Two years after America’s second war against the British ended , Stephen Decatur famously toasted, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” Ironically, that kind of somewhat jingoistic statement made today would be seen by some as unpatriotic, or maybe even “communist.” How could America ever be wrong?
For the last 250 years, there have seldom been times when the United States has been wholly in the right vis a vis other nations. Even when wars were ostenisbly fought in self-defense, there were often ulterior motives and opportunism that drove how the wars were fought. *
As a veteran of Operation Earnest Effort to Lower Oil Prices, I’ve muttered Decatur’s words to myself on more than one occasion. And in this moment in time, when so much of what is done in the name of our country is objectively anything but right, those words take on a reformist spin: a patriot should not just accept that the country is wrong, but make it right.
Patriotism, in my mind, is a love of country and its people. It is civic, not political. A patriot steps up to help other people in their country regardless of identity, class, or even immigration status in times of need, and is willing to put the good of the people of the nation ahead of individual ambitions and interests, and strives to make the country right when it isn’t.
Also, patriotism is not performative–you don’t act patriotically to draw attention or glory to yourself. Patriotic acts are by definition giving without any expectation of getting; in wartime, that could include giving your life to protect the lives and rights of people you’ve never met.
This view of patriotism is in direct opposition to what the current regime promotes: division, “nativism,” racism, self-promotion and self-gain, corruption, moral cowardice, and chaos directed at creating conditions suitable for sustained authoritarianism.
MAGAs are not patriots. They are nationalists with an adjective: white, Christian, fascist. Don’t let them challenge your patriotism. And keep fighting to make America right, not right-wing.
*With the exception of the Civil War and the actions against the Barbary Pirates, every war the US undertook in the 19th century had the goal of territorial expansion. The War of 1812 had some core righteous causes (“Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” is a banger of a rallying cry, Jack McCain). But there were other motivators that may have been less noble. There was territorial expansion on the menu, including seizing land in the west from native tribes that were allied with the British, and goals of annexing Canada outright. “The Quebecios will welcome us with open arms!”…said someone who had never met a Québécois. In the 20th century, US entry into WWI was for a muddled host of reasons; entry into WWII was driven by trade issues and collision of colonial interests in the Pacific, and Korea and Vietnam were driven by “containment” of Communism but also protection of the hegemony the US had inherited from spent allies in Asia. And then there was Reagan…
It’s now just about a year since my parents’ twin health crises became emergent. A lot has happened. There are many people I am grateful to, including my management at my employer for making it possible to keep my job and deal with the relocation of both parents, hospitalization of one, and the finding of long-term housing and care for both. Work has become more normal, and more sustainable, while my parents’ situation is more sustainable but far from “normal”…though my relationship with them was never “normal,” whatever that is.
Mom is deeper into dementia. What had been a short-term memory loss issue has progressed to sundowning episodes where she reverts to her late teens and early 20s (while still somehow recognizing me as her son). She still manages daily life with not a whole lot of assistance, but a lot of screaming from my dad
The week before July 4, we drove 500 miles to my parents’ house to start the process of selling it. That meant cleaning it out, a task we have yet to complete but have gotten a great deal of help with from Cindy, the woman who has done house cleaning for my parents for over 20 years. My parents, as the real estate agent said charitably, were/are “savers”–not quite to the level of extreme hoarding, but they never threw out or otherwise disposed of anything that they assigned any value to.
My mom had been an avid digital photographer. Until about 10 years ago, she sold landscape and architectural photo prints at the local farmers market and at craft shows. She also kept every camera she or my dad ever owned, often leaving film or memory cards in the ones she abandoned, piled into boxes or oversized camera bags that had fallen out of favor in a corner of her office space. I retrieved some of them on our trip, and found a decade-old memory card in a Nikon D90 with photos she had taken–including photos of my daughter as a teenager while on a trip to Florida with them, and of their (and previously my brother’s) dog Hagen.
Photos from BSG, 2016
his was by no means the only little time capsule we came across–the whole house (especially the garage) was filled with things that could only be summed up with the interjection “What the fuck, Dad?” shouted rhetorically into the not-void.
Long after he had stopped doing anything with them, my dad obsessively purchased and collected model trains– Lionel and other O27 and O gauge, HO, and especially N gauge model engines and railcars, sets, track, and accompanying model buildings and landscape items. He did not keep these in any sort of good order; luckily he stored about half of the Lionel trains in their original boxes, but not in a way that enhanced their value. Toward the end of his residence in that house, he had a couple of N-gauge train cars in their boxes (and one out of its box) under the flip up seat on his “cadillac walker” that he had purchased during recovery from knee replacement and had begun to use again as vascular disease he ignored made it more difficult for him to walk without falling.
