Looking at the behavior of some of the right-leaning people that had infiltrated the Capitol building, you can see that sanity and calm thinking hadn’t won the day. While not quite as destructive, the actions looked a lot like the leftist Black Lives Matter riots than anything.

These people didn’t just arrive at their conclusions in a vacuum, and while there are many paths to becoming a radical, the left’s ability to make people feel a sense of desperation is definitely one of them.

One of those ways the left does that is to silence, censor, and belittle. It’s a tactic that might work a while but behind the seal they put on dissent, pressure builds. At some point, it’s going to explode.

The censorship of conservatives isn’t new. It’s been going on for years and it’s no conspiracy theory. Video evidence shows just how blatant the censorship of conservatives is, and despite how the leftists in Silicon Valley deny it, it’s clear that the left wants it.

The silencing of conservatives or right-leaning voices isn’t going to make the problem go away, it’s only going to increase the anger and vitriol felt by the silenced. The radicalization won’t come because of an abundance of radical speech, it’ll come from a lack of expression of dissenting opinion, the vast majority of which is entirely reasonable.

Resentment will drive the radicalism, not false information.

There’s a difference between dissenting speech and actually dangerous speech, and the left has more or less lost sight of what that difference is in its quest to sensationalize and silence.

The left continues to put the kibosh on conservative speech at its own risk, and — God forbid — a real insurrection rises up that actually takes the lives of a good number of people, the left will only have themselves to blame.

The Boeing 747 is, for many, the first aircraft they went long-haul on. It changed aviation significantly, making flying more accessible to more people than ever before. For those airlines that wanted to fly not only a high passenger load but also large amounts of cargo, Boeing created the 747 combi.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts.

The requirement is being delivered through an in-app alert directing users to agree to sweeping changes in the WhatsApp terms of service. Those who don’t accept the revamped privacy policy by February 8 will no longer be able to use the app.

For storing rarely used secrets that should not be kept on a networked computer, it is convenient to print them on paper. However, ordinary barcodes can store not much more than 2000 octets of data, and in practice even such small amounts cannot be reliably read by widely used software (e.g. ZXing).

In this note I show a script for splitting small amounts of data across multiple barcodes and generating a printable document. Specifically, this script is limited to less than 7650 alphanumeric characters, such as from the Base-64 alphabet. It can be used for archiving Tarsnap keys, GPG keys, SSH keys, etc.

The script is implemented in Python, since this is one of the most widespread interpreters, is compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3, and has one external dependency, the iec16022 binary. On Debian-based systems these can be installed using
apt-get install python3 iec16022

The script accepts any ASCII sequence and generates an HTML page sized adequately for printing on A5 paper that contains multiple ISO/IEC 16022 (Data Matrix) barcodes. The barcodes can be read with any off-the-shelf software, e.g. ZXing. Even if up to 30% of the barcode area is corrupted, the data can still be recovered. //

This page can now be printed on a laser printer (with no margins) and laminated. If done properly, it is likely to outlast the service for which it holds the secrets.

Our elites are corrupt. The political establishment is not serving us well. These wounds will not be healed by sanctimonious Instagram posts, cable news monologues, egghead Twitter threads, or lofty speeches on the Senate floor, applauded by Beltway journalists who just pocketed $2,000 bonuses and rarely worry about feeding their families. //

As the Capitol devolved into chaos, I overheard a protester walking away from the scene, down the hill on the east side Union Station, mutter about the political establishment to his friend. “It’s like they’re playing a game,” he sighed, “and everyone has a role to play but us.”

The notion of reusing rockets finally went mainstream in 2020. As the year progressed, it became clear that SpaceX launch customers have gotten a lot more comfortable with flying on used, or "flight-proven," first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket. One commercial customer, Sirius, launched its XM-7 satellite on the seventh flight of a Falcon 9 booster in December. Also, the first national security payload flew on a reused booster last month when the US National Reconnaissance Office launched its NROL-108 mission on the fifth flight of a Falcon 9 first stage.

NASA, too, agreed to fly future crewed missions to the International Space Station—beginning with the Crew-2 spaceflight in the spring of 2021—on used Falcon 9 rockets. And the US Space Force said it would launch its GPS III satellites on used boosters in the future as well. These are among the highest-value missions the United States has. //

NASA deserves credit for pioneering work in reusable spaceflight. The space shuttle was the world's first partially reusable launch system, with the orbiter and solid rocket boosters capable of multiple flights after significant refurbishment. But it wasn't cheap—the best independent estimate of the shuttle's cost over the lifetime of the program is about $1.5 billion per launch.

Trump didn’t cause what happened yesterday…a “long train of usurpations” did. We finally got tired of being called bitter clingers, deplorables who live in flyover countries. We got tired of being called rubes. When we finally find a Paladin who will fight for us (as flawed as he is) the other side made up a bunch of crap…long since debunked now…and put the country through a two year investigation and impeachment.

The political destruction of a decorated General Officer’s reputation and net worth, over something he didn’t do. When DOJ, finally forced to cough up exculpatory evidence, decided to drop the charges, a corrupt judge appointed another counsel to argue against that.

The press, helped the DNC and the Biden team openly and notoriously steal an election in broad freeking daylight. then the court system refused to hear evidence and grant discovery (except in one case)…and thus the left was able to destroy evidence….ballot envelopes, signature verification…ballots…memory cards.

These folks are telling me, this isn’t about Trump. This is about denying 74 million voters a voice. This is about pushing back on leftist gaslighting…and sadly, some of the same by putative allies.

The November election (and Tuesday’s Georgia curtain call) wasn't won and lost by the tactics, spending, individual players and messaging in the weeks before Nov. 3, according to interviews conducted with more than three dozen frontline players.

Rather, its outcome was cemented long before Labor Day 2020 by a Democratic machinery of former Barack Obama proteges, like David Plouffe, John Podesta, David Axelrod and Stacey Abrams, who worried far less about the tactics of ads, travel (Joe Biden hardly did!) and fundraising and far more about the strategy of how to control the narrative and the rules that would shape the outcome.

They even told the Republicans and the public what they planned to do. Just read Plouffe's book, "A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump." They even boastfully predicted days before how the vote count would roll out on election night and for several days later. Trump would lead early, and Biden would surpass late, they said.

They were right. Why?

First and foremost, they usurped the powers of GOP-controlled state legislatures in the five battleground states and rewrote the rules of how votes would be cast and counted, using the pandemic as an excuse.

Mail ballots could be sent to everyone, even if they didn't ask for one, and wide swaths of Americans could vote by mail. Voter ID requirements could be suspended for those who felt homebound by COVID's wrath. Mobile ballot boxes could be deployed. Spoiled ballots that legally were supposed to be discarded could be "cured" by election clerks. Legally required voter roll purges could be skipped. And a single billionaire could donate $350 million directly to the election clerks, judges and vote counters in the states, requiring them in some cases to register voters, and create more poll locations in Democratic strongholds.

And Republicans — who controlled the legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona and the constitutional right to set the rules — hardly put up a fight. Instead, they urged their voters not to take advantage of the loosened rules and to vote the old-fashioned way. They, in the words of the Trump-loving Georgia Democrat Vernon Jones, simply unilaterally disarmed. //

In other words, the liberal brain trust engaged in cutting-edge warfare, while Republicans tossed their comfortable set of horseshoes from the 1980s, hoping the good old recipe of evangelical GOTV, direct mail, talk radio and Fox News would deliver yet another election win as it had done for decades.

It didn't.

To be fair, Donald Trump mustered — by a mile — the largest national vote ever assembled by a Republican at 75 million-plus voters and barnstormed the country, risking COVID and criticism without fear. Kevin McCarthy picked an all-star slate of candidates and picked up seats. Mitch McConnell raised a ton of money, and Ronna McDaniel put together one of the most impressive get-out-the-vote efforts ever assembled.

But all that could not overcome the advantage of a rewired electoral system in the five battlegrounds, as the Georgia runoffs showed Tuesday, said Tom Price, a former congressman and Trump Cabinet secretary. //

Secondly, liberals spent two decades building an alliance with the mainstream media, the social giants and the search giants and the permanent government bureaucracy until they could control the narrative, even when it wasn't true. They had it perfected by the time Donald Trump took office.

Those who objected were canceled and shamed. Intelligence and law enforcement and private investigators were misused to create false realities. True facts and legally protected speech were outright censored long enough to create the narrative needed to win.

Trump colluded with Russia, and bribed Ukraine to investigate his political opponents … though he didn't. The Hunter Biden corruption story was Russian-fed conspiracy theory …. though it is really true, and he was under criminal investigation the last two years ... American towns could be burned to the ground and police defunded because a Kenosha, Wisc., officer shot an unarmed man … who turned out to be wanted by police and armed with a knife.

Owning the information superhighway of the 21st century, like the rules of the election, was far more powerful than choosing where to run ads, campaign in person or spend money.

Finally, the liberal oligarchs club — George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Bloomberg et al — spent more than ever to win. But they also transformed the way political donations were spent by imposing corporate governance and specific returns on investment.

Every recipient had to deliver very specific outcomes to keep getting money, governed by lengthy contract-like documents. And the outcomes and deliverables were mapped to the two larger goals of controlling the narrative and the rules of the election. //

Phill Kline, the former Kansas attorney general, led the Amistad Project's efforts to challenge some of the Democrats rule changes. He said the the GOP legislatures in the key battlegrounds must reassert their constitutional right to set the rules of election.

Universal mail ballots can be ended, limited only to those who absolutely need it. Voter IDs can be mandated. Exemptions and legal settlements could, by law, be required to be approved by the legislature. Setting the rules of the election are easy if there is a will, Kline added.

"I think the discipline of the party should be all about de-powering Washington and empowering the states, especially the state legislatures," Kline told Just the News.