"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rolling Stone.md\"> Rolling Stone </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md\"> How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Javanka in Exile.md\"> Javanka in Exile </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Step-by-step How to grow a company culture.md\"> Step-by-step How to grow a company culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager.md\"> GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now.md\"> Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS.md\"> How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io.md\"> Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀.md\"> GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Digital Cover - Method Man - Essence.md\"> Digital Cover - Method Man - Essence </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Digital Cover - Method Man - Essence.md\"> Digital Cover - Method Man - Essence </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/ntfy.sh Send push notifications to your phone or desktop via PUTPOST.md\"> ntfy.sh Send push notifications to your phone or desktop via PUTPOST </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mouthwatering Turkey With Glass Noodles.md\"> Mouthwatering Turkey With Glass Noodles </a>"
],
],
"Renamed":[
"Renamed":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"06.02 Investments/Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web.md\"> Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web.md\"> Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/-Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web.md\"> -Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Mountain Men & Holy Wars.md\"> Mountain Men & Holy Wars </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mountain Men & Holy Wars.md\"> Mountain Men & Holy Wars </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/3 youths in Medellin.md\"> 3 youths in Medellin </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/3 youths in Medellin.md\"> 3 youths in Medellin </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Personal projects.md\"> @Personal projects </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Lifestyle.md\"> @Lifestyle </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Life Admin.md\"> @Life Admin </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Finances.md\"> @Finances </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@Family.md\"> @Family </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/@@Life Organisation.md\"> @@Life Organisation </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Poul ak Nwa.md\"> Poul ak Nwa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves.md\"> Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves.md\"> Braised Short Ribs w Curry Leaves </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/He spent 25 years infiltratong the Klan.md\"> He spent 25 years infiltratong the Klan </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md\"> How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Javanka in Exile.md\"> Javanka in Exile </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now.md\"> Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md\"> How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/« Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> « Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web.md\"> Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Mountain Men & Holy Wars.md\"> Mountain Men & Holy Wars </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/« Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> « Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.05 Media/Kids for Cash.md\"> Kids for Cash </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rolling Stone.md\"> Rolling Stone </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Javanka in Exile.md\"> Javanka in Exile </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md\"> How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.06 Professional/Step-by-step How to grow a company culture.md\"> Step-by-step How to grow a company culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager.md\"> GitHub - stefanprodandockprom Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now.md\"> Why Epicureanism, not Stoicism, is the philosophy we need now </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀.md\"> GitHub - