Ebrius Disputatios

A thing's not wrong because it's illegal, a thing is illegal because it's wrong.

What's that saying, the tree of liberty needs watering with the blood of both tyrants and patriots. I'm sure that tree's still thirsty.

It started out as another dismal day politically, however it livened up a little on Capitol Hill later this evening. As usual getting accurate reporting from anywhere, these days, is always sparse and questionable. I can only speak for myself, but I've become so cynical, that I can't believe anything I hear or see politically. I'm sure even my political experiences are being scrutinized by every fiber of my being.

I don't know who these protesters in Washington, DC are, they could be democrat infiltrators for all I know but with all the protest this summer featuring the left wing democrats, it's not the least bit upsetting to see Americans attempting to put the fear of God into the swamp dwellers in the nation's capital. They're proved time and again that they do not respect the American people. This includes both parties. I've now become accustomed thinking of them as the uni-party. They may claim to be from two separate houses but they, the members of both parties only care about their own perceived power. I supported a peaceful protest however, sometimes a little reciprocal chaos is in order. Also, if these people are going to riot and raise hell then I hope that they make it count.

The politicians have used this alleged pandemic as a pretense to steal our rights and it has climaxed in our new realization that not even our right to elect whom we choose, is guaranteed anymore, as evidenced by the disgraceful third world election sham, that occurred on November, 3, 2020. What is apparent to everyone, is how quickly the Capitol police acts against some protesters as opposed to others. The protesters today are being shown the blunt force one would have loved to have seen this summer.

Exactly, police have stood down for left wing protesters but whether or not, these are Trump supporters, or infiltrators, one can't help but notice that the response in force, is markedly different. Republican politicians are cowards and they will pay a political price for what has gone down since November, until this day. They have essentially ceded the country to the democrats and so have we. We'll live to fight another day but our republican traitors may have to join the democrat party if they ever wish to continue in politics.

Where do patriots go from here? While the politicians must be made to pay for their blatant disrespect, corruption and cowardice, the patriots must unite our efforts and coordinate our forces as we find new ways to preserve our rights and liberties.

I'm beginning to think no. If and when white Americans are a permanent minority, then the United States of America, for all intent and purposes, ceases to exist.

Why am I even discussing such a divisive issue? It's simple really, I left my home to take a walk, something which I do often from time to time and what I see, I'm sure, is plainly seen by all even preschoolers. Take a walk on any American street and you'll see that in neighborhoods that are predominantly non white, you really must watch your step and I mean this literally. For, in sections of my own neighborhood, I rarely have to worry about stepping in some dog shit, getting assaulted, raped or robbed in a white neighborhood but especially stepping into dog shit. White Americans, for the most part have the uncanny habit of following laws and rules, to the point of being obsessive. A trait that is most lacking these days, in so called civilized society.

Some people only pretend to obey the rules, they only do so, if at all, when they think others are looking. Though I hardly if ever, step in dog shit these days, it is a testament of all those dog owners who obey and follow the law. Recently, I've noticed, walking the streets, the same sanitized obsessed people, who probably think wearing masks makes them think that they're valorous, think that it's fine not to clean up their dog waste. When I walk pass a pile of dog shit, on the sidewalk of downtown, any town, USA, I know the owner of that dog wasn't white. I know it because I only see dog shit on sidewalks where other people live and it's not whites leaving their neighborhoods, walking their dogs, hoping to take a shit on the little people. I know discussing topics like this isn't popular and can be construed as being crass and insensitive and perhaps, it may be. However, I'd like to walk on sidewalks without having to worry about about walking a minefield covered in dog shit. I bring race into it because, whenever I'm taking a walk on any sidewalk occupied by white Americans I hardly ever have to worry about dodging feces.

Now, I know some people, who may end up reading this may wonder what my motivation is for typing this. Did I step in a huge pile of shit? The answer is no. I'm just seeing piles and piles of it increasingly, lately, everywhere and I'm fed up with watching greatness assaulted by mediocrity, while seemingly good people do nothing about it and accept it as normal while the consider conformity.

Now I know I'm the bad guy, I'm going to ruffle more that a few feathers because I notice that in some parts of the city or towns which I traverse adhere to different standards. Is it that particular city's officials that are at fault because individuals can't obey the rules? I don't think so. Some people don't believe rules and laws apply to them. Increasingly, if one waits for the walk icon on a traffic light before walking into traffic, that person is considered the oddball. People who think freedom and individual rights are paramount, are considered selfish and extreme. Ask, yourself, is that the reason why so many people come to the United States of America? So that they can help pave the sidewalks of our cities with the excrement of their dogs? For those who think the streets of the USA are paved in gold, and certainly they cost as much, but lately some want to make sure that they're paved in excrement and not just the excrement of dogs either, just ask the people of San Francisco.

