lol. Roflmao.
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It should come as no surprise that a nation of cast-offs and rejects from Europe of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries — 400 years worth of religious extremists, prisoners turned indentured servants, disowned second and third sons, treasure hunters, pirates, brigands, thieves, sons of impoverished pastors, corporate murderers–and the kidnapped and dispossessed of various continents plus the survivors of the genocide of its original inhabitants has elected a charlatan, showman, rake and felon as their President for a second, non-consecutive time. The problem is that many have an illusion of this political subdivision of the North American continent being fundamentally Exceptional, and they are now shocked to find that the script has deviated from their vision, while others are absolutely certain it is their way that is Exceptional and that Exceptionality also requires exclusion of everyone that doesn’t look, think, worship, or fuck like they do.
The axis of American political direction has always been wobbly, the result of idealism built on a foundation made from the opression and enslavement of others whom the founders could not be bothered to admit were also people worthy of rights. “We the White Male Landowners” would have made for a very uninspiring Constitutional preamble opening, but it would have certainly been more accurate–and as it turns out, that’s how certain “originalists” on the Supreme Court interpret it anyway. Fear of a lessening of American Whiteness has long been a driving force behind national policy, from the three fifths compromise, to Irish, Eastern European, and Italian restrictions in 19th century immigration acts, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to children in cages on the southern border. Only those who can assimilate into what remains of Protestant White culture are truly welcome everywhere in America, and even then those of a slightly darker shade will be eyed suspiciously.
So shock! An appeal to the basest of those long-held prejudices along with a promise of doing a different (but not necessarily better) job with the economy and shutting the doors for the corruptive forces of global trade in goods and ideas has won the majority of a vote by a minority of Americans who are eligible to participate in this system we call Democracy, with all its handicapping for underpopulated and exceedingly White provinces that in many cases are still fighting the war they lost in 1864 in another form. We are stunned that our hopes for a somewhat slightly better direction embodied in a daughter of immigrants was thwarted by the grandson of a bordello owner who emigrated illegally and was stripped of citizenship in his old country for not paying his taxes. (The apple does not fall far from the tree, even over two generations.)
Which story is more American? The child of immigrants who rose to be a top cop and instrumental in maintaining a status quo that put innocents in jail and slapped the wrists of corporations abusing the less wealthy, and generally making California slightly less fascist? Or the convicted felon escaping sentencing whose life story has been about the power of both real and fictional wealth, the power of coarseness and lies, and reaching out and grabbing whoever he wanted by the p*ssy?
Both are on script, but cop shows are tired and everybody loves a circus.
Footnote: My accompanying rant from Bluesky
A little food for thought having nothing to do with Veterans Day, but everything to do with it, if you get my drift.
We were taught certain things that made us want to serve. That Democracy was to be defended. That America was the land of the free and the home of the brave and fair to everyone, right? And that we were making the world safe and supporting a Western World of truth, fairness and Big Macs for everyone
Or we were inspired to defend our country by the evil acts of evil people from lands far away where they wanted women to be covered up and flagellated themselves and were cruel to animals and shit. Plus 9/11.
But what we keep finding is places where you’re putting a boot on the neck of people who are more like us than the people who are cheering for us, victims of every fucking circumstance who if they had been born in the US would probably drive pickup trucks with Trump flags to NFL tailgate parties.
And we lost friends. We lost shipmates and fellow grunts and squadmates and battle buddies and often the people from those places we went who helped us the most. Sometimes in combat, often in stupid, stupid circumstances created by a flag officer trying to get another star’s wet dream of an idea.
But if we opened our mouths about how stupid those ideas were we’d get busted or worse, get sent off to some rubber-room assignment waiting for our obligated service to run out or some brig or disciplinary barracks. So we either stealth resisted or just said yessir and waited for the worst to come.
47 shipmates in one take, and I was elsewhere because I pissed off the wrong person and was in Panama making sure classified data wasn’t in fucking plain sight through the window to Russian binoculars on the other side of the canal and the names were rolling up the screen and I was screaming.
And that’s just how it fucking was. And how it is. And how it evermore shall probably fucking be. Because a handful of people end up taking the brunt of the mistakes of someone a handful of people voted for in the right states, and afterward they get a “thank you for your service.”
Happy Veterans Day.
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That’s it. That’s the post.
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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.
