Yup. The guy was caught by the Secret Service as he was “trying to find an opening in the security.” About the only saving grace in all this is that the people trying to do this are idiots. Like that guy who came up with a brilliant plan to get past the bullet proof glass at an FBI building by using a nail gun.

Unfortunately, throw enough idiots into the mix and some of them will succeed just by dumb luck. And the right has plenty of idiots to throw.

Same thing happens in the Jewish community. My father is a Republican and believes that Republicans support Jews because “they support Israel.” He doesn’t see that the only reasons that Republicans support Israel are because:

1. The evangelicals want Israel to exist and be run by Jews so it can be attacked and Jesus can return.

And

2. So the right has a place to say Jews really belong (not in America).

They’ll “support Israel” all day and night while actively pushing for a Christian Theocracy in America where Jews are (at best) second class citizens.

I was the victim of a cyberstalker about a decade ago. This person was convinced that I was really someone else that she had a beef with. Her reasoning? We both like taking photos. (Apparently, I’m the only one posting photos online. All those pictures you see online? That’s all me. No wonder I have no free time!)

I couldn’t argue with her to let her know that she was mistaken because she had it on “very good authority” that I was lying about who I was. Namely, “God told her.” And I’m not exaggerating here. She literally thought that God talked to her and told her stuff like who was committing crimes.

Oh and I was guilty of those crimes according to “God.” I won’t name those crimes because they’re heinous, but suffice it to say she thought I was doing unspeakable things to kids. She was threatening to call my employer, the police, and everyone who knew me to tell them about what I was doing.

Luckily for me, all she had to go on was “TechyDad.” I blogged at the time, but didn’t post my exact whereabouts or my real name. The guy that she thought I was wasn’t as lucky. She contacted his employer (a school in New Zealand) and everyone with the same last name as him that was on Facebook and near him. All to tell them what he did to kids. (Again, her source was “God.” He didn’t really do anything and he had to have quite a few awkward conversations to clear things up.)

I finally got rid of the stalker by grabbing her IP address (from one of her comments) and modifying my htaccess file to report 404 Page Not Found for only that IP. She crowed on Twitter about how she singlehandedly took me down and then moved on. (I and her other targets would report her to Twitter, but she’d constantly have dozens of other handles ready and waiting and would switch to them the second her main one was banned.)

To my knowledge, she’s still out there stalking people.

Now, how would this have been different had she had my real name? Well, with a little work she would have been able to look up my location. (My name’s pretty common, but she’d find me eventually.) Then, she’d locate my employer, my address, and other information. She could send me packages or mail harassing me. She could contact my local police to swat me or just to report my “crimes.” She could contact my employer to report me and try to get me fired.

Now, I eventually did tie my real name to “TechyDad.” I wrote a book and didn’t want to publish under “TechyDad” so I used my two name. That being said, it was my choice. I definitely wouldn’t want it to be required for me to use my real name everywhere.

I bought one with Bluetooth headphones built in. I have tinnitus and going to sleep was torture. I’d lay in the quiet room and be unable to sleep thanks to the loud ringing in my right ear. During the day, my hearing aid helps, but I take it out at night. With the Bluetooth sleep mask, I can put on white noise, drown out the ringing, and fall asleep.

As a bonus, I made a specific white noise mix for sleep and I seem to have trained my brain to have a Pavlov-type response. When that white noise goes on, my brain says “time to go to sleep” and I’m able to quickly fall asleep instead of having my brain run a mile a minute in the dark. (At least, on most nights. The Pavlov response isn’t strong enough to overcome me being stressed about something if I go to bed.)

The sleep mask with Bluetooth cost me about $30 and it was worth every penny!

I heard about Boost coming to Lemmy also. I don’t have any information about development progress, but I’ll definitely be trying it out once it launches.

Boost is still working for Reddit because Reddit realized that turning off their API access was harder than they thought. It will take them a few weeks to do this. Once they do, Boost for Reddit will be dead.

I’m still using it to look into a few subreddits every so often. (Ones that I haven’t found Lemmy replacements for.) When it dies, my time spent on Reddit - already very reduced from the pre-API crisis levels - will drop even more.

I like Liftoff and Jerboa. I flip between them depending on my mood.

I’m proud of my son. He decided to read a book based on “it was banned in some school districts” (not ours). He then scoffed at the reason for the ban.

I can’t recall the book title at the moment, but the reason was that two characters have sex and the incident takes up one page. From what my son described, it wasn’t overly graphic. This wasn’t an erotica sex scene tossed into the book. It was just the normal kind of story description of events. Books like the Bible have much more graphic content.

The only reason that he seemed like a “Genius CEO” with SpaceX and Tesla was because those companies had layers of management dedicated to protecting the company from Musk.

If Musk marched into Tesla and decided that all Tesla cars should have eyeball shaped headlights, managers would tell him what a genius idea that was and that they’d get right on it. Then, they’d distract him with something else while the idea went in the trash can.

Twitter has no such management layer so every Elon Epiphany becomes Twitter policy no matter how bad or destructive it is. SpaceX and Tesla were successes despite Musk and Musk gained his “genius” reputation because those companies were able to filter out his idiocy.

I was assuming that the reason was that Twitter fired all their system administrators so the services are basically held together with bubble gum and string. If too many people use the services, it’ll crash so they need to limit usage.

They can’t admit that the rate limits are due to unmaintained servers, though, so they trotted out the “people are scraping Twitter” excuse.

Come to think of it, didn’t Reddit use something like that as an excuse for the huge API pricing? Are they coordinating on how to ruin their services? If so, they’re doing a great job!

