Border Patrol

In this science fiction drama, the Canadians have turned sufficiently into an extension of District groupthink to be counted on to round up and return the "defectors" who try to draft dodge.  

In the meantime, those Mexican countries (wink) with their leftist governments, provide a haven south of the border for those wishing to avoid being sent to the front, as pawns for NATO.  

In that case, the border wall was a good investment.  It was always about keeping the prey hemmed in, in our game park.  We've been here before, in screenplays and dramas.

A sealed border is an affront to the freedom of movement for everyone, whereas most borders are semi-permeable -- meaning permeable.  Some of the right stuff, and right people, still gets through.  

Who are the right people with the right stuff?  That's up to the ones controlling customs.  

These read like grammatical truisms.  The fabled Hermetic Seal is more myth than physics, akin to a "perfect vacuum".  

Most membranes are at least permeable to light, meaning any electromagnetic frequency on the spectrum.

The question of citizenship or ships is not always a question of geographic locale.  You'll find citizens of country B inside country A and vice versa.  People mix it up like that, all the time.  

When an ideology puts people first, such complicated arrangements pose less of a threat.  From the viewpoint of the individual, it's rarely that complicated.  One cultivates one's loyalties as events unfold. Each step of the way makes sense, like a blockchain.

The idea that a person born anywhere on the planet has some inherent right of access to the whole planet, is not accepted even in principle as a part of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.  

The rights of citizenship, if one has citizenship, are not the same as access rights.  Thanks to private property rights, no one alive has unrestricted access in practice.  Even if "some inherent right" pertains, we see countervailing principles.  Then there's simply the inaccessibility of much of the planet.  No roads...

I'll be the first to admit I have no privileged access to most places.  Given my expired passport (I need to work on that), I'm pretty well penned in, but within a rather large area.  

What's oppressive is when the borders you must not cross keep you within a single campus or less.  Such arrangements are usually considered punitive, although if you're washed ashore at sea, on a deserted yet life supportive environment, then you may consider yourself lucky to be alive.  Hello Tom Hanks.

One hopes for at least an airport or dock, with appropriate boardable vessels coming and going.

Social Media Regarding Social Media

Random Gossip

From some Facebook timeline somewhere:

I'm still trying to figure out the IRA game (Internet Research Agency) as research seemed what it was up to: stage events, gain followers, sell stuff, promote memes... but to what end? Twas Bannon of Cambridge Analytica who overtly copped to trying to win elections, with that whole scary backstory about the secret Facebook quiz. Facebook took the heat and learned to kowtow.

I bet IRA was more "oligarchs playing with the west's new toys" trying to get in on the ground floor playing the new social media capitalist game. Swinging the election was likely not a motive, not at all. My hypothesis. Facebook and Google are global goliaths and the Russians assume (as I do) that they're just as entitled to their troll farms as any lobby group. IRA actually stood up to Mueller saying it had every right to play the game and Mueller backed down, seeing this as a footnote in history he'd like us to forget.

On the other hand, the whole Guccifer 2 business and Crowdstrike is a separate narrative and there we're told the GRU itself has its hands in everything, and working on Trump's behalf was definitely the goal in that case. The Mueller report goes into great detail, showing the Russians snapping to attention when Trump called for them to find those missing Hill-Billary emails. The only weakness in the narrative there is CrowdStrike wrote it under contract, with the FBI in no position to audit, only coach and cajole to get the narrative it wanted. It's not what I'd call highly credible, even if it's in the Congressional Record (so is a lot of other garbage).

Making Sockets More Secure

An issue CJ and I would argue about, was whether browsers were amiss in relegating unencrypted websites to second class status.  Chrome seemed especially heavy-handed.

I'd taken up the position that sticking with HTTP was no sin, any more than not wearing a mask, or wearing one.  In principle, we don't have enough info to talk about who's being "too unforgiving".  The bare fact of using HTTP does not warrant any kind of moral or aesthetic judgement.

I had a dog in the fight: through 2022, my Grunch.net, host of Synergetics on the Web, and hosted at GoDaddy, was serving plain old HTTP, with no encryption, no security certificate.  Perhaps for this reason, although I'm not clear on the mechanics, my ability to connect to my own website was degrading.

I cannot quite imagine what whitelist or blacklist would be frustrating traffic through my two routers, one behind the other, when neither registered any explicit blocking.  Was CenturyLink getting involved up line from me?  I'd reboot the routers, and at least temporarily regain access to the site -- or not (even that stopped fixing the issue). 

We could still ping and traceroute the grunch.net domain, just not get through to the server, netting a timeout instead.  Yet that very same website, viewed through Verizon, on a phone, was still quite responsive.  "What's up with that?" was the thinking.

Anyway, in the midst of all this confusion I decided it was time to bite the bullet and tackle the HTTP issue more directly, by upgrading Grunch.net to an HTTPS site.  

GoDaddy had a solution waiting.  I was able to follow the steps myself, although not without some confusing chat sessions (by voice and by text) with disgruntled tech support humans.

I'd point out to CJ that many of our treasured websites no longer had active administrators behind them.  Webmasters pass away.  Getting them converted over to HTTPS would require someone taking active measures and assuming administrative responsibility.  Is that even possible in all cases?  Given our rough and tumble Global U reality, we have no right to assume such faculty will be available.