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Brian Strietelmeier has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 2008. In 2020, the 34-year-old Prospect man might vote for a Libertarian or even Donald Trump.

Why?

Strietelmeiers top political issue heading into 2020 is not healthcare, or border security or any of the other top issues that seem to have split the electorate.

The candidate who will win his vote will need to be pro-vaping, or at least open to the idea of studying it before making policy changes such as a flavor ban.

Im not asking them to come out, hold up a vape, you know, and take a huge rip and be like, Im with you. I mean, I would love it. But, Im a realist, said Strietelmeier, a print services specialist.

Strietelmeier is not the only vape bloc voter.

In a Morning Consult and Politico poll of 1,988 voters last month, one in 10 former Trump voters said theyd be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate in favor of banning flavors, and 8% said theyd be much less likely.

Other vapers interviewed by LEO said they may vote for a third-party candidate, while others said they might vote for Trump, but all were skeptical of Democratic candidates, most of whom have stayed silent on vaping.

They said they arent against all regulations, such as raising the age for vaping to 21 and requiring vape supplies to be sold in only specialty shops. Mostly, they dont want a ban on flavors, and some just want a candidate who wont demonize vaping.

On Sept. 11, Trump threatened to ban vape flavors, but in November, he backed off, and now vapers like Strietelmeier are still waiting to see if he disavows the idea completely. Libertarians, by definition, arent big fans of government regulation, and that would include vaping regulations.

Not all vapers are single-issue voters.

Danielle Lavigne, who lives in Allen County, Kentucky, said she will consider other issues such as education, job growth and lower taxes. But, the 44-year-old supermarket employee understands why others would let vaping decide their vote. Many issues that candidates bring up dont touch peoples everyday lives, she said. Thats not the case with vaping.

Thats something that affects my life greatly, said Lavigne, who vapes in lieu of smoking, which she did for 26 years.

Still, some people doubt that there are many single-issue voters on vaping on either side of the debate. Skeptics include Ben Chandler, a former Kentucky congressman who is now president and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, which lobbies for more vaping regulations in the state.

He said he hopes lawmakers wont hold off on passing vaping regulations because of what he called electoral blackmail from vaping lobbyists.

They dont have any evidence on their side that this is a healthy activity, said Chandler.

About that evidence

LEO interviewed four voters, two of them Kentuckians, who said they plan to base their votes in the presidential election solely on vaping. Some have opinions on issues such as immigration, healthcare and abortion, but after quitting smoking with the help of vaping now they believe its imperative to public health to vote with their vapes.

E-cigarettes have fewer toxins than do combustible cigarettes, but a health expert who studied vaping, Aruni Bhatnagar from UofL, has told LEO that just because vaping carries X number of fewer toxins doesnt mean e-cigarettes are X times healthier than smoking. Vaping still produces harmful substances, he said, and the long-term effects of the practice are not known. The recent vaping illnesses that have hospitalized 2,291 people led the CDC to urge people to stop using black market THC vapes and adding their own ingredients to nicotine e-cigarettes and other vaping products. This, after the additive vitamin E acetate was linked to the illness. But, the CDC said, there might be more than one cause and, as such, is advising abstinence from nicotine and THC vapes. Still, vaping has replaced smoking for millions of Americans, according to a report published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Smoking tobacco kills 480,000 people in the United States every year.

Lainey Tipton, a 38-year-old graphic designer from Tennessee, said she smoked cigarettes for 12 years before switching to vaping. Both her parents died from smoking-related lung illnesses.

When asked why vaping has become her main political issue, Tipton said, Because it saves lives.

Honestly, the day my mom died was probably the hardest day of my life, and I still just randomly burst out in tears, said Tipton. And its because of smoking.

For the vapers who spoke with LEO, flavored vapes were integral for transitioning away from smoking cigarettes, although they have continued vaping. Vanilla custard is the one Tipton attributes to helping her quit.

Most vapers interviewed by LEO said that they were consistent voters and registered with particular political groups, but most were free-flowing with their affiliation.

Carl Hughes, a 42-year-old vaper who lives in Pikeville, Kentucky, described himself as not very political.

Which is why its easy for me to be a single-issue voter, said Hughes.