I was unaware of how bad things had gotten for one reason in particular: the distance between us, both physical and emotional. We only saw my parents once or twice a year, often not at their home.
As the kids got older, it became much harder to muster a family trip to see them, and when they had all started independent lives we honestly didn’t *want* to visit them. It was an obligation that usually came with a list of tasks and a lot of shouting when we tried to fix things that were not on the list but obviously in need of repair.
We would end up spending the time occupying the same space at best. There was resentment from my parents when we left the house to do something without them–passive aggression from my mother, grumbling and shouting from my father. The guilt trips we got from my mother for taking our daughter to a cat show in a nearby city allegedly without asking if she wanted to go are something of legend.
But they never really wanted to go anywhere because the only thing shorter than their patience and attention span was their stamina for getting off their asses. When we took my mom on another day trip, she ended up spending most of her time on a bench.
This, it turns out, was because of medical issues my father never mentioned and outright ignored himself, both his own and my mother’s . I knew she had back pain from her scoliosis, never addressed when she was younger ; she also had had her thyroid zapped due to hyperthyroid in her 40s, but her medication was not particularly well managed.
As for my father, he had never fully recovered mobility after a second knee replacement resulting from a botched first surgery–that resulted in a monthslong staph infection raging in my father’s leg that was ignored by his Physician’s Assistant in multiple surgical followups. And his mobility deteriorated further because he had been ignoring his Type II Diabetes diagnosis and his resulting peripheral artery disease in his legs. As a result, he depended on two hiking sticks to help him get around–which made him look like he was a novice downhill skier. He fell a lot.
He fell again today at the assisted living center. I don’t have the details, but I assume it was while he was doing physical therapy exercises with his walker and his prosthetic leg. I only know because I got a call after the fact that he had been taken to an emergency room in an ambulance to be checked out. [He broke two ribs while doing his physical therapist’s exercise with the walker on his own in his room, tripping on his own wheelchair because he hadn’t moved it out of the way.]
Ours is not a unique experience, I know. There are untold legions of GenXers and late Boomers faced with providing care for their parents. Some are “lucky” and have siblings to share the load. (Your mileage with lucky may vary.)
My brother killed himself 15 years ago. This is a complicating factor I may need a while to find a delicate way to talk about. But in short, he never escaped the trap my parents set for him. My parents’ view of mental health as a stigma didn’t help.
So here I am, with parents 23 years older than me, wondering if I will survive them or if they [and my father in particular] will extract every bit of the joy (and whatever savings I have for “retirement”, lol) from my remaining years of good health. I am obligated to them, but I also feel imprisoned by them.
This post is a follow-up to an earlier anon submission –editor
Stop Watering Dead Flowers
I have been walking through the long dusk since the burn. Smoke still in my lungs. It has been almost a year since the last time I wrote about it. Ghosts of what should have been, scattered in the corners. I thought we were watching a slow slide. Something we could still bend if we moved fast enough.
We didn’t.
It arrived quietly. Then it became louder.
The outrage? Lost in a cacophony of daily outrages. Normalized enough to ignore if you wanted to. It wasn’t a collapse – it was a pattern.
People choosing comfort over truth. Small betrayals stacking into structure. Systems choosing themselves over the people they were meant to protect. Leaders choosing power over responsibility. Each decision explainable on its own, but together – well, fuck.
Then came the abandonment.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just an absence. Silence where there should have been action. You learn who shows up and who does not. Who steps in and who steps back. Who watches the fire and decides it is not theirs.
That is the second burn.
It reshapes you. It makes isolation feel rational. Cynicism becomes an earned badge. Compassion becomes a liability. I’ve felt that pull to disengage and stop investing.
To let what burned stay burned and call it clarity.
But that is how it ends, so here is the line:
Stop watering dead flowers.
Some things are gone. Some systems were never what we thought they were. Some people are not coming back. The longstanding, unspoken generational promise you were made was broken. Accept it.
Move forward without them.
Rebirth starts there. Not in hope. In clarity.
It looks smaller than you want it to.
Showing up. Telling the truth. Building with people who refuse to shrink. Compassion that holds the line. Togetherness that costs something. Resistance that does not disappear when it gets hard.
No performance. No waiting. Build.
You plant the seeds of a future, even if it is not yours.
That is the work now. Not winning the moment. Making sure something survives it that is worth inheriting.
So choose.
Acknowledge the betrayal.