I checked out their FEC report for October. It was very enlightening. OpenSecrets has a good summary of their activity based on FEC reports for 2023-2024 as well.
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).
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Goats grazing in Wyman Park Dell brings out a very specific demographic.
I might be in it.
Landscape-tainment 
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I’ve done a lot of research into fake “liquidity mining” cryptocurrency scams connected to “pig butchering” rings—enough to be super suspicious of anything having to do do with liquidity mining. Or cryptocurrency, to be honest.
But this latest bit of news is…🧑🍳🤌
As many in the Cosmos community are now aware, it was revealed that a significant portion of the Liquidity Staking Module (LSM), created by Iqlusion for the Cosmos Hub, was developed by North Korean agents.
Hat tip to Molly White of Web3 Is Going Great .
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They’re back, they’re loud, they’re all starry-bellied and adorable. Also loud. And feisty.
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There are many times I wake up and feel like I’m living in a Samuel R. Delany novel. America sometimes seems to traverse history as a flat spiral, constantly re-encountering itself without recognizing itself as it passes.
I picked up Dhalgren in a remainders bookstore when I was 16, after moving at the end of my junior year of high school from Long Island to a small city upstate near the Quebec border, a town caught in its own desolate time loop with a SAC base and nightly scrambles of bombers and tankers.
The B-47 bomber outside what was once Plattsburgh Air Force Base. The book was mind bending and the wildest thing I had read up to then, but Bellona felt like a town I knew somehow.
I was already living at something of a remove from the world around me, having moved 375 miles north of my whole life to that date because my father had taken a job as a high school principal. My mother was still going to be teaching on Long Island, commuting to our new home every other weekend-adding to the sense of unbelonging.
Margaret Street in Plattsburgh 
Point Au Roche trail I sometimes feel like I’m walking past that kid with Cold War neuroses when I walk through my neighborhood in Baltimore, where I have family and friends but will never be a native. To always be from someplace else is a hell of a thing.
Wandering the old Jones Falls mills with my son Jonah, 2011. Mill #1 is now luxury apartments. A lot of this came to mind last night as I sat in an auditorium listening to Jeff VanderMeer talk about Absolution , his new Southern Reach book, and the rest of the series. He talked about how his research assistant had to construct a map of all the layers of previous human inhabitance in Florida’s Forgotten Coast — black communities’ burial grounds, indigenous settlements, and failed plantations, etc. — because no one had ever bothered to centralize all that knowledge.
We keep recolonizing our past, not even recognizing it as our past. As we approach the first Tuesday of November, this is…very much apparent.
Maybe we’ll wake up at some point and look around and see ourselves walking the other way as we pass on that footbridge out of this place where we are all visitors.
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My colleagues in Sophos X-Ops MDR and Incident Response are tracking a series of attacks in the past month leveraging compromised credentials and a known vulnerability in Veeam (CVE-2024-40711) to create an account and attempt to deploy ransomware. We put out a social media thread on this last week that was highlighted in a recent BleepingComputer article on the Veeam vulnerability. As I wrote in our Mastodon post:
In one case, attackers dropped Fog ransomware. Another attack in the same timeframe attempted to deploy Akira ransomware. Indicators in all 4 cases overlap with earlier Akira and Fog ransomware attacks.
In each of the cases, attackers initially accessed targets using compromised VPN gateways without multifactor authentication enabled. Some of these VPNs were running unsupported software versions.
Each time, the attackers exploited VEEAM on the URI /trigger on port 8000, triggering the Veeam.Backup.MountService.exe to spawn net.exe. The exploit creates a local account, “point,” adding it to the local Administrators and Remote Desktop Users groups.
In the Fog ransomware incident, the attacker deployed it to an unprotected Hyper-V server, then used the utility rclone to exfiltrate data. Sophos endpoint protection and MDR prevented ransomware deployments in the other cases.
These cases underline the importance of patching known vulnerabilities, updating/replacing out-of-support VPNs, and using multifactor authentication to control remote access. Sophos X-Ops continues to track this threat behavior.
Sophos X-Ops on infosec.exchangeWe’ve since connected another case to the same threat activity cluster, and are continuing to hunt and research the threat. But this is just another case of weaponized unpatched hardware and software being used against organizations struggling to stay on top of security threats— particularly small and medium businesses without dedicated information security teams.
The Packet Rat 