Hughes recently switched from being an independent to Libertarian as Trump toyed with a flavor ban. More needs to be done. He has to come to a decision, said Hughes. Im cautiously optimistic that hes going to do Trump will do the right thing, and if he does, Ill happily campaign for him.

Cherry Lai, a vaper from California whom Hughes knows, said that shes always based her votes on single issues. Last election, it was healthcare.

Lai, a retiree, described herself as a left-leaning moderate, but this election, she plans to vote for Trump.

Strietelmeier is currently leaning toward voting Libertarian, but he said that he would vote for Trump if he took a more pro-vaping stance.

Tipton said she voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in the last presidential election, but shes also considering Trump in 2020. Nobody else has really spoken out on the issue, and Im going to vote for someone who has a stance on it, said Tipton, and at least hes gone, We need to really consider whats going to happen to the economy and to these peoples lives.

Vaping diehards such as Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, a vaping advocacy organization, think vapers could impact the election.

A lot of vaper voters are people that are largely disaffected, Conley said. And they may not be regular voters, but if you give them a reason to vote, they will turn out.

He pointed to a poll conducted by a Republican firm, McLaughlin & Associations, created for the Vaping Technology Association, that showed 74% of 4,669 vapers surveyed in 17 battleground states would be less likely to vote for Trump if he banned flavored e-cigarettes. Eighty-three percent said they would be likely to vote for or against a candidate based solely on their position on vaping products, the survey found.

Conley said that vapers have already decided elections, specifically, the race that re-elected U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson thanked vapers in his acceptance speech, saying they made the results possible. Kaiser Health News reported that an owner of an online vape store at the time and former campaign manager for Herman Cain, Mark Block, rallied vapers around Johnson, raising $3,000 with a Vape PAC and sending out around 400,000 mailers. KHN also interviewed Tom Russell, the campaign manager who worked for Johnsons rival, who said it was the Tea Party, not vapers, that had made a difference in the election.

Vapers have organized mostly online, with a We Vape We Vote social media campaign paired with calls to contact representatives, although there have been rallies, including one in Washington, D.C. that attracted around 3,000 people, according to Conley, and another that occurred in Lexington, Kentucky, the day that Trump came to town for a pre-election rally for former Gov. Matt Bevin. Somewhere between 75 and 100 people showed up to that one, hoping to capture the presidents attention.

Vapers seem to have Trump worried.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on Nov. 17 that Trump stepped back from a flavor ban partially to keep support from vapers. Perhaps coincidentally, he changed his mind about a ban while on the way to his Kentucky rally, according to an unnamed Trump adviser interviewed by the Post.

The few candidates on the left who have taken a stance on vaping have called for more regulations. For vapers, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg became enemy No. 1 after allocating $160 million to push for flavor bans in at least 20 cities and states. Andrew Yang told The Washington Examiner that the country was headed in the right direction after Trump proposed a flavor ban. And, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been dinged by vape enthusiasts for urging regulators and companies to increase oversight [and] address health impacts of e-cigarette products.

At this point, I want to see them pay, said Strietelmeier. I want to see them do the right thing, or I want to see them go down on their swords.

Go here to see the original:
Could Vapers Swing The 2020 Presidential Election? - Louisville Eccentric Observer

To truly understand the dark web you need to understand who is using it, for what purpose, and to what degree. In part one we called the dark web a den of thieves and a front for freedom fighters. Lyrical prose aside, the description was technically accurate, if incomplete.

Current estimates place the number of unique URLs in use on the dark web at roughly 60,000. Obviously, we are talking about destinations here, not users. However, these destinations essentially form the dark webs marketplace (to use the term loosely), and profiling this marketplace offers a largely representative, albeit incomprehensive view of dark web demographics.

For simplicitys sake, we can divide dark web users into five primary categories: anonymous users, corporations, criminals, state actors, and anti-State actors. Each have their own motivations and habits:

Anonymous users refers to individuals looking for anonymity for personal reasons. Some might be pursuing deviant, albeit not technically illegal behavior. A few may be whistleblowers acting against companies, organizations, or institutions. Others of the more libertarian sway may simply wish to keep their personal browsing patterns free from the touchy-muchy tentacles of big data crawling machines like Google and Microsoft.