Accept the abandonment.
Commit to the rebuild.
Find your people. Stay human. Protect what matters. Build something that outlasts this.
This moment does not need more outrage.
It needs something real.
The fire took what it could. What comes next depends on what we refuse to lose.
Two years ago, I gave a presentation at a little gathering we like to call ThruntCon entitled “Everything you need to know about the inevitable collapse of journalism as we know it.” For reference, these are the slides I spoke to in that talk:
That talk was very 2023. Two years later, the inevitable collapse is well underway, and there’s not a blessed thing that can be done to reverse it without substantial change in the economic model of media and the displacement of the “broligarchy” that has poisoned it.
To review:
Jeff Bezos decided he could, in fact, interfere in the editorial mission of the Washington Post if it was what he needed to do to deflect the ire of Donald Trump.
Every major media organization sanitized Donald Trump and acted as a stenographer for him, his campaign and his White House, because they feared being kicked out of the WH Press Corps like the Associated Press. Spoiler: it didn’t matter.
Social media companies X and Meta have quadrupled down on tolerance of disinformation and hate speech, algorithmically promoting it while limiting establishment media access to their platforms.
Major news platforms have continued to move their opinion and editorial content toward the right with a “fine people on both sides” excuse of balance.
Actual reporting on subjects of importance has been driven to the margins and now occurs mostly in publications and platforms that are outside of the traditional mainstream of mass media journalism.
Media is dependent on Trump for its content, which focuses on the “wow that just happened” cycle of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness assault on governing and diplomatic norms, just as is intended. The more time they spend on catching up, the less time they have to analyze what’s actually going on and disseminate that information to the viewing/reading/listening public.
Web platforms are gorging themselves on the clicks and ad views.
So, in short, media companies found it profitable for Trump to be around, if only for the rage watching/reading/clicking. But those returns are narrow and diminishing, because many people are just *not reading/watching/listening to the news anymore* to avoid being triggered by Orange Caligula.
This is also in line with Trump’s plan. It’s a weird corollary to the media strategy George W. Bush’s team devised : “If you tell a lie often enough it becomes accepted as the truth by media.” The Trump Corollary is “If you make people who don’t like you uncomforatable enough with your constant lies they get tired of trying to correct them and eventually they just stop listening so you can do whatever you want.”
I’ll be gathering data for an updated version of my talk, and will post the final version here. If you’ve got any media analysis data, sources or opinions you’d like to share for a shout-out in the talk, please leave comments here or email me at packetslost at falling-anvil dot com.
The TikTok ban (and the “deal” to restore it being proposed by the once and future President Trump) is, more than anything, protectionism veiled in national security language. It addressses a privacy concern by banning one service that is not a US-based concern, while not addressing the privacy and security issues that every other social platform has failed to address on their own adequately. And considering that China managed to hack law enforcement hooks into nearly every telecom service in the US, it’s a bit like closing the door to a barn that has already burned to the ground.
We are in a period of extended remix disinformation, unrestrained personal data harvesting, and algorithmic mass surveillance and manipulation that extends beyond social platforms into internet retail, education, search and as-a-service platforms. Every click, purchase, interaction, and view is being monetized in some way by default. Our ability as individuals to counter this is extremely limited; even when we opt out of data collection, we don’t really opt out of data collection-we just opt out of reaping its “benefits” within the platforms themselves.
Using Privacy Badger from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one way to at least staunch some of the privacy bleed. But as we’ve seen, Google, Meta and others keep finding ways to gather data to ‘monetize’ in some way through their browsers and apps.
That data can be used for ill by a variety of players—including cybercriminals who use targeted malicious advertising on websites and search engines to deliver malware. It has been used in the past to target disinformation campaigns and manipulate political discourse.
True free speech is speech without manipulation, and being able to choose which conversations you want to be part of. Shutting down TikTok because of its China ties—an act that the incoming administration will likely seek to reverse in exchange for favors—is not the answer. It’s not even addressing the right question.
We had roughly 5 inches of snow on January 6. I did my usual bird seed deployment that morning, along with an extra-generous toss of peanuts onto the porch roof outside my office. The result: a visit from some fine feathered friends, American Crows looking for an easy snack.
Steps advocates need to start taking now for the post-inaugural future.
So, Ken White (AKA Popehat) just posted something on how the frailties of a certain crack squad of sycophants might help prevent the total disaster commencing in January. Gotta say, probable but don’t count on it. Organizations & activists working with Trumpist-targeted groups need to plan otherwise.
