Author: Shawn K. Quinn

The worst election night I have ever lived through

I’m going to summarize the last five to six hours or so. Basically, the TV has been tuned to KHOU-TV (channel 11 in Houston, our local CBS affiliate) watching the CBS News coverage of the election. Next to the TV, I have the laptop with IRC open and chatting with some people who happened to be talking about the election, with the web browser open to check results of the local elections (I’ll get to those tomorrow). I have watched as Donald Trump has inched closer and closer to the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. CBS News has shown both the Trump and Clinton campaigns’ election watch parties. I get why the people at the Clinton watch party are downright crestfallen; some were even crying.

I’m more angry than sad right now. There is still a very faint glimmer of hope remaining that enough of the last few states will turn blue on the map and Hillary Clinton will be our next president. As I write this, the electoral vote tally is 244 to 215 in favor of Trump. The reporters are all talking about how he pulled this off, the campaign stops Hillary Clinton didn’t make, the voters Donald Trump attracted, yada yada yada.

They also brought up that it’s been rare that the same party wins three presidential elections in a row. That may be true, but we’ve never had a candidate this unqualified and who has behaved this badly and this erratically throughout the campaign. That terrifies me. It terrified me this morning before I voted, and it terrifies me now that I’m back home watching the election coverage.

I’m not calling it either way right now. I’m hoping something changes big time before CBS News signs off for the night. I’ll be back on tomorrow night with some final national election thoughts after I discuss the local elections.

Thoughts on the 2016 election season

A bit late, I know, but I want to get something out there for many reasons.

As alluded to in the previous entry, I have not ignored the goings on with the 2016 presidential race. I voted in the Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders. Though he did not win Texas, and eventually conceded the nomination to Hillary Clinton, I still feel Bernie would have been a far better choice for president.

When I read Bernie conceded the nomination, it was the biggest letdown I have ever felt over a candidate in the primaries. That day was the first truly sad day of a pretty sad week. It became obvious, of course, that those in charge of the Democratic party wanted Hillary to win at just about any cost–something which sparked outrage within the party, and which led to the eventual resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and not a moment too soon.

As bad as that may have been, what happened on the Republican side is far more terrifying. I have never in my lifetime seen a candidate so obviously unqualified to be president actually win the nomination. I noticed Donald Trump running for the Republican nomination, and I thought it was one of those joke campaigns that had no realistic chance of winning, and that we’d at least see the Democratic candidate (this is before Hillary won) face off against someone remotely qualified to run the country sitting in the White House come next January.

And then, excuse my French, the shit really hit the fan. Mr. Trump showed he was a jerk with no regard for the law on so many occasions it’s hard to remember them all. The “highlights”, some of which happened before Trump actually won the nomination, include inciting a riot in North Carolina, the infamous “grab ‘em by the (genitalia)” tape leaked, instructing security to eject protesters out into subzero temperatures without their coats, and demonstrating a terrifying lack of understanding of foreign policy by asking “why can’t we just nuke Russia”. There’s also building a wall at the Mexican border, his anti-Islamic statements, and last but certainly not least, Mr. Trump has refused to release his tax returns sparking all kinds of speculation. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is, Mr. Trump is the personification of everything that’s wrong with the Republican party as we know it today.

I’m not even going to get into the whole emails debacle. I’ll just say there’s a huge double standard, and that when the Republicans do what Hillary did with emails, they have no problem with it. Yes, that’s ludicrous and hypocritical. No, it doesn’t surprise me anymore.

Adding to the frustration is that the system is horribly broken regarding third-party candidates. When I feel more like diving into details, I may go into this more in another post, but suffice it to say that today, the way presidential debates are organized, only the Republican and Democratic candidates are invited. They are organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is run by leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties. Worse, so many states do a “winner take all” allocation of electoral votes. Meaning, in theory, if Donald Trump has one more popular vote than Hillary Clinton in a state like California or Florida, it’s the same as if he wins by a 90%-10% margin or a 60%-40% margin.

And the rest of the world wonders why the USA is so messed up sometimes.

Perhaps the worst part about it is, the polls showed that Bernie would have crushed Mr. Trump in the general election. Yet Bernie is not who the Democratic Party put out there; Hillary is. Granted, at least Hillary has some idea what the job entails, having been in the White House during her husband’s two terms, and is somewhat qualified having been a senator and Secretary of State in the past. The flip side of that is the awkward truth embodied in the old joke that Bill Clinton is the best Republican president we’ve had (he ran as a Democrat). I wasn’t eligible to vote yet in the 1992 election, and honestly I’m not sure who I would have voted for even if I did. (I used to lean much farther right than I do today.)

I’ll be honest, I don’t like Hillary Clinton a whole lot. But I really, really, really don’t like Donald Trump, and I’m horrified he’s made it this far and that the Republican Party has given him this long of a leash. The presidency is not a damn reality TV show! This is not a four-year-long taping of The Apprentice! Sheesh! (Yeah, I voted for Hillary. I could not risk voting a third party with some of the last polls saying Texas was effectively a toss-up or swing state.)

So, why did it take so damn long for me to write this post? The few times where I had time to start writing a post about the election season, I actually got a bit queasy. It was still difficult getting it all out there today. I’m not sure how to fix this hot mess we call the presidential elections, but I do know there’s a lot that needs fixing.

If anyone has any good ideas on where to begin, feel free to comment below.

It’s the holiday season, and Starbucks returns to the center of controversy

I know I’ve kept far quieter about the upcoming election than I should have. To be honest, I found it incredibly difficult to actually put the disgust I have felt about parts of this campaign into words. I am breaking my usual pattern of not posting on the weekends (as you may have noticed, this going up on a Saturday) to try and catch up on a few topics. I’m going to try to keep this on the main topic as expressed by the title, though by necessity I will wind up discussing a few things about the election as a result.

Upworthy recently reported on the latest Starbucks holiday cup, and unfortunately, the controversy that was unbelievably quick to come in return. This is not the first time we’ve been down this road, as regular readers of this blog should be aware.

The only reason I will likely not wind up with one of these cups is that I rarely if ever order hot drinks, coffee or otherwise, at Starbucks. (My usual is iced tea, and I’ve been known to order it well into the winter, or at least what passes for winter in Houston.) This cup is definitely a keeper, though, should I partake of my occasional wintertime hot chocolate.

This quote from the article sums it up nicely:

No election will solve those problems. No election can solve those problems. Those issues — what it means to coexist with people who hold vastly different beliefs than our own — are on us to solve in our everyday lives and in how we choose to treat others. This isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue; this is a human issue.

This has been, if not the most polarizing election, one of the three most polarizing elections I have lived through. The 2004 and 2008 elections are definitely contenders for most polarizing, and I feel the trend has been towards more polarization and division as the years have worn on. This is a real shame, and to be honest quite unexpected in this cycle (then again, Donald Trump actually being nominated wasn’t something I had expected to happen either; more on that in a later post).

That the backlash comes in the form of, for example, someone deriding the cups as “political brainwashing” is a pretty sad commentary on where we are as a society and a country. I’m proud to be an American, but I’m embarrassed to see people writing things like that and at the same time holding themselves out as Americans, and in some cases patriotic Americans at that.

I don’t think the design is about politics, and certainly not about Starbucks openly positioning itself as a Democrat- or liberal-leaning company. I take the message at face value: that there is more that unites us than that divides us. Come November 9, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to wake up with a president they didn’t want. And yes, in a way that will include me; I really wanted Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic Party’s nomination, and I was severely disappointed when he decided to concede the nomination to Hillary Clinton. A lot of Republicans certainly didn’t get the candidate they really wanted, either.

I get that a lot of people were disappointed by Barack Obama’s presidency. President Obama got a lot accomplished, though there were a few things that in my opinion he screwed up. (I do plan to post a retrospective on his presidency either near the end of the year or in early 2017; which it is depends on whether I carry on with some plans I had for this blog in the month of January.)

But slamming Starbucks for choosing the cup design they did? One that’s supposed to celebrate unity? That’s outrageous, and I would even call it borderline un-American. Again, because of the cup design and the fact that people are slamming Starbucks over it, I’m making my next visit to Starbucks sooner rather than later. (Though the fact I’m at 120 stars and thus only five away from earning my next free beverage certainly doesn’t hurt.)

I’m not even going to think about opening the whole “war on Christmas” can of worms just yet. It’s still a bit too early, and those worms go better with Thanksgiving turkey anyway.

[Update 2016-11-29: As referenced in a more recent post, this cup design is not for the winter holiday season, but more timed for the election season.]

Are you registered to vote in the upcoming election? (US readers)

Heads up to my readers in Texas: If you are eligible and you have not registered to vote yet, time is running out. The deadline is this coming Tuesday, October 11. If you’re not in Texas, your deadline may be even a couple of days sooner than that, though in most states it’s either the same day or a bit later, and in other states you may be able to register in person on election day. (If you’re in North Dakota, lucky you; it’s the one state that does not have voter registration.) See this page on usa.gov for more information.

This is a very important election on the national level; however, please do not neglect the state and local candidates, regardless of where you are voting. Remember, our government works best when as many people as possible cast an informed vote.

The tale of the WordPress XML-RPC attacks

I can’t believe I’m writing this post. But, I am.

This concerns something in WordPress that a lot of people don’t even know is there called XML-RPC. The XML-RPC feature has been turned on by default since version 3.5 (released 2012 December 11) and which I think has been in WordPress itself since the beginning even if not enabled by default.

Without getting too technical, XML-RPC is responsible for two main features of note: pingbacks and external blog post editor support. Unfortunately, it has recently become the vector of choice for what I can only assume is some kind of worm/malware which sends thousands of requests in an attempt to either break into a site or just plain cause havoc and increased resource usage. That’s where the problem begins.

This wouldn’t be that vexing of a problem except for one thing: I actually use XML-RPC legitimately. This post, for example, was made via the XML-RPC function, not WordPress’s internal editor (though I have made posts via the internal editor before). Most of the posts you’ve seen me make in the last three years have had the XML-RPC interface come into play during editing at some point. So, just turning this thing off isn’t an option.

I tried a couple of plugins which promised to “secure” XML-RPC and they did so by completely breaking it. (I can do a better job of this with “rm xmlrpc.php” or “chmod go-rx xmlrpc.php” myself, I don’t need a plugin to effectively do something like this for me.) It is difficult to know for sure, but given the relatively low traffic I have, it does not make sense that my resource usage is what it is. (Resource usage which I pay for, I might add.)

So, what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks am I, or other WordPress site admins, supposed to do?

Well, right now (actually, by the time I post this, as of a couple of weeks ago), my solution is akin to a duct-tape-quality fix: copy the existing xmlrpc.php to something else, and use that for my editor’s XML-RPC endpoint. It’s the only thing I could think of to do, and thankfully almost everything still appears to work as designed.

I say “almost” because this doesn’t yet solve the problem of legitimate pingbacks potentially getting dropped. My host has XML-RPC protection, but unfortunately that protection is to change permissions on xmlrpc.php at the first sight of an attack (breaking the functionality until I manually restore it). Unfortunately I don’t have a way to tell sites sending me pingbacks to send them somewhere else automagically just yet. It also means I have to repeat this step on each upgrade (well, at least if xmlrpc.php changes). Like most actual duct tape repairs, it’s probably not the best solution. But, for now, it works, and to me that’s what matters.