Corporations are keenly aware of the existence of the anonymous user and a few have set up a dark web presence of their own to cater to this group of digital agoraphobes, including the New York Times and Facebook.

Mostly though, companies are motivated by self-preservation, responding to the threat of hackers sharing deep web vulnerabilities capable of granting access to corporate databases. Cyber firms specializing in dark web monitoring offer these corporations their services, which mainly involve crawling, scraping, and analyzing dark web data for traces of client names, products, and user information. The idea is to head off a breach before it occurs, or if it is too late for that, to at least plug up the dam before it fully bursts.

Make no mistake, the threat is real. A 2019 study managed to identify over 20 million stolen credentials from Fortune 500 companies spanning 10 different industries across the globe.

Criminals are perhaps the most notorious group on the dark web, and for good reason. In addition to seeking ransoms from corporate or other entities following successful data breaches, this intrepid shadow-class of businessman, with little to no moral moorings whatsoever, are paddling in any and all products and services that are at the very least detested, more often criminalized by mainstream markets. With cryptocurrency fueling the engine, everything from child exploitation to gun running, fraud to murder, can all be found on Amazon-like marketplaces, conveniently categorized, complete with user reviews and checkout carts.

Much of these offerings are scams in-and-of-themselves, with newbie TOR surfers frequently being taken in and having to chalk up their financial losses to lessons learned, as one element still lacking on the dark web is a Better Business Bureau.

State actors: the U.S. started it all and it never left the fray. But many more have joined the game since then, and the dark web has become a small part of a far larger cyber war with as many fronts as there are conflicts, including U.S.-China, Russia-Ukraine, India-Pakistan, and so on. No government agency is safe, with recent hacks of top secret US Naval intelligence and a stunning attack on Russias FSB underscoring this point.

Anti-state actors: championed altruistically by some of the original researchers on the TOR project (Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson, and Steven Murdoch), they are the original rationalization for allowing TOR to go public despite the possible negative consequences of such a bold move.

For oppressed people under the thumb of tyrannical regimes, the dark web has become at minimum a release, and on a greater scale a means of insurrection. It is the anonymity of the dark web that affords anti-government users the ability to fight back against the likes of China and Iran, regimes ruthlessly vigilant when it comes to crawling the internet to snuff out any and all activity deemed a threat to their stronghold on the reins of power.

Interestingly, terror, for the most part, makes up a small portion of TOR sites, perhaps for the same reasons the dark web has not gone mainstream as some have predicted. At least in one respect, terror has a similar digital goal as that of any respectable aspiring organizationnotoriety.

This is not to discount privacy concerns, which continue to be a vocal gripe of the masses. But basic marketing and group-think psychology always worked against the notion that privacy concerns would trigger waves of migration from the surface web to the dark web. The whole idea of social media is to be social, and if we are including in this description the posting of visual media to platforms, the reality is that most people are not interested in true anonymity.

As for freedom-fighting individuals, the technical barrier to dark web entry has always been a curbing factor. That is to say nothing of the fact that dark web anonymity is by no means fool-proof. Oppressive governments are not sitting idly by while resistance pockets seek to undermine their authority. The mere thought of cyber units crawling the farthest corners of the network, imagined to be armed with unknown technology specifically designed to ferret out regime traitors, will inevitably keep many of the more cautious-minded users at bay.

Corporations, on the other hand, can be expected to increase their presence dramatically as the dark web becomes more of a threat to their data. Expect to see dark web monitoring become a mainstay of international standards like ISO and NIST, with auditors demanding to see results from companies latest dark web monitoring sessions.

And we havent even discussed offensive business intelligence, another possible use of the dark web that requires more exploration and much experimentation.

The most alarming trend of the dark web, however, is the growing scourge of cyber criminals, profiting off the ideals and enabling the technologies of governments and libertarians alike. Words cannot accurately capture the horrific abuses anonymity, cryptocurrency, and streaming bandwidth have invited. It is certainly true that these crimes were being committed long before the dark web came about, but the ease of serviceability brought on by the digital marketplace may be significantly increasing the volume of these crimes. As far as the degree of depravity of the crimes themselves, nothing brings out creativity quite like an audience, which is now available on demand and with a profit incentive to boot.

