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On the 2020 US election

Every time an election cycle draws near, I promise myself not to be drawn into it, but I always get too involved and it inevitably ruins my balance. Here are a few thoughts on what’s going on, before the election is called.

There’s an incredible amount of manipulation going on in the media. In the past, I’d always wonder why filthy rich businessmen would bother acquiring media companies, especially because they always bleed cash, but now I know it’s because they love to manipulate the public into believing certain narratives, especially when it suits their futures. The current flavor of the narrative is leftist and quite heavily so. Whatever the left’s selling, the mainstream media will flog, all day long. Having grown up in a Communist regime, I naturally abhor the left, but entitled, coddled American teens and youth have been brainwashed by top-ranking schools and colleges to believe that it’s a good thing, and that’s a sickening prospect.

There’s an unheard of amount of censorship in social media against anything that threatens the leftist agenda. I could not believe it when I could not post a link to the Hunter Biden stories on Twitter and on Facebook, and when the accounts of the NY Post and the White House Press Secretary were locked out, I knew social media companies had crossed the line. Apparently YouTube has been cutting off Partner status for certain conservatives or simply removing their accounts. I talked about the leftist leanings of big tech back in June, but I had no idea things would go so far, so quickly, that open censorship of official newspapers and official government accounts would occur on the eve of a presidential election.

There’s an unbelievable amount of voter fraud going on, and most, if not all of it, is being perpetrated by the Democratic Party. From illegal signs at voting stations and coaching of the voters, to countless ballots making their way into the hands of bad players, and the destruction of ballots found to be marked for Republican candidates, the Democrats are guilty of all of it. Just do a few simple searches and you’ll see plenty of proof.

Just as in the 2016 election, the public has been presented with two choices of candidates that are unlikable. On the one hand, we have Trump. I’m not sure what I could say about him that hasn’t been said already. I didn’t like him before he ever got into politics. I didn’t like his business practices and I didn’t like the debts he’d built up over the years. He was held up as a model American businessman through the 90s, 00s and 10s, and I kept wondering how that was possible given his business record and mountains of debt. I couldn’t understand the whole birth certificate controversy with Obama and I couldn’t understand why he got into politics. Right up to this year, I couldn’t stand the guy. But as the election drew near and I began to compare him with Biden and to look into what he’s accomplished while in office, he suddenly became more pallatable, because…

Biden is quite likely a “treasonous pedophile”, as he’s been described in the past few days. I’d add pathological liar and senile to that description. (Let’s not mince words here…) In spite of the narrative being put forth by the media, the proof is clear that he used his son and his political position to arrange large payouts from foreign governments. That’s at least corruption, if not treason. And every time I watch those video clips of him grabbing little children, pulling them toward him, sniffing them and whispering stuff into their ears as he’s forcing them to listen, there’s an inescapable gut feeling that comes over me, and that gut feeling screams “pedophile”. There are many videos of him lying through his teeth during his long and unproductive career in politics. Hell, he was even forced to withdraw from a previous presidential election because it was discovered that he plagiarized and lied his way through it. As if all this wasn’t enough to make me want to have the guy publicly executed, there are also clear signs that he’s quickly becoming senile. Then I begin to wonder about how complicit Obama and his administration were, because they knew about all this garbage when he was VP, and how corrupt the Democratic Party really is for putting forward such a nasty, ill-suited candidate at a time when it really matters. It’s filthy, vile stuff to do this to the American people and yet there he is, campaigning for “honesty, hope and decency”, the very concepts he’s been working to destroy all his life. Even the “no malarkey” slogan is the opposite of what he’s doing.

Serious financial efforts have been underway this year from certain individuals and groups of individuals with a nasty agenda to destabilize the US. Say what you will about Trump supporters — call them loud, obnoxious rednecks, call them racists, etc. (which they aren’t, by the way, most of them are none of those things) — they aren’t the ones who are clearly guilty of violent crimes, of physical assaults, of vandalism and destruction of property and historic art, of occupying neighborhoods and cities, as BLM and Antifa have done this year, and as they are doing right now, on election night. What’s also becoming clear is that these groups wouldn’t exist without financing from those individuals with a nasty agenda. While large mass protests are possible without manipulation, continued assaults on cities and people, night after night after night, aren’t possible without organization, equipment and funding. And when they happen inside a country, they are proof of well-financed efforts to topple an existing governmental structure. Furthermore, when local and state governments aren’t taking action to prosecute individuals identified as having committed those acts, there’s clear collusion between those groups and those governments, so that means even more money is involved in that game.

The whole COVID situation has been used as a political, governmental and economic football, with various sides blaming each other repeatedly. Whatever the virus may actually be doing to people, it has benefitted from much too much advertising (worldwide propaganda, really) for it not be used as an “agent of change”. What that change is and why it has been foisted on people will become clearer in the following months, but COVID has been one of the main actors in this presidential election and in this year, so it must be mentioned.

It’s absurd and tragi-comic how the US has been held up in recent decades as a beacon of hope and democracy for the world — and how corrupt it has really been. How in the world can a country that is so mired in a swamp of its own making, full of the nastiest stuff on earth, be a positive example for smaller countries such as Romania? I remember the speeches against corruption made by Gittenstein, the previous US Ambassador to Romania, only to find out this year that he’s been part and parcel of the greater corruption perpetrated by Biden and Basescu, an ex-president of Romania (see here). It seems that this brazen corruption (while speaking out against it) is the modus operandi of US politicians, in and out of the US, and any sane person has to wonder if any of them are decent people, or if all are guilty of having gone skinny-dipping in the Washington swamp.

I am left disgusted and repulsed by the whole situation. I’d like to see some proper house cleaning take place. It remains to be seen whether this will ever get done, or whether the whole house of cards will end up in shambles and ruin. Who knows, perhaps this has been the plan all along… What I do know is that nasty stuff is brewing up. This election is being hotly contested and where this leads is anyone’s guess.

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Adobe’s many-tentacled grip on its users

I’ve been using Photoshop since the late 1990s and Lightroom since its launch in 2007. I’ve been a user of Adobe software for some time, and have owned various software packages from them since that time. But in recent years, I’ve begun to be repulsed more and more by their greedy grip on their users. Their move to subscription-based software was the beginning of my discontent, which was only furthered by their constant attempts to constantly monitor what we do with their software and how we use our computers. I know of no other software company that does this so much, and I find it despicable. I think what they’re doing is a clear invasion of user privacy. Some might say it’s benign, that they’re only trying to keep track of their software licenses, but when you find out that they make most of their money with a suite of services they call Experience Cloud, where they offer “AI-driven solutions for marketing, analytics, advertising and e-commerce”, you get the sense that we’re the guinea pigs for their solutions, and their many “helper” applications that are supposed to only monitor software licenses are likely doing a lot more than that on our computers.

I am also a Mac owner, and in stark contrast to Apple’s constant marketing-speak about user privacy, they never mention Adobe’s many applications that are constantly talking back to the Adobe servers, and they never go into the details of what the many Adobe helper applications actually do on our computers.

At best, the many “helper” applications that get put onto your computer when you install Adobe software can be called sloppy programming, and at worst, you have to wonder exactly what they’re doing with each and every one of those pieces of software under the guise of “keeping Adobe applications up-to-date” and “verifying the status of your Adobe licenses”. Most people probably assume those apps are the various components of the Creative Cloud suite and even though they’re numerous and they can probably tell those apps are in constant communication with Adobe, they choose to tolerate them.

I know things may be different on Windows, where software gets installed in multiple places, but on Macs, applications are and have always been packaged into single files that contain all that a piece of software needs in order to work. Even Microsoft Office on the Mac functioned this way and only used one additional piece of auto-update software to make sure everything stayed that way, and after it moved to the App Store, even that went away. They let Apple handle all their updates now.

Not so with Adobe… They have to be “special”. They have to stick their tentacles everywhere on your computer, doing and monitoring who knows what. I absolutely hate the fact that their Creative Cloud software has to run all the time and talk to their servers all the time, just so I can use their software occasionally. I find it abusive and overreaching and questionable, but for some reason, we’ve chosen to go along with it because we want to use the software.

Have a look at what gets installed with their Photography Plan, where only two apps should be present.

You of course will get Creative Cloud, even if you don’t want it, with its many little apps that invade your computer. Then you get Adobe Lightroom CC, the app that hardcore Lightroom users never asked for and don’t want, because all we really want is Lightroom Classic. You then also get Photoshop, which I might use to create a logo once or twice a year, and I infrequently use to blend different frames together into a single photograph (for focus stacking). If that functionality were offered in Lightroom, I’d barely need to open Photoshop. It’s overkill for me.

Let’s see what we get with Creative Cloud, because that’s the crux of this post. Most people won’t realize that the little red folder called Creative Cloud in the Applications folder isn’t really the whole of it. No, Adobe also puts a lot of helper apps in your Utilities folder.

Whether you want them or not, you get Adobe Application Manager, a second Adobe Creative Cloud folder, Adobe Creative Cloud Experience, Adobe Installers and Adobe Sync. Let’s have a look at each of them.

Look at all the “goodies” you get in the Application Manager folder. Yuuuummmy… I didn’t effing ask for all this, Adobe!

Let’s see what else we get. We get more stuff we never asked for in the Creative Cloud folder.

We also get to be part of a Creative Cloud Experience that we never opted into.

We also get the uninstallers. Fine, okay… although on the Mac, we should simply be able to drag an app from the Applications folder into the Trash (sorry, the Bin) and “bin” done with it.

We also get Adobe Sync, which is another application/service I don’t want and didn’t ask for. Never mind that sometimes it’s stuck on syncing a few photos for weeks on end. I guess it’s thrown in as padding to justify the cost of the subscription plans. “Look, you’re getting the good software, and you’re also getting storage space and a website”… I didn’t ask for it. I just want Lightroom and nothing else!

By now you might think we’re done, but no, you also get a special plugin that monitors your online activity, um, “detects whether you have Adobe Application Manager installed. I bet you didn’t know about this little goody from Adobe, did you? It’s called the AdobeAAMDetect.plugin.