National Debt Clock National Debt Why isn't the website hosting the US debt clock not the most popular site among US citizens? Perhaps, it's because, if that clock is to be believed, it's just a matter of time before we and our politicians bring us and the United States, all to our knees when we have to take the debt seriously and are forced to pay it back with real money.

If the complacency, demonstrated by the US electorate on the crappy, sham, third world style elections, is any indicator, or the two week shutdowns which lasted way more that the allotted time, from March 2020 until today, New Years Eve 2020, the US national debt will not be taken seriously either.

At this writing, the national debt is a staggering $27,553,528,900,900 and rising as every second ticks by. In English is twenty seven trillion, five hundred fifty three billion, five hundred twenty eight million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred. dollars. I hope I wrote that correctly. It's a staggering sum of money. No one seems to care about the growing amount of money Americans seem to be accruing by the second. Politicians don't even bother to lie about doing anything about it and frankly, why should they bother? A vast number of citizens seem perfectly willing to keep the status quo. I'm not but for the life of me I can't come up with any credible solutions either. Just like most things in life, it's way above my pay grade and intelligence grade, apparently. Honestly, watching the recklessness of our elected officials and much of the electorate, that refuse to hold their feet to the fire, is akin to riding a mythical bus that's on a very long journey going nowhere, especially because the route leads to precipice and the brakes on the bus are prone to failure. We the people try to be hopeful but inevitably and instinctively, we all know the outcome will end in disaster.

I recently employed the services of a web hosting firm, I think that's what they're called I'm not entirely up on the vernacular just yet. I then got myself a domain name and now I pondered, the question, which was, now what? Now what, indeed, while I know my way around computers an am not afraid to learn new skills, I hadn't the foggiest clue on what to do or how I planned to tackle the projects I had been pondering for some time.

The questions swirling around in my mind consisted of how in the world was I going to tie in the recently acquired domain name to the internet address of the server on the virtual private server? Was I going to need Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, where would I get those and how much would they cost? I wished I had made web development and deployment a priority when I started embracing computer technology. Well initially I had, when I had just started, I remember learning how to use HTML and creating my first web pages but soon I scaled down my enthusiasm when I discovered then, that I'd need a domain name and that I'd need a host for my server and that it wouldn't be practical to run a web server from my home. Well that's what I was led to believe reading all the documents at the time. Not to mention the daunting perception I had about setting up a HTTP server like Apache, who's configuration file I knew I would have difficulty understanding without step by step instruction. I soon found that the web side of computer science didn't appeal to me so much anymore. So I decided I'd focus my attention on programming, applications, operating systems and kernel matters. I do alright, it was never my profession, you see, just a very rewarding hobby and extremely satisfying as a learning tool. However, I digress, what was I to do with my newly acquired implements?

Turns out it wasn't as daunting as I expected, I got my domain name from hover.com and all I had to do was log into hover's site, go to the DNS section and change the value, in this case the IP address from the number on hover's page to the IP address of my VPS server and that worked. It wasn't so hard at all.

What motivated me to do this was my obsession to start my own Mastodon instance. While it's easy enough to join many Mastodon instances, many of them seemed just as authoritarian and censorship prone as Facebook and Twitter ever were, especially whenever any topic right of center was posted and no matter where I went, this fact was the same. I'd get emails from admins, basically warning me that, that type of free speech wasn't acceptable. Mind you, my speech wasn't anything but a few post in support of President Trump but apparently that kind of talk was verboten.

Since I knew that Mastodon is free and open software, I knew that I could start my own instance on my own terms, sure, my kind of speech may still be unacceptable to some and while it may get me ostracized, in some circles, at least I can't be kicked out of a community, because of who I happen to be and what I say. At least I'm hoping that, that will be true.

Setting up a Mastodon instance was a little more daunting that I had anticipated, so I decided to learn more about doing so before I wasted time. Since time was of essence to me, I decided to have a Mastodon hosting service do the hard work for me until I become more proficient in such matters.

I wanted my Mastodon instance pronto so I decided to go that route temporarily. I'm admin and sole occupant of my instance and I like it that way. I search out people I believe are interesting, funny, tech savvy and the ever rare conservative right winger to follow. I appreciate all the people who do follow me back and will try not to offend anyone. I love the freedom I get from actually searching out people I wish to hear from, without any ulterior motive of having them follow me back, which seems to be the common motivational imperative on the many other social networks.