Progress is being made technologically to identify and arrest these criminals, and there is an increase in international law enforcement cooperation. But the game of cat and mouse never truly ends, and when confronted with the crimes themselves, when stats and figures become faces and stories, one cannot help but ask whether the dark webs benefits justify the costs, a question all its users will likely have to grapple with for as long as the dark web exists.

Ariel Yosefi is the head of the technology and regulation department, at Israel-based law firm Herzog Fox & Neeman. Avraham Chaim Schneider is coordinator of the firms cyber and innovation media project.

See the article here:
Villains and VigilantesCitizens of the Dark Web - CTech

A man was killed and another is in custody in a shooting in Stony Point, said Alexander County Sheriff Chris Bowman.

Bowman stated in a news release that a call was received at 12:32 p.m. Tuesday regarding a shooting at a home on Spring Pointe Drive. Deputies arrived and found a man with several gunshot wounds to the chest area, Bowman said. The male was pronounced dead at the scene by Alexander County EMS.

Bowman said deputies located 39-year-old Joshua Lee Branch, of Stony Point, at the scene of the shooting. He was detained, taken to the sheriff's office and charged with murder.

Bowman did not release the name of the victim, but did say the investigation is ongoing.

Earlier in the day, around 3:30 p.m., off a remote road in the 700 block of Spring Pointe Drive, roughly two miles away from the Iredell and Alexander county line, authorities worked in the front yard of the home. Several patrol cars and a crime scene investigation van were also parked in the driveway.

A photo of Branch and his bond amount were not immediately available.

Read more from the original source:
Stony Point man charged with murder; investigation into shooting ongoing - Statesville Record & Landmark

By: Ross Fodera

ARLINGTON, MA In 2016, the Arlington Police Department searched for a way to involve the community in what really happens in the daily life of an officer in their town. This led Captain James Curran to find the funding to revive a program from the early 2000s. The Citizens Police Academy (CPA) is a rising trend around the country. This program also exists in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia, among other states, along with cities and towns of Watertown, Springfield and Hingham right here in Massachusetts. Local police stations are encouraging their residents to participate in a program tailored to explain the basic operations of the department.

Anyone over the age of eighteen can apply to this twenty-student program each year, which takes place over nine weeks in the fall and concludes with a graduation ceremony. Each class is hosted at the station on Thursday nights from 6 9 PM, and the application is due by mid-August. There is no entry fee to apply or cost for the classes themselves. However, because of the high volume of applicants, the class is limited to Arlington residents.

Each week, the class tackles different topics in police education, ranging from their K-9 unit to crime scene investigation. Participants get a behind-the-scenes look at the 911 operators for the town, the cell block, and a tour of the entire station.

Subjects covered include:

These classes provide much more interactivity than mere lectures. The program allows its participants to explore the daily life of a police officer through ride-alongs that show what is involved in routine traffic stops. The notorious climax of the course is a visit to Camp Curtis Guild National Guard Reservation, where participants get to access the Reading Police Academy simulator and use a fake gun to experience real-life situations officers may face in the field.

Lt. Brendan Kiernan, a CPA supervisor, describes some of the core elements of the program, We go through what the detectives do, going to court, what the patrol officer does on the street, how responding to calls work, we do dispatch and what they do on a daily and nightly basis as far as answering calls and what their role is in the department.

If youre an Arlington resident and interested in law enforcement, dont miss out on this opportunity, as well as other programs offered by the Arlington Police Department, such as the R.A.D. (Rape Aggression Defense) program for females, a nationwide offering that APD does particularly well.

More:
Arlington Police Educate Community on Police in their Town - Arlington Public News

The spaceship Rocinante arrives at the exoplanet Ilus in The Expanse.

By Stephen HumphreyDec. 6, 2019 , 8:00 AM

On 13 December, Amazon Prime will air the fourth season of The Expanse, a hardboiled space drama renowned for its working-class characters and real-world space physics. Showrunner Naren Shankar is part of the reason the science checks out. The veteran writer and producer for programs such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, and the police procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has a doctorate in applied physics and electrical engineering.

Shankar chatted with Science about why he feels its important to have a realistic sci-fi show, and how television work is like the scientific peer-review process.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How did you end up making sci-fi shows?

