the service containing all user information. Now all it takes is a few keystrokes to dump the entire database somewhere locally, yeehaw! Next steps, to the black market to sell some personal identifiable information.

Great, so some jerk has your Adobe Online account. So what? You haven’t used that in years.

Well, hackers leverage the fact that many users use the same password for different services to do something called “credential stuffing” . Basically these means to test the stolen credentials against many web services until they find a match and gain access.

“Password re-use is the main threat to ordinary users for sure” – the guy on the Reply All podcast Joseph

Password Management

You can avoid any of this and really make your life generally better than it has ever been by using a password manager. My favorite it LastPass. I have to admin that I did re-use passwords in the past. How are you supposed to remember 30 odd different strong passwords without writing them down? This is really not good practice and I am terribly ashamed of my irresponsible past. But hey, live and learn.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So what I used to do was to cycle between a handful of passwords that used different small variable changes. This lead me to forget any passwords I didn’t use often and spend a lot of time clicking and looking for reset password links.

LastPass changed my life. Not only does it come up with strong passwords for you, it will automatically autosave them, then auto fill them right on the website even on your phone. I am not sponsored by LastPass at all and there are many others to use that have similar features such as 1Password.

2 rules


All you have to remember is a ultra strong master password. After that just be sure to change your passwords regularly and you will be doing the 2 things for success using any password authentication.

  1. Use strong passwords
  2. Use different passwords for every account

If you remember anything from this post please remember the above 2 rules. This  could very well save you from unauthorized Uber rides on your debit card or tax returns filed in your name by someone with really bad credit habits.

What’s tha craic, Limerick?

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You get a lot of time to think when you travel. This was my first trip across the Atlantic. And for once I was actually able to not be inclined to work out my life so much and enjoy my travels. Not sure why for so long all you want to think about our problems back home when you are abroad.  Anyway, when I was younger it was really difficult to stay out of my head. After getting older, some life experience, a few good books, sage wisdom and an interest in practicing meditation I’m finding it easier to and more enjoyable to take life in, in a way that is really satisfying. Finally I can celebrate this, so you young folks out there falling under the pressure of your mental gravity, environment and harshness of growing up in modern life. The stress is normal, it’s growth and development which will pay off. So keep your eye to the sky and keep on keepin on no matter where you are in life.

 

To digress back to the purpose of this post, Limerick is amazing and I feel really fortunate to spend a good amount of time there while working no doubt. Ireland is an amazing country with really friendly people. It was cool to finally experience some kind of heritage in my ancestry. My grandmother’s family is Irish, the Fee’s from Antrim, who migrated here sometime around the revolutionary war. Apparently one of my grandfathers had married the daughter of an Earl. These revelations are all too interesting to me, being the history buff that I am. My first answer to anyone who ask what I liked most about Ireland is it’s history.

 

That history became a source of a lot of contemplation, notwithstanding the break from mental activity I mentioned above. I had an intention to visit  King John’s castle on the River Shannon since I arrived. There are not many castles in the US, or really none at all. Lol. Short of seeing an actual castle up close and taking the opportunity to take some great photos for instagram I was surprisingly in store for a great history lesson.

 

The route going through the Castle follows the whole of Irish history. I won’t go into all the details as I implore anyone to visit to see for themselves, but what I learned and experienced on that short lunch break caused a great sadness in me. Our world history is wrought with the experience of war and conquest which in my mind is usually always brought about by the rationalization of injustice for the purpose of greed, and maybe more understandably but nonetheless inexcusable in the same, fear.

 

Always a story of entitlement at the odds of the poor, shorted as unwieldy and dehumanized in our collective historical conscience in arguments of the necessary evils of progress. I came back to work with all this on my mind and with the current state of affairs an enormous amount of unsettledness. There should be a collective shame, but it’s forgotten. This is one of the reasons I follow history so much. With the amount of collaboration, which we are doing working together across borders and communicating online. There is hope these things will stop happening.

 

A very healthy and friendly pride permeate through the Irish people. It is very cool to see. It reminds me of the sense of pride we have in Texas, but without the haughtiness inherent in the egos we can’t fit into our trucks. By the way, there are no full-size trucks in Ireland. A saw one single small pickup the entire three weeks I was there. There is a chicness about the fashion there and what I would consider a quintessential euroness in all the hairstyles in clothing choices. Not sure how I know what Euro is, probably from movies, but It was really cool to see. Adidas is making a killing over there, but of course they would Adidas are badass.

The Locke Bar and Curragower  …full stop, some of the best seafood I have ever eaten and I was born in raised near the Gulf of Mexico in East Texas, frequenting South Louisiana for delicious cajun food. Since I left I have not stopped thinking about the seafood chowder, mussels and battered fish. Oh man, so good. I want to go back just for the seafood. Their chocolate, the purple stuff in particular, Cadbury’s puts US chocolate to shame. I mean, it’s really bad how deprived we are. I’m saying the same for bread. Irish soda bread. Dead. My bags on the way back were packed with 70 euro worth of Cadbury’s. I recommend the Galaxy stuff too, so silky.

 

Maybe at some point I’ll come back and add some stuff about Dublin, which is probably one of my favorite big cities now ever and talk about the cool music everywhere. Yet for now, i’m going to pick out the best photos to include in a gallery on this page and call it a night because I feel there is so much good stuff to talk about Ireland. Go if you can, as soon as you can.

Street Art of Houston

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When I was growing up graffiti was underground and it was illegal. Some property owners were kind enough to allow artists to express their talen legally on “permission walls”. These were rare, but probably instrumental in graf writing gaining notice in traditional art crowds and networks.

Nowadays after well-known “street” artists like Banksy with others gaining acceptance and popularity, murals public art and guerilla wheatpastings are becoming expected in the city landscape. The criminality seems to have lessened.

Some graffiti artists hate the term street art, some embrace the mainstream. In any case, I’m in the latter because it’s allowing our cities to become unique, beautiful and even more interesting. Fucking boring ass architecture from the later century has left much the city a wasteland of dull office buildings and strip malls. Thankfully someone had the sense to beautify some parts of Houston with scenic parks to help reverse the urban sprawl and corporate practicalism that plagued the city landscape for so long.

The photos above are just from one block and I have seen much more murals all around the city. It’s giving the city vibrance that has so desperately been needed. The murals are becoming an attraction with crowds of peope waiting to take photos of themselves standing beside the works of art. Interestingly no one really does this with paintings. Public art is for the people and people are drawn to interact with it.

Austin has lovely hills and a beautiful city. Houston, although flat and pretty dull save the skyline is full of the most diverse and beautiful people of any city that I know. The city is full of art, and a city with a message. Living, breathing and speaking. It is so great to see this and to watch my hometown grow, prosper and become more beautiful as the years go by.