Rural people are pretty well off, given their choices

Read Kevin Drum’s post and look at the data he’s charted. Here’s the conclusion of the post, after the presentation of the data that backs it up:

Despite the fact that most rural problems aren’t all that bad—and are mostly of their own making anyway—they’re convinced that the big thing holding them back is urban liberals who refuse to give them their fair share of federal money. This is despite the fact that it’s common knowledge that urban areas transfer vast amounts of tax money to rural areas:

Here’s my point: Rural America has problems. These problems aren’t nearly as big as they’re often made out to be, but they do have lower incomes, a declining population, and a less educated community.

But these are almost all caused by their own free choices. They refuse to tax themselves to pay for good schools and the infrastructure needed by business. They hold on tight to their social conservatism, which drives out both the young and the educated. Then they sit around and complain that the urban liberals who support them aren’t supporting them enough.

Being rural is not like being Black or gay or female or Jewish. It’s a choice. And the rural lifestyle is also a choice. They could do the things they need to do to become more prosperous, but they don’t want to. They’re comfortable the way they are.

And that’s fine. Not only do I have no objections, but I’ll even keep paying high taxes to support rural America in the manner to which it is accustomed.

But do I want to spend a lot of the government’s time on a rural “policy renaissance” even though it’s mostly alphabet soup money distribution that will always be resisted and scorned (“those city boys all think they know better than us”) and will never solve the real problems of provincial culture? I’m not so sure I do.

Italian with the Rockwell Model T

Not so late a start as it might seem: I was distracted by receiving my FutureMe email from a year ago, and drifted into drafting a reply, now sent to the me of 12/31/2023. (See previous post for details.)

I’m feeling pretty chipper, as who isn’t as we leave the past year behind us. Perhaps some of the upbeat feeling comes from having had a very nice shave. It began with the Colonia shaving soap, whose label has now become so smeared that I’m not even going to try to figure out what to call it. The name of this soap has always been a puzzle, anyway, but despite its nominal challenges, it’s quite a good soap, and my G.B. Kent BK4 brush did a good job of strutting its virtues: wonderful lather, thickly applied.

This is the original Rockwell Model T, not the later T2, and it did a very nice job. As you see in the photo, I have it dialed to “4,” and that seems to work well for me — three easy passes did the job, and my face is fully smooth (though some credit goes to the prep, which of course included Grooming Dept Moisturizing Pre-Shave).

A bit of the Antica Barbieria Colla aftershave milk, a balmy sort of finish (not meaning “warm,” but rather “like a balm”). And the sun is out!

The tea this morning is Murchie’s Baker Street Blend, a favorite: “Lapsang Souchong, smooth Keemun, rich Ceylon, Gunpowder, and floral Jasmine.”

An email from a year ago

I just received the FutureMe email I wrote to myself a year ago: December 31, 2021. I had expected to get an email from my year-ago self tomorrow, but today does seem like a good day to look back at the coming year and plan for the next. I hit some specific topic areas that might serve as grist for your own FutureMe mill:

1. A brief description of your current situation (social, emotional, financial, educational (that is, what you’re in the process of learning), spiritual, and relationships).
2. Your worries and concerns and even fears for the coming year. (No one else will see this.)
3. Your hopes for the coming year.
4. Your specific goals for the coming year — emotional, financial, educational (i.e., what you want to learn), spiritual, and your relationships.
5. Any plans or ideas by which you might achieve those goals.
6. Anything else that occupies your mind: dreams, concerns, activities (current and planned), and so on.

This post on planning might be helpful. And see also see the previous post.

Two updates: 1) This brief article suggests additional uses for FutureMe.  2) See also “How putting purpose into your New Year’s resolutions can bring meaning and results.”

Today I ponder the email I received and write an email for delivery a year from now.

Thinking about a new year, our resolutions for it, and whether those are good.

A short video, and an interesting contrast of ideas. Full disclosure: On the first of January, I shall get an email to myself that I wrote one year ago, about my plans, goals, fears, and hopes for the coming year, and I shall write one to be delivered a year later. However, the same is true for the first of each month. 