A: I actually started at Cornell [University] as an arts student. But I always loved science and math. In my second year, I transferred into the college of engineering. Usually, people transfer out of the college of engineering! I stayed all the way through to get my Ph.D. And somewhere along the line I just kind of decided I didnt want to be an engineer anymore. The field rewards incredible specialization, and I saw myself becoming more and more of an expert over a smaller and smaller corner of the universe. I had a couple of friends out in Los Angeles that I had just done creative writing with when I was in school. They said, Hey, come out, be a screenwriter. And I thought, great.

Q: What did your science education bring to your television work?

A: One of the most valuable things I took away from school is peer review. You write a paper, sit down with your colleagues, and then you pare it down. That is really the process of the writing, when youre writing a script. Everybody sits down and reads it and then you take it apart.

Naren Shankar, showrunner for The Expanse

I did a lot of science fiction in the early stage of my career, and then I did a lot of cop shows and crime shows.CSI: I ran that show for many years. It had a lot of scientific method in it. Investigating, the idea of the logical path to do a criminal investigation, evaluating evidence: All of that sort of really did play to the training.

Q:The Expansetries to incorporate real-world science. Does that fire up the physicist in you?

A:It does, and its actually one of the things that attracted me to the project. When I got the script for theThe Expanse, the pilot, I was, like, Wow, this is a very different kind of a show. Because they embraced all of the things that most science fiction shows run away from: the fact that you dont have weight unless your ship is accelerating, the fact that communication in space is not instantaneous. We use that for drama. At the end of one episode, a bunch of missiles are heading off to basically hit Mars. In the very next episode, people on Earth are realizing that that has happened, like, 25 minutes ago.

Q: What about the physics of your spaceships?

A:They fly with realistic physics. You see conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum: all of the things that would actually occur in space. You dont see control surfaces and aerodynamic flight, because theyre all moving in a vacuum. You see realistic objects changing orientation with thrusters. Personally, Im quite tired of seeing spaceships fly around like fighter planes in the Pacific in World War II.

In the pilot, the series opener, the big action sequence was the ship making a turn. This crappy old ship has to suddenly divert off of its course to go investigate a distress call. The only way a ship can change course is flip and burn, which is to flip around and fire the rocket. But they decelerate much harder than they should have. This could break the ship apart! That was the tension of it.

Q: In season four we see an exoplanet, Ilus, thats rich in lithiuma rare mineral thats valuable in the future. Ilus is like Earth but a bit wrong. You see different continents from space. Animals on its surface are different. Theres sort of an uncanny valley experience.

James Holden (played by Steven Strait) suffers the physical consequences of acceleration in The Expanse.

A:Thats a really good way to describe it. It appears to be Earth-like, because you can breathe the air. Oh, things are fine. Well, biology is much more complicated than that. There are things that happen when you have interacting biomes. Imagine the first Europeans coming to Australia. All the biology that was there was stuff that they were not used to. There were things that were poisonous, that they didnt understand. Many of them died. Its a little different with Ilus because weve got humans coming to an alien planet with a different biome than human genetics. So that causes some interesting interactions.

Q: How is Ilus different than aStar Trekplanet of the week planet for you?

A:Star Trekis a wonderful show, but its not really, in any true sense, a hard science fiction show. The kind of stories it chooses to tell are largely allegorical in nature.Star Trekwent to planets with monolithic cultures and dealt with certain sociological problems. Ilus is uninhabited. Its just a place thats got a lot of lithium. The only people there are a bunch of refugees saying, You cant have our mine.

Q: Is that maybe a couple of steps from happening, right now? Maybe somebody will claim an asteroid and become a trillionaire.

A:Absolutely. Its amazing when youre getting into these stories that are set hundreds of years in the future and then you look at the present: You know, maybe its not going to be that long. Because that stuff is out there, for sure.

Q: Do you think youre raising the game for everybody, as far as how to make a science fiction show?

A:I hope were raising the game. I do get the impression, though, that people are a little intimidated by trying to pull it off. It does require you to pay attention to things that people arent really told to pay attention to. That requires a different kind of appreciation of the reality of whats going on. And so its a fairly high bar, I think. But its certainly not inaccessible.

The rest is here:
How real-world science sets The Expanse apart from other sci-fi shows - Science Magazine