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The best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home

There isn’t an obvious public link to this specific message, sent out on Free DC’s list, though their site has plenty of their digital campaign materials about this and other issues they advocate for. I thought it was excellent though. Once again, I think of my passed grandfather, Battle of the Bulge veteran, Republican, who I know would find this use of the military offensive.

I’ve reproduced the core of the email I received, including their emphasis and links (minus ActionNetwork’s redirects):

Armed soldiers don’t belong in our communities. The National Guard isn’t supposed to police American civilians. They are not supposed to chase down children, intimidate people on the street, harass residents for simply being outside, or be used as props in Shake Shack photo-ops.

Trump is trying to make the National Guard do all these things here in DC as well as in Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, and Portland. Guard members themselves are increasingly fed up with it.

Yesterday we learned that National Guard members are increasingly questioning their role in Trump’s agenda of occupation and deportation.

“This is just not what any of us signed up for, and it’s so out of the scope of normal operations,” said J, a member of the Ohio National Guard who spoke on condition of anonymity. "[Y]ou want me to go pick up trash and dissuade homeless people in D.C. at gunpoint. Like, no dude."

J isn’t alone. In September, leaked documents revealed that the Guard knows its occupation of American cities is “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans. That’s not what service members deserve.

This Veterans Day, the best way we can honor service members is to send the National Guard home. These deployments are unsafe, unlawful, inappropriate, and a waste of public funds. Our demand remains: National Guard Out Now.

Dick Cheney’s death should be a reminder that we must fix the process of politics whatever content we would advocate for. Cheney is, as much as anyone else, the godfather of Donald Trump. As Jonah Goldberg put it, Trump is kind of his “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

I might become a decent writer if I put as much effort into composing and finishing prose in private as I did in venting it off as stream of consciousness to a couple of poor victims I portray as friends. Instead, it gets vented there (and sometimes cribbed for here) and I don’t feel the urge to revisit and work it further.

What happens when we all put our heads in the cloud

Yesterday’s AWS outage reinforces an old truth: the cloud is—oversimplified but not wrong—someone else’s computer.

This isn’t an argument against cloud adoption. It’s about trust distribution and control boundaries. How much faith do you place in a single provider, how much can you afford to take advantage of their redundancies—or can you afford not to? What’s beyond your control regardless of SLAs? What do those SLAs actually mean? Are you hedging those bets?

The pattern looks familiar: numerous organizations, despite apparent diversity in their offerings, seem to have concentrated their infrastructure in AWS US-East-1. No real surprise. What’s telling is (based on reporting to date) the apparent lack of tested multi-region failover capabilities. When this reportedly DNS-originated incident hit, rapid adaptation failed—if it even existed.

I don’t operate at hyperscale. I am a web developer who evolved through digital professional services into a technology manager. My experience comes from managing other technologists, engineers, and vendors for what was, in terms of staffing a larger medium-sized business where our budget probably couldn’t match what these tech giants spend on toilet paper. Yet we maintained business continuity—for a 24/7 crisis line—through outages. When any cloud component failed, whether SaaS platforms or our AWS deployments, we retained operational capability through alternative pathways, including fallback to “pre-cloud” configurations.

Our teams' recovery strategy addressed both RTO and RPO intuitively, before we knew what those terms were. We identified single points of failure, built redundancy where cost-effective, and accepted calculated risks elsewhere. Most importantly, we tested these failover procedures regularly.

This sounds like common sense. Experience suggests otherwise.

If your organization needs someone who treats information systems and infrastructure as a product serving your team, someone who speaks plainly and pragmatically about availability, threat models, and builds contingency plans that actually meet reality, especially if you’re trying to make the world a better place, I am interested.

I am a technologist but a morning like this encourages my Luddism (understanding technology’s impact, valuing autonomy, adopting it intentionally). I had cash; while Venmo was down, our visit to the PTSO coffee table outside school happened anyway & The Childe did some practical math.

I took Metro this morning. Got on a Silver Line train in the direction of Ashburn. Operator pronounced it ASSburn.

Yeah, we’re all on the train to ass burn these days.

Paul Clement pretty much said it out loud

This morning I’ve been listening to SCOTUS arguments (rather than public radio pledge drive pleas) and heard conservative lawyer (and former Solicitor General under the end of the Bush II administration) Paul Clement admit Republicans have a hard time finding voters who want to join Republicans in court to have standing to support Republican complaints about (what in my mind amounts to) voter enfranchisement. This was all as an aside in the arguments being made this morning in Bost v. IL Bd. of Elections.

Am I missing something good?

Having taken a break from certain social media platforms in recent years, I might be missing the valuable content amidst the trolling, spam, and slop I imagine having to continued to fester. However, I don’t feel compelled to give any fucks on the news about Sora 2, except those which I give for all of generative AI (some of which I use): concern for its energy consumption, as a source of societal and civic distraction, and potential to cause confusion. Is there truly any art or communication being created with it or similar tools that was impossible or significantly more valuable than before its existence?

Bruce Schneier on Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

Bruce Schneier lays it out pretty broadly that regular Americans really should be thinking of their personal threat model as living under authoritarianism.

It might be uncomfortable to think about. I remember in the past, it was a bit of a no-go to even bring up whether we saw our government as a potential threat in our threat model at a past job. And getting an answer? Well, that was even less fun, given the sensitivity of certain data and the tension of priorities. (I didn’t get one!)

Journalism should have already be on board and well ahead on the idea, especially for certain stories and topics. But the Pentagon’s push this week should really make that clear. Nevermind the major networks recently being directly targeted and their general capitulation. Or maybe the State Department’s proclivity to kick out journalists who ask pesky questions?

I do not think this is a question anymore.

Just some curious bullshit

What appeared to be RFK Jr’s old 2024 presidential campaign bus was parked (illegally) outside the Pierce School condominiums in northeast DC on September 16. This location is also known for hosting a crypto party aligned with Trump’s inauguration and being a place Musk and other DOGE figures early in the administration.

I have no other context, but found it weird to see. I found it vaguely notable that it happened between RFK Jr’s grilling before the Senate Finance Committee last week and his fired CDC director’s testimony before the Senate HELP Committee yesterday. That’s probably a coincidence.

If RFK Jr. hadn’t bought a multimillion dollar home in Georgetown upon his appointment, I’d say it would fit that he’d be living in the old campaign bus (down by the river?) when in DC.

Whatever the actual story, DC has enough Dear Leader banners of Trump being hung off of Heritage Foundation, Agriculture and Labor buildings, we don’t need an outdated totem of failure emblazoned with our other narcissist-in-residence rolling around town.

A photograph of the RFK Jr “Kennedy 2024” bus, seen from the rear left, parked (illegally) in DC.

What did he fight for?

I’ve been thinking about the news lately. (That’s a true statement most days of the week, most weeks of the year.)

I’ve been thinking about Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s quitting, because of speech restrictions from Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company.

I’ve been thinking about all the backlash on people who mostly either tried to counter the hagiography of Charlie Kirk or perhaps were venting less tactfully (I’ve been known to).

I’ve been thinking about one of my grandfathers — I’ve mentioned him before in the open air of the Internet: The one who is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who really fought real Nazis. A conservative, a believer in freedom. I think also, like many veterans of that and other wars, he came out of World War II an atheist. (He went in a Quaker, one of the more conservative “programmed” variety, like Nixon.)

He was also a dairy farmer, part of a dairy co-op that supplied Ben & Jerry’s (well before the Unilever acquisition). I do not know what he thought about the hippies making and selling ice cream all over New England and Upstate New York, but I know he didn’t mind eating it or selling to them. (Conversely, Ben and Jerry had to know all these family dairies their milk came from weren’t exactly communes.)

I know he didn’t mind their speech. I know this because when I grew into a teenager, I took positions against what I considered abuses of authority in my small world—positions he wouldn’t take himself. And I got in trouble for them.

And he spoke up in my defense.

“What did I fight for?” my mother has quoted him from that time.

What did he fight for, I wonder. Most days of the week. Most weeks of the year.

And especially today.

The climate crisis, slow-roll-WWIII, no better than band-aids on the social safety net between axe swings at it, and a duopoly political system oscillating between making it all happen or doing nothing people actually need to stop it, and an economy teetering on realizing it.

Imagine, in terms of the kinds of things being cut in proposed House and Senate GOP budget bills, what we could pay for already (accepting ludicrous premises) if we just weren’t flying all those KC-135s and C-17s constantly at $20k+/hour/plane re: Israel/Iran. Or you know, the fucking parade.

If you told me 30 years ago that an adult me, not a lawyer, would listen to Supreme Court oral arguments “for fun,” I’d have spit my Mountain Dew in your face.