Anyway, paying to get my Mastodon instance established left me with a VPS and nothing to do with it so I decided that one of the most useful things I could do, would be to start a Mumble VOIP server on it. That wouldn't be too hard I pondered and I was delightfully correct. A mumble server's configuration file is mostly good as is and with just a few alterations, such as setting up the SuperUser's password nothing much had to be done. I use Debian and love using that Gnu/Linux distribution and so I chose it as the operating system for my instance as well, so installing Mumble was as trivial as using apt install.

I've always wanted my own Mumble server but I never wanted to host it from my home IP. I don't know why it took me so long to deploy one until now, perhaps, I've always thought web hosting was more expensive than it is, or perhaps, prices just became more affordable. In any event, I love it that I have some presence on the internet, even if it's in a small way, by some standards. I like the fact that I won't get kicked off Mumble because some admin didn't like my political views. I mean, some people get offended by me just talking about how good it is to be free and what freedom means to me. It's unbelievable. I've had a few bad experiences on some networks, however, I've also made friends along the way and it's always cool to know that we can still keep in touch since we can always retire to my server and yuck it up.

Besides setting up the Mumble server, I decided that having a blog would be a good use for all that space left on the VPS, I mean Mumble is a very small program, it would be a waste of resources not to find another project to implement on my VPS.

I decided that a lightweight blog would suit me fine. I've loved WriteFreely since the first time I learned about it's existence and I especially loved the idea that it was federated and used the Activity Pub protocol. Which meant that people on the fediverse, could easily follow my blog if they liked my content. For the uninitiated, the fediverse, a joining of the words federated and universe, are a group of very useful servers and utilities that use Activity Pub to connect to each other making it easy to still connect with people you like, who are on different networks. It's revolutionary, is what it is, because unlike Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest of the centralized social media networks, everyone you follow and like must be on those networks respectively. Not so with the federated networks you can start your own instance, join any one that's to your liking and follow your friends who are on any other network. It's analogous to email. That is, one can have a Gmail account and have friends with Yahoo mail, Netzero mail and so on and it doesn't stop one from sending and receiving emails from them. Federation has the potential to change the landscape and thinking, of how we start viewing social media in general. I'm hopeful that it will succeed.

The documentation for WriteFreely, in my opinion, seemed dreadful, perhaps I should volunteer to the project and help out in that particular area. I couldn't get my instance setup because there was a lack of intuition in the documents that I found. However, I finally gleaned some insight and things started working. Well, perhaps I was a bit harsh about the scope of the documentation, because it was in reading them, that I successfully set up a Mysql or MariaDB database, in this case, so parts of the documentation were much more clear than others.

I got most of the pieces working except whenever I pointed my web browser to my domain I had an error 403 that said Forbidden. However, on my server, whenever I pointed the Lynx browser to localhost:8080, WriteFreely was on full display. So I realized that Nginx was working, WriteFreely was working and MariaDB was too. So the problem had to be human error, me. I did some more research and found out that I knew very little if anything about reverse proxy. I searched a little but I didn't find anything immediately but I was excited at the progress. I wanted instant gratification too, however, so I visited my friends at Skyn3t and I got major help from Nuggy and Zer0. Thanks again guys!

Speaking of WriteFreely, the main reason why I decided that having my own instance would be a good reason is, I had joined a few writefreely instances and wrote a few articles in support of President Trump and to my surprise they're no longer over there, my posts I mean. So so much for free speech and freedom of expression, only being censored by the Masters of Silicon Valley. Apparently, the grassroots types like it as much as anyone else too.

So the site seems to be running well and I decided I should review the logs, in particular the auth logs. What I found was horrifying apparently in the space of one day, there were over thirteen thousand attempts to log into my server. The crackers are indeed, very busy. Well I'm happy everything's working out and I think I'll enjoy them for a few hours before I find some other project to play with. I'll enjoy my Mastodon instance, my Mumble VOIP chat room and my newly implemented blog, all in their infancy. I read somewhere that truly happy people are the ones whom are mostly satisfied with the things that they have, I agree. It's pointless to overlook the good things or the bad, for that matter, that one possesses, totally ignoring or neglecting them, in search of vain ambitions and regret. I'm going to enjoy this happy time and continue on my journey to self improvement. Thanks for taking the time to read this and take care of yourselves.