The Swiss cheese infographic that went viral

That’s the graphic by Ian M. Mackay, “a working Scientist and an adjunct Associate Professor (University of Queensland). I have a PhD in virology, also from UQ.”  That’s from this post that explains the graphic. The post goes through the graphic’s iterative development and is worth reading. Regarding the “final” version — 5.3, shown above — among other comments, he notes:

This version [shown above – LG] also:

• Elaborates on the type of mask – fitted and N95-or-better
• Notes the need for science-informed leadership
• Asks for reporting on virus data (not just SARS-CoV-2; stop hiding public data!) and CO₂ levels
• Reminds us that we are responsible for getting vaccinated and boosted
• Reminds us to limit risky indoor time if the site is crowded
• Pleas for paid sick leave
• Notes the absolute need to keep funding improved vaccines (we need mucosal immunity).
• Removes the mask from the person as masks are among the layers.
• Added more misinfo mice because, the world
• Recognises that virus can get through most layers – but the more layers you have, the lower the viral load you are likely to be exposed to, and a lower infectious dose can mean milder illness which might mean less long-term health damage.

There’s also a NY Times article about it.

If you do get Covid…

Note this research report: “Rapid initiation of nasal saline irrigation to reduce severity in high-risk COVID+ outpatients.” I’m buying some saline nasal spray tomorrow.

More on the lead-crime connection

Kevin Drum notes:

Tyler Cowen weighs in today on a study of the lead-crime hypothesis:

These results seem a bit underwhelming, and furthermore there seems to be publication bias….I have long been agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, simply because I never had the time to look into it, rather than for any particular substantive reason. (I suppose I did have some worries that the time series and cross-national estimates seemed strongly at variance.) I can report that my belief in it is weakening…

Hmmm. I suppose that a quick look at the abstract of one paper might very well weaken your belief in something if it’s the only thing you’ve ever looked at. Unfortunately, even mild pronouncements from Tyler tend to carry a lot of weight, so I suppose I should comment on this even though I’m sort of tired right now and don’t really feel like it.

But let’s do it anyway! I shall sprinkle exclamation points throughout this post in order to simulate energy and enthusiasm. But I’m afraid it’s going to be kind of long and boring anyway. That’s just the nature of these things. If you want to read along, the study is here.

First, though, just to get this out of the way: I don’t know what Tyler means when he says “the time series and cross-national estimates” are at variance. I’ve looked at both and they seem to agree fine. Time series estimates tend to show that crime goes up and down based on lead levels in the past (i.e., during childhood), while cross national estimates tend to show that the peaks and troughs of crime line up with the rise and fall of leaded gasoline, which happened at different times in different countries. I’m not sure what the variance between these two types of studies is supposed to be.

But let’s move on. I wrote about the study at hand a couple of years ago, and you can read my initial thoughts here. There are a few things to note: . . .

Continue reading.

So far as I can tell, the lead-crime connection is well-established. It’s been observed in multiple countries and connected always with diminution of environmental lead because of a switch from leaded to unleaded gasoline. And given that lead is a potent neurotoxin, the findings make perfect sense.

Radio.garden — take a look

Check out Radio.garden. It was fun hopping around to various places I’ve lived — and they’re surprisingly easy to find on the map.

Trevor Noah explains reparations

Trevor Noah is an awesomely smart person. Watch this (which requires sound).

How fun activities push autistics into the margins

An extremely interesting column providing insight into how an event that seems fun to non-autistic people is a minefield for an autistic person. Terra Vance writes in NeuroClastic:

Key points:

• Autistic people and our accomplices regularly repeat the mantra, “This world is not made for us.”
• This article walks you through a specific experience in the life of an autistic parent of an autistic child to illustrate how the world is not made for us.
• Enjoyable, fun events we want to participate in can cause distress, trauma, and social exclusion even if they have no obvious catastrophes.
• The circumstances in this specific article can be generalized to therapeutic, educational, social, athletic, professional, and home settings.
• All autistic people are different, so the circumstances in this article may not apply the same way to every autistic person.

Recently, my husband signed our child up for a local group wherein girls learn outdoor skills and engage in community and charitable service. She had only attended one meeting and had loved it. The group leaders are elementary teachers, and there were fewer than ten girls in this particular group.

The second meeting was a regional event and did not go so well. What happened was I watched helplessly while my child:

• tried over and over to adapt to something not designed for her,
• hid and fell behind until she became invisible to her peers,
• mustered a superhuman amount of optimism,
• masked away her autistic nature,
• then had the last flicker of optimism snuffed out when she felt like she had failed at being a good, normal child.

And no one else noticed a thing.

This is long, but it’s far shorter than it needs to be for you to know what an everyday experience is like for an autistic child. Or an autistic adult.

I shortened this as much as I could, but if you really want to know what it’s like to be us, you need to put in a shred of the effort we have to invest to exist a day in your everyday life.