Ostensibly, it’s used to detect whether the Adobe Application Manager is installed onto your computer, but who knows what else it does without looking at its code? All I know is that when I go to my Safari plugins, it’s not openly and transparently listed there. No, it’s hiding in the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ folder, so you have to know where to look in order to find it. Why? And what else is it doing? Is it monitoring my online activity, just like the apps installed on my computer are monitoring my application usage and who knows what else?

I find all this deeply disgusting, and without opening up each of those apps that Adobe sticks on our computers and looking at the code, we won’t know what they really do. If I didn’t like Lightroom so much, I’d switch to another piece of software in an instant. But I have yet to find a single piece of software that:

  1. Doesn’t have a subscription plan,
  2. Lets me easily edit my photos and, this next one is really important to me,
  3. Lets me easily edit the metadata across all of my photos and update it as needed, and finally,
  4. Lets me import my catalog from Lightroom while keeping my collections, smart collections and collection sets intact, so I don’t have to sort through hundreds of thousands of photos manually.

After 13 years of using Lightroom, the interface is very familiar. I know exactly where to find what I need, but I sure find Adobe’s business practices despicable and would gladly switch to something else. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve stepped over the line long ago and have been invading the privacy of their users intentionally for years.

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Thoughts

On the automation of surveillance

We are seeing an increased use of surveillance at every level of our lives (on the street, at work, online, on our phones, etc.), and we see increased use of automation (simple, algorithmic and AI) to sort through all our activities. It’s a worrisome trend. We should be asking questions such as:

  • Who’s surveilling us and why? It’s easy to answer this with two terms: government and big tech, but the answers can be and should be much more granulated.
  • Who’s keeping track of that data? Exactly who are the players who have access to our data, who are running analysis on it and who are storing it, backing it up, etc.
  • How long is our data kept and where?
  • When algorithms decide our human fate, is that just? Should we tolerate it?
  • Who wrote the algorithms and are they skewed in some way? Given the recent censorship issues on Facebook and Twitter, I think algorithms are clearly written with an agenda in mind and they can be easily skewed to fit the needs and wants of the companies who apply them.
  • And many more questions like this…

I’d first like to point out the following: we live in a human world, and we’re meant to relate to each other in human ways; it doesn’t work well otherwise.

However, as I’ve pointed out in past posts, the world is too full of humans, and there are many complications that arise from that. Chief among them is this: an unusually large proportion of them aren’t relating to their fellow humans in human (or humane) ways and they are engaging in violence, murder, kidnappings, rape, pedophilia and other perversions, vandalism, theft, looting, corruption at all levels, drugs, road rage, terrorism, con schemes, etc.

That’s when law enforcement and governments, unable to keep track of every one of these so-called “humans” with existing personnel, turns to computers, mass surveillance, facial recognition, algorithms that identify suspicious behavior, etc., in an effort to sort through the mass influx of human faces, some of which are engaged in criminal/inhuman activities. The issue of why personnel cannot be ramped up in these institutions so that humans can sort through and keep track of these activities is up for debate, but I think we can all agree that when surveillance and automation are used to flag and identify the activities listed above, so that humans can sort through them, it is probably okay, and it is probably to be expected.

It is not okay when automation of surveillance is used to:

  • Spy on our private activities simply for the purpose of keeping track of everything we do, “just in case” we do something wrong,
  • Restrict freedom of speech, such as when social media algorithms simply won’t allow us to post certain links or words on our accounts, or will outright censor certain subjects or people,
  • Dig through our online activities and disqualify us from obtaining a job simply for having posted something questionable in the past, or to destroy our lives altogether, as today’s cancel culture and supposed race inequality movement is actively trying to do to so many people,
  • Monitor all our communications, such as our messages, emails and telephone calls, in the name of national security,
  • And the list can probably go on and on…

Here’s my understanding of the direction of this trend so far: as long as humans will continue to grow in number and to present a very complex environment where it’s thoroughly difficult or outright impossible for a limited number of people involved in law enforcement to keep track of illegal activities, the arguments for the use of automation in surveillance (to the point where artificial intelligence will handle a large part of it) will continue to mount. Also, as long as hidden agendas will continue to be tolerated in government, in the media and in academia, hidden surveillance will continue, for various nefarious purposes, such as persecution, extortion, a building up of arguments to support certain policies, etc.

The solution as I see it is to decrease the world population till we stop being numbers and countless faces and we become communities once more, where we know everyone who lives around us, where we are not one nameless face in a mass, in a ridiculously large throng of people, but a meaningful, contributing member of a neighborhood, a village or a town. That’s when surveillance and its automation will no longer matter. It won’t even be an issue anymore. We’ve got to stop multiplying like rabbits. We’ve got to stop focusing on large numbers. We’ve got to focus on quality, not quantity. We’ve got to focus on meaningful human interactions and meaningful numbers when it comes to our communities and our towns. To those of you who live in smaller communities, what I’ve just said is obvious, but to those who still prefer to live in large cities, I think my words will sound quite strange. And for them and because of them, mass surveillance and the automation of surveillance will continue…

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These are photos of summer and autumn flowers from our garden.

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