Start teaching people how to use Signal. Have people with the right language skills help immigrant populations get access to technology that protects them from unwarranted surveillance and other algorithmic mining of their communications.
And when I say “use Signal,” that also means providing infrastructure within that environment for group chat, teaching people how to use disappearing messages, helping them with access to devices that can be used for Signal if they don’t have smartphones, providing opportunities for mutual identity verification and understanding how safety numbers and PINs work to keep them safe, and all of that.
These are things librarians, no matter how good they are at getting people in touch with technology these days, are not up to speed on. All organizations serving communities that are at risk should consider how they can best support people who will soon be targets to potential government sanctioned harassment, and potential deportation or other processes that will make their lives a lot more difficult.
Every-day people will need to do the same, because their lives are also going to be potentially more difficult. Chaos in government provides opportunity for criminal targeting of at risk communities. Keeping people informed of actual government activity and debunking disinformation is going to be super important in the coming months.
As a threat researcher, I am very attuned to the damage that can be done by exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt for social engineering by all sorts of actors. I am readying myself for a target rich environment of threats to hunt and dissect.
Political Action Committees are a great way to launder money, and SuperPACs even moreso. But even the smallest of PACs can have a diluting effect on the gifts from citizens hoping to support the candidate of their choice.
So a few days ago I got one of those many political fundraising SMS messages anyone who has ever made the decision to support a political cause has been seeing hundreds of this election season. But this one reminded me more of a phishing message:
Now, this wasn’t the first text I had gotten from them. The first two were chastising for not “endorsing” Kamala Harris. But this one, and the website it led to, sort of burnt my toast.
And it was tied to data from ActBlue, the organization that is central to Democratic fundraising efforts.
So I did what I usually do when something triggers my cybercrime research setting. I went digging to see who was behind this and exactly how much money was actually going to help political campaigns.
It turns out that very little of their fundraising so far this year actually went to help candidates’ campaigns. In October , the Alsobrooks Victory Fund got the only candidate-affiliated disbursement : $1000.
The first page of UNITEDemocrats PAC’s October FEC filing.
So in this campaign cycle , UNITEDemocrats has brought in $618,292 in contributions. Of that, the PAC has donated…$6,833 to federal candidates. That’s basically a penny of every dollar raised-a percentage that would even make a Fraternal Order of Police fundraising company blush.
Where does all the money go? Well, a tiny bit goes to sustain their web presence on Squarespace. More goes to ActBlue for their “merchant account”, and to an SMS delivery company called Tatango. And then a bunch goes to a minority/woman owned fundraising messaging company called Momentum Campaigns LLC. And there’s the salaries of the PAC staff and the rent for their office on C Street NW in DC, right across the street from the Bureau of Federal Prisons.
But they aren’t the only organization at that suite number. There’s also BlueWave Politics, a consulting firm…for whom the treasurer of UNITEDemocrats works:
“Sue [Jackson] has 13 years of compliance, accounting and campaign finance reporting experience working on various Presidential, U.S. Senate, Congressional, PAC and non federal committees. Prior to starting her second career in political compliance, she worked for 13 years in international business while living in Atlanta, GA. She has a B.A. in Government from The College of William and Mary.
Fun Fact: Sue has lived in 4 foreign countries and visited 27 others.
Recent Clients: Deborah Ross for Congress, Montanans for Bullock, North Carolina Democratic Party, Josh Harder for Congress, Citizens for Boyle”
So other than the treasurer, we don’t know who else from this consultancy is involved in UNITEDemocrats. I suspect I can find a bunch of other PACs sharing the same address.
It sure is an interesting business model. It reminds me of…pig butchering, but it’s legal.
So what about MAGA grifters?
Most of the Trump-aligned PACs I saw dumped about half of what they brought in directly into Donald J Trump For President 2024 Inc. — a total of $315 million over this election cycle. Almost all that money (aside from what was given back to angry or ineligible donors) was spent on Trump…but not necessarily for the campaign. There were over $1.3 million in American Express credit card payments which were not itemized.
Then there’s the more than $50,0000 in “travel reimbursements”to Southern Baptist minister and podcaster Michael Clary and other “influencers” who Donald J Trump For President 2024 Inc. directly paid to be at the convention and other events. And between DJTFP2024 and other contributing funds, just shy of $1 million went into Mar-A-Lago Club LLC.
Another Trump-aligned PAC, ULTRA MAGA PAC, spent 10 percent of its raised funds on contributions to candidates like Kari Lake. But most of the money went into direct mail and other fundrasing costs (and lawyers, and other players).
The Packet Rat 