Month: January 2025

Who would want to cripple a government cybersecurity org? 🤔

This is obviously not suspicious in any way….

The Cyber Safety Review Board — a Department of Homeland Security investigatory body stood up under a Biden-era cybersecurity executive order to probe major cybersecurity incidents — has been cleared of non-government members as part of a DHS-wide push to cut costs under the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the matter.

And what was the CSRB looking into?

The terminations will likely delay an ongoing CSRB investigation into the Salt Typhoon hacks, which involved a wide-ranging Chinese infiltration into a number of telecom providers in the U.S. and around the world. The hackers also targeted the communications of a number of high-profile political individuals, including people tied to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. 

Yup. Not suspicious at all. Pass the popcorn.

Echos of the 1930s

This is how normalization works.

People are quickly discovering what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad. And it will be felt as a relief. No longer will they have to echo bien-pensant hypocrisies, they can engage in frank, honest assertions of their self-interest.

And:

“Plutot Trump que le Wokisme” seems to be the slogan of the center-right that once whinged about the Constitution and our sacred norms.

From https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/welcome-to-vichy-america . Read the whole thing.

How not to behave as a Democrat

My Congressional rep, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D), attended today’s Inauguration and posted happy selfies on her FB page. I would have understood if she had turned up wearing dark colored clothing, with a black arm band to mark the mourning for President Carter, and spoken of our debt to Martin Luther King for whom today is a national holiday. If she had approached it as a civic duty on behalf of her constituents, but one undertaken with regret.

But she didn’t.

#primary2026

“Mob” thinking among the oligarchs

This:

“The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends.

(Frank Ruda, quoted by John Ganz. )

Thoughts on personal social media strategy

Quite a few of my friends have been posting about their uncertainty about if and how to use social media going forward. Musk rendered X/Twitter toxic, and now Zuckerberg is capitulating to MAGA and abandoning moderation on Facebook. I posted the following as a comment on one of these threads, and decided to repeat it here:

I think the best approach is going to be dual-track: Bluesky plus personal blog. Longer form content on the blog, ephemeral interactions (plus notifications of blog updates) on Bluesky. (Or whatever supersedes Bluesky.) This is what folks like Scalzi and Emptywheel are doing.

What FB and Twitter have taught us is that relying on a single platform is risky/unwise/disappointing. Migrating old content is awful, but do you really want to lose your history? And setting up and running a WordPress instance is operationally trivial and pretty affordable.

Right now, I have four daily feed sources. (Too many, but 🤷?)
– Email, for all of the newsletters (including many Substack sources).
– Feedly, for all of the blogs and news sources that provide RSS feeds.
– Facebook, for family and friends.
– Bluesky, for ephemeral stuff.