The Weaponization of Christianity

How Charlie Kirk used Christianity to divide America In the landscape of American political discourse, few figures embody the marriage of Christian identity and partisan warfare quite like Charlie Kirk.  The founder of Turning Point USA has become a fixture in Republican circles, his influence extending from college campuses to the highest levels of GOP Read More …

The Golden Calf in the Radio Box

I was once told by a man of the cloth, one of the old-fashioned kind who still believed the Red Letters were more than just a stylistic choice by the printer, that the quickest way to lose your soul is to find a way to sell it at a profit. Now, I’ve seen many a Read More …

IaC – Infrastructure as Code

The Recipe for Modern IT In the traditional world of IT, setting up a server was a craft.  A sysadmin would log in, click through menus, install packages, and tweak settings until everything worked.  I know, I did this job for much of my early career.  But much like a chef cooking a complex signature Read More …

OIDC – OpenID Connect

Adding Identity to the Authorization Layer In the journey through information security, you will frequently encounter OAuth 2.0. While OAuth is excellent at authorization, it was never actually designed for authentication. To solve this, OIDC, or OpenID Connect, was created.  Think of it this way: OAuth 2.0 is the key to a hotel room, while OIDC Read More …

The New Gospel of the Gilded Calf

It has been remarked by men wiser than myself that the Good Book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. These days, however, it seems a whole congregation of folks have looked into the Gospel and somehow mistaken the Beatitudes for a business prospectus. I Read More …

Automating Infrastructure Visibility with dig

In modern cybersecurity, you cannot protect what you don’t know exists. Traditional DNS tools often give you fragmented data. You get an A record here, an SPF record there, but connecting those to an owner (WHOIS) or a risk profile (Shodan) usually requires manual effort. A Solution: One Script to Rule Them All I’ve consolidated Read More …

THE SOUND AND THE SURGE

A FRAGMENT OF THE UNCONQUERED DARK By William Faulkner It was not the machine but the wanting of the machine, the cold, calculated, and inexorable expansion of a thing that had no blood but possessed a terrible, circulating hunger for the lightning. Kevin sat there. He was a small man, a man of Tiers and Read More …

OCF – Operating Cash Flow

In the technical world, we often distinguish between “allocated memory” and “active throughput.”  A system might have plenty of resources reserved, but if the data isn’t actually flowing through the pipes, the system just stalls.  In finance, Operating Cash Flow (OCF) is that throughput.  It is the actual cash moving into and out of the Read More …