Every person mentioned in this story was a kind, well-intentioned person who has not done the work to prevent my child from having her heart broken in perpetuity. You have to learn to get beyond “loving someone with autism.”

Inclusion requires nuanced knowledge.

When autistics say this world isn’t made for them, here’s what they mean

Autistic people often have profound deficits in executive functioning, which means that they do so much work, internally, to prepare for any new situation before they even arrive. Autistic children and adults need enough information to be able to go into an event mentally and emotionally prepared. . .

Continue reading. This is worth reading in full and then thinking about.

Beets & Leeks after 2 weeks

Generally, I allow 2 weeks of fermentation when I’m fermenting my own mix of vegetables. (But Cultured Carrot Cake in a Jar, for example, does not ferment so long.) I started the current batch of Beets & Leeks two weeks ago, so today I removed the fermentation weights from the jar and put the two jars (3 liters total) into the refrigerator.

I did take a small bowl of the finished ferment to check it out. It is extremely tasty. I think I created a recipe that is worth repeating — well, obviously so, since this is the third batch I’ve made. It has nice crunchiness, some warmth of spiciness without actually being hot, a kind of background sweetness, and a little tang. The flavor is quite good.

The Downfall of Andrew Tate Is Deliciously Ironic and Vitally Important.

Jay Kuo writes in The Status Kuo:

If you’re like many people, the first time you’d ever heard the name Andrew Tate was through reading about climate activist Greta Thunberg’s brutal takedown on Twitter after the former lightweight world kickboxing champion decided rather unwisely to troll her. As it is Schadenfriday, I’ll review the hilariously ironic part of this first before getting into why this actually matters beyond the hellsite of Twitter.

The Tate Twitter Massacre

On Tuesday, Tate, 36, whose Twitter account was suspended in 2017 but had been newly restored to Twitter by his fellow butthurt manbaby Elon Musk, was in the mood to troll an autistic teenage climate activist. You know, just in case anyone had forgotten what a truly horrible person he is. Tate tweeted the following at Greta Thunberg:

Hello @GretaThunberg

I have 33 cars.

My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo.

My TWO Ferrari 812 competizione have 6.5L v12s.

This is just the start.

Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.

For good measure, Tate included a picture of himself refueling one of those vehicles. . .

Continue reading.

Old-timey prep, new-timey razor

The day is sunny, a winter pleasure. And, speaking of pleasure, I bought out my tub of J.M. Fraser’s shaving cream and thought the Omega Pro 48 would be the perfect brush for it, nor was I wrong. I loaded the brush vigorously and well. I could use good pressure because over the years the shaving cream has become harder through gradual dehydration. 

The lather, though, was excellent and carried the light lemony fragrance of the shaving cream. My Henson AL-13M is a remarkably comfortable razor, and I enjoyed all three passes, which left my face smooth as can be at the end.

A drop of Grooming Dept Rejuvenating Serum followed by a good splash of Pinaud’s Lilac Vegetal, the oldest after-shave lotion in the world (not this particular bottle, of course, but the recipe), and I was ready for the day, which will include a walk to the library. Library Extension found another book I was looking at, and it’s ready for pickup. 

The tea this morning is Murchie’s Storm Watcher because earlier it didn’t look so good as it does now: “Contains Yunnan and Ceylon. Full-bodied with low astringency, a selection of tea terroirs blended for a brisk, satisfying mug. Slightly smoky with toasted malty notes.”

Stress as a cause of cultural conflict

I was thinking more about the article I just now blogged — see previous post — and I had a thought.

In pondering the change WW made back in September 2018, I realized that all the “lifestyle changes” things I read about include a permanent change to eating patterns, to exercise patterns, and — this is what caught my eye, as it were — to stress reduction.

Stress reduction seems invariably to be included in such programs as an explicit component. And I realized mentioned that most people — people who are not yet retired and lead lives of comfortable leisure — do not have the time to cook the sort of meals I regularly consume, nor the time to read in detail about foods and diet (in the sense of the foods one regularly consumes) and the effects those foods have on one’s body and health.

That made me realize that many — most? — people nowadays lead lives high in stress. As I recall my life back in my prime working years, from (say) age 25-45, the stress level I experienced was around, say, 4 or 5 on a 10-point scale. Nowadays, it seems — now that I think about it — that the norm for most is a stress level of 7 or 8.

I’m thinking, for example, of the high-stress life of a MAGA person, who sees threats and conspiracies on every hand and is constantly watching for sneak attacks from liberals and immigrants and people who think wrong. And liberals also live in stress, worrying about the threat of MAGA attacks like Jan 6 and the undermining of democratic institutions. And the stress levels among BIPOC and LGBTQ populations, always high, seems even higher with constant aggressive (and often deadly) attacks from conservatives and even from the police, whose mission supposedly is to protect them.

And almost everyone, liberal or conservative, must deal with economic stress, which will get much worse next year when the Fed’s insane interest rate increases to fight inflation (which has now pretty much ended) start to actually affect the economy. (The interest rate increases have not yet affected the economy, and inflation has already died down — it was a temporary bump from the economic effects of the pandemic — see this post.)

Living in a constant state of stress seems as though it might well lead to obesity (through self-medicating with cheap and ready-to-eat food). And having everyone under great stress might also be a contributing factor to the intensity of the culture wars now raging in the US. It reminds me of the situation when rats in confinement get overcrowded for too long: their society moves into suicidal collapse.

I wonder whether a good portion of the trends we see is due to high and constant levels of stress in a majority of the population. If such high levels of stress were common, then I would expect that stress reduction as a thing in itself would move to the forefront of concerns and recommendations — and that is indeed what we seem to see.

All that is mere speculation, but I will look for research into the question.

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong, revisited

I blogged some years back about Michael Hobbes’s lengthy and interesting article on how medical doctors in general get an F on their approach to obesity.

I stumbled over one thing in the article:

For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets.

Since I have found that a whole-food plant-based diet has indeed worked — it controlled my type 2 diabetes, helped me lose weight, and enabled me to discontinue the medications I formerly had to take — his statement did not make sense to me. (And, BTW, it is not just me who has had success with a whole-food plant-based diet in treating type 2 diabetes: see this article.) Moreover, research has shown that the Mediterranean diet is much healthier than the Standard American Diet (SAD).

His statement seemed to me to say “It doesn’t matter what you eat.” And yet we know that eating a substantial amount of ultraprocessed foods — foods manufactured using industrial processes from refined ingredients, including a lot of additives like refined sugar, salt, preservatives, and artificial flavorings and colorings — causes weight gain compared to a diet that focuses who whole foods, including a hefty amount of fruit and fresh vegetables. How can he say that diet does not matter?

The Wife pointed out that diet has two meanings:

1. Diet can mean “what you eat,” meaning the range of foods that you routinely consume — for example, the Mediterranean Diet, the whole-food plant-based diet, or a vegetarian diet, or in a statement like “His diet includes too many ultraprocessed foods.”
2. Diet can also mean restricting oneself to a specialized and temporary list of foods for the specific goal of losing weight, with the idea that — once the weight is lost — one returns to their normal eating pattern (i.e., their normal diet, in the first sense of the word “diet”).

Hobbes seems in the quoted passage to be talking about this second meaning of “diet,” but it’s confusing because the Paleo Diet and the Atkins Diet are not temporary diets but are proposed as permanent alterations in one’s eating patterns — that is, they are presented as diets in the first sense.

Perhaps the goal (particularly for the Atkins Diet) is weight loss, but the Paleo Diet is offered as a healthy (and permanent) alternative. Moreover, WW changed its name from Weight Watchers (in September 2018, the very time Hobbes’s article was published) specifically to reflect “its focus on overall health and wellness, and not just shedding pounds.” (CNN) That is, WW moved from being the Weight Watchers diet (in the second meaning: temporary) to being a permanent approach to food (“diet” in the second sense, as a permanent change in the foods one consumes and also considering exercise and other components of the program).

Because “diet” is so ambiguous, the word in the first sense — the range of foods one eats on a daily basis — is now often called one’s “lifestyle,” though that word generally also includes the type of exercise in one’s regular routine and also often addresses stress reduction.

I would have been happier (and understood better) if Hobbes had not written “The first is that diets do not work,” but instead had written “The first is that the temporary restriction of one’s diet in accordance with some fad plan does not work,” which seems to be what he means. And then he should also have omitted from his list those diets intended as a permanent change in eating habits (paleo, Atkins, and WW). When he includes those total and permanent changes in one’s diet, then the reader (at least, this reader) naturally thinks of other basic, permanent changes to one’s eating patterns, like the Mediterranean diet and thewhole-food plant-based diet.

With that exception, his article is straightforward, interesting, and informative. It begins:

From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks, and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death, too, beginning with rattling teeth and ending with a body so rotted out from the inside that its victims could literally be startled to death by a loud noise. Just as horrifying as the disease itself, though, is that for most of those 300 years, medical experts knew how to prevent it and simply failed to.

In the 1600s, some sea captains distributed lemons, limes and oranges to sailors, driven by the belief that a daily dose of citrus fruit would stave off scurvy’s progress. The British Navy, wary of the cost of expanding the treatment, turned to malt wort, a mashed and cooked byproduct of barley which had the advantage of being cheaper but the disadvantage of doing nothing whatsoever to cure scurvy. In 1747, a British doctor named James Lind conducted an experiment where he gave one group of sailors citrus slices and the others vinegar or seawater or cider. The results couldn’t have been clearer. The crewmen who ate fruit improved so quickly that they were able to help care for the others as they languished. Lind published his findings, but died before anyone got around to implementing them nearly 50 years later.

This kind of myopia repeats throughout history. Seat belts were invented long before the automobile but weren’t mandatory in cars until the 1960s. The first confirmed death from asbestos exposure was recorded in 1906, but the U.S. didn’t start banning the substance until 1973. Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path. . .

Continue reading.

How politics has poisoned the Evangelical church

Back in June, the Atlantic Monthly had a lengthy and compelling article by Tim Alberta (no paywall) on how in the US divisions are opening up in Evangelical churches and indeed in Christian churches in general. I found it absorbing, and it is difficult to know where it will lead — but it is pretty clearly not to a stronger Christian church, since in many of the churches Christianity has taken a back seat to conservative politics, which now is the focus.

A City Fights Back Against Heavyweight Cars

David Zipper reports for Bloomberg:

Imagine that you, a city resident, are contemplating swapping out your mid-sized sedan for a full-sized pickup truck. And not just any pickup truck; your eye has fallen upon a heavy-duty one, like the Chevy Silverado HD or the Ford F-250. These are machines intended for towing and hauling, but they’re increasingly popular as passenger vehicles in the US, despite their massive proportions. At 6,695 pounds, the F-250 is 23 inches taller and more than twice as heavy as a Honda Accord.

Such oversized vehicles exacerbate problems across all kinds of communities, but none more so than dense urban neighborhoods full of pedestrians and cyclists. Driving a large pickup or SUV increases the likelihood you’ll kill or injure someone; its thirsty power plant (the F-250 gets 15 mpg) spews more air pollution and greenhouse emissions.

If you’re a city or state leader, you have a limited arsenal of tools available to discourage residents from operating these behemoths on local streets. A proposal from the District of Columbia would add a new one: The city is poised to require owners of vehicles weighing over 6,000 pounds to pay an annual $500 vehicle registration fee], almost seven times the cost to register a modest sedan. No other US jurisdiction has created such a forceful financial disincentive against the biggest, heaviest car models.

“You can’t ban sales of these things,” says Mary Cheh, a D.C. councilmember who developed the new fee structure, “but you can make them pay their own way.”

Other state and local leaders alarmed by “truck bloat” would be wise to study the D.C. law, which represents a first-of-its-kind effort to address the negative externalities — or costs borne by others — associated with larger, heavier SUVs and trucks. To date, the federal government has largely ignored such societal downsides. Although pedestrian fatalities are surging in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently declined to add pedestrian crashworthiness to its crash test ratings program, which could have penalized the biggest models. (Most other developed countries added these tests years ago.)

D.C.’s approach revolves around . . .

Continue reading.

Broccolini du jour

I’ve not blogged a dish for a while, and tonight I decided to cook a bunch (not meaning “a lot,” but one bunch) of broccolini, and the rest came along for the ride, though I did have the BBQ onions in mind.

Drizzle my 12″ MSMK nonstick skillet with about

• 1.5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (actual olive oil)

Then prep the vegetables, starting (always) with garlic, since it must rest 10-15 after being cut up. So:

• 4 large cloves Russian red garlic, sliced thin (with my garlic mandoline)
• 4 small knobs fresh ginger root, minced or chopped small (not grated)
• 1/4 large red onion, chopped
• 2 BBQ/spring onions, chopped including leaves
• 3 largish mushrooms, halved vertically then sliced
• 1 piece of Du Puy lentil + Kamut wheat tempeh, diced small
• 1 large jalapeño, cap removed, quartered lengthwise, and chopped
• 1 lemon, ends removed, then diced
• 2 sprigs fresh tarragon, leaves stripped from stem and chopped 
• about 1 teaspoon Spanish bittersweet smoked paprika
• no Umami Bomb — decided against it at the last minute
• 1 teaspoon dried marjoram, as much for antioxidants as flavor
• 1 teaspoon Georgia Gold turmeric purée, and therefore:
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

The tarragon was purchased on a whim, and this seemed a good place to use it. Having the tarragon made me decide against Umami Bomb (which is added after cooking). I wanted to get the full effect of the tarragon.

I put all the prepped vegetables in the skilled as I went, adding the garlic at the end (when it had rested 14 minutes). I stirred the vegetables to mix, turned the burner to “3” (of 10), and covered the skillet.

Once the glass lid was covered inside with condensation, I stirred the veggies to make sure the skillet was now hot. I added:

• about 2 tablespoons water

And put the lid back on. I cooked it for about 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until cooking was well underway. Then I turned the burner to 200ºF, the timer to 10 minutes, covered the skillet, and came in to start this post. 

When the timer went off, I had a bowl of it. Extremely nice. Tarragon comes through strongly, of course, and the lemon was a good addition. Nice warmth from the one jalapeño. Good mouth feel and chewiness from broccolini and tempeh. Glad to get the turmeric, which I have been missing.

A success.  

A Top DeSantis Aide Behind the Martha’s Vineyard Migrant Flight Is In Some Deep Shit

Jay Kuo writes in The Status Kuo:

Something about the migrant “relocation” flight to Martha’s Vineyard, orchestrated by the DeSantis administration this past summer, has always bothered me, even beyond the inhumanity of it all: the price tag.

The charter flight company that actually flew the migrants, Vertol Systems, received a contract worth over $1.5 million from the state of Florida. That single flight cost the state a whopping $615,000, or around $12,500 per person. Vertol received a second payment of $950,000 just two weeks later.

This didn’t go unnoticed by the Florida Center for Government Accountability (FLCGA), a non-profit that sued the DeSantis administration in October of 2022 for withholding records relating to the migrant flight operation. The FLCGA brought its suit under a “sunshine” law designed to maintain transparency in government.

DeSantis’s office bitterly fought the suit but eventually lost, finally releasing records right before the Christmas weekend, no doubt hoping to avoid a big press story. Media nevertheless began picking up what could become a major scandal swirling around Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s so-called “czar” of public safety in Florida. And long time critics of the DeSantis administration, such as lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder, took to social media to amplify Keefe’s apparent corruption.

Larry Keefe appears to be crooked AF

It turned out, probably to no one’s surprise, that Vertol Systems has connections to the DeSantis administration. Vertol was a longtime client of Keefe when he was a partner at a Florida corporate law firm, and Keefe was very close to its CEO, James Montgomerie.

Here’s how crimey these two guys apparently were. According to . . .

Continue reading.

Privacy Is OK

I saw a negative comment on Mastodon about Reid Blackman’s article in the NY Times (no paywall) on Signal and why unrestrained privacy is a bad thing. I read the article and I didn’t understand what the problem was, though I was perfectly willing the accept that there may indeed be a problem. I was just unable to see it, and the 500-character format was insufficient to describe the problem to those who, like me, were ignorant of what it was.

Now, thankfully, Tim Bray has written an explainer that provides the insight I wanted. He writes:

I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.

Blackman’s description of what Signal does is accurate: Provides an extremely private communication path among individuals and groups; private to the extent that Signal.org (a nonprofit) doesn’t even know who’s talking to whom, let alone what they’re saying.

Blackman argues that this is dangerous because bad people could use it to plan nefarious activities and the legal authorities wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on them and stop them. Indeed, bad people can and (I’m sure) do use cryptography to evade surveillance.

So, let’s agree that Signal offers an upside and a downside. Up: Your privacy is protected from snoopers, be they maleficent governments or ordinary criminals. Down: It’s hard to wiretap the bad guys.

So, can we remove the downside without doing damage? Blackman says little about that, except the phrase “Whether law enforcement should tap our phones on the condition that a warrant is obtained…”

I’m sorry to be the bearer of of bad news, but it’s simply not possible to address the downside without completely shattering the upside. Here are three reasons why.

1. When you say “law enforcement”, who exactly do you mean? Employees of the United States? Of Oregon? Of Crow Wing County, MN? Of Italy? Of China? How are you going to sort out the jurisdictional disputes, and how are you going to ensure that only “good” law-enforcement organizations get to snoop?
2. A Signal eavesdropping capability would become the Holy Grail for every global organized-crime organization, national-security agency, and teenage hacker from Belarus. They’re pretty smart people at Signal, but there aren’t that many of them, and in a fight between them and a world-wide army of attackers, I know who I’m betting on.
3. Obviously, . . .

Continue reading.