Including sites that are hosted outside of the US. Does Virginia think that a site hosted in the Germany and run by people in the Netherlands will care that Virginia says they need to verify the age of their visitors? (I picked those countries at random. If I somehow picked countries that wouldn’t work due to local laws, just substitute different countries.)

The level of fabrication would be impressive if it wasn’t so maddeningly illegal.

The guy didn’t contract for a website for his gay marriage.

He didn’t know that guy he was supposedly marrying.

And he’s straight.

And he’s been married to a woman for 15 years.

How did nobody check this out and what penalties can the website designer and lawyers face for lying in court?

He’s an anti-vaxxer that echos a lot of Russian propaganda. He even tweeted an image of a woman wearing his campaign merchandise - and then people noticed that the sign on the cafe in the background was in Russian.

If anything, he seems like a right-winger trying to pretend that he’s a liberal and hoping that people vote for him based on his famous family name.

As soon as they stop doing things worthy of criticism (and undo what they’ve already done), then I’ll agree that the liberal justices should stop criticizing the court.

The last one is Imposter Syndrome. I struggle with it too. Despite having worked in web development for 25+ years, I’m constantly finding myself thinking that I don’t know anything and any day now everyone else will realize it. It’s a constant battle to remind myself that I’m actually talented and knowledgeable and not just a huge fraud.

DeSantis is all about performance politics. He does things not because he thinks they are the right thing to do, but because he thinks the performance of him “hurting the right people” will get him more votes.

He doesn’t even care if his laws are overturned later. He can either ignore that they were overturned or he can rail against “liberal activist judges” (even if the judge was appointed by Trump).

Building with LEGO can be fun, but obviously buying tons of sets costs a lot of money and displaying them takes up a lot of space.

A nice alternative is using BrickLink Studio. This software lets you build LEGO creations using a 3D CAD-style software. You can not only build creations, but can generate photorealistic images. Here’s a recent virtual build of mine:

You can upload your creations to Rebrickable.com and download other people’s creations.

If you really want to build your creation, you can upload the parts list to BrickLink and buy new or used pieces. Obviously, this last part takes real money, but buying used pieces can bring down the cost.

Republicans seem to want to turn back the clock to the 1950’s and in one aspect I agree with them. The top tax rate back then was 90%. That should be returned for anyone making over $10 million.

Unlike Republicans, though, I think people should be free to be who they are - whether they’re LGBTQ or straight/cisgender, black or white, Christian or Jewish or atheist, or any other group I didn’t list. (I didn’t list all groups only because I don’t want this comment to be novel length.) Basically, as long as your actions affect only yourself and consenting adults, I’m fine with them.

I’m also fine with parents having some control over what their kids do. I’m a parent myself and know that as a parent you need to make judgement calls as to what’s best for your child. I wouldn’t want someone else questioning my parenting based on their beliefs. However, there are limits. If your child is LGBTQ and you try to force them to be straight/cisgender, you aren’t acting in your child’s best interests. If your 10 year old child is raped and their life is in danger, but you refuse to allow them to have an abortion because your religion doesn’t allow it, then you’re harming your child.

Also, a person’s “parental rights” shouldn’t mean that they get to decide that certain books are banned from everyone reading them. My son actually just finished reading a book because it had been banned and we laughed over how innocuous the “ban triggering passage” was compared to some stuff in the Bible.

Basically, I think I’d call myself a Pragmatic Progressive. I advocate for progressive causes, but I also realize that society can often be slower to adapt than we like. While we would love to be able to pass X and have it be widely adopted immediately, there’s often a series of slow moving battles to get X passed and another slow march to get wide acceptance. We can’t simply throw in the political towel at the first setback. Neither can we pass up 10% of our goal being within our grasp because we’re holding out for 100%. We need to get whatever advancements we can while continually pushing for more.

Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution - the 14th Amendment. DeSantis couldn’t just have Congress pass a law repealing it. Now, he could have Congress try to pass a new Amendment removing it. That’s possible, but extremely unlikely.

First, he would need to get two thirds of each chamber of Congress on board. Right now, the chambers are basically divided 50-50. DeSantis might get one or two right leaning Democrats to jump on board (Manchin), but there’s no way he’d get enough to pass this hurdle.

Let’s say he did, though. The Democrats suffer a mass outbreak of temporary insanity and wind up passing this. Now, it would go to the states. DeSantis would need three fourths of the states, or 38, to ratify it. 27 states voted for Trump so lets assume they immediately jump on board. Georgia was close and is run by Republicans so we’ll give that to DeSantis also. This still leaves 10 states. He’d quickly run out of swing states and would need to convince some blue states to approve his amendment.

Is it possible that this happens? Yes, but it’s also possible that I find a winning lottery ticket on my front lawn tomorrow. I wouldn’t count on either one happening though.

They want the First Amendment to only apply to straight, white, Christian men.

Of course, they want all rights to apply only to them and all restrictions to apply only to everyone else. It’s why conservatives were very pro-gun control when black groups started marching while legally carrying guns. “We can’t have ‘those people’ using the Second Amendment! It only applies to us!!!”

It’s pretty much the playbook of all of DeSantis’ “accomplishments.”

1. Make a broad law banning or mandating some action.

2. Brag about how great, conservative, and anti-woke you are for passing this law.

3. Law gets struck down for being obviously and egregiously unconstitutional.

4. Either denounce “liberal activist judges who push the woke agenda” (ignoring that the judge was appointed by a Republican) or just ignore the ruling entirely and keep touting the law you passed regardless of the fact that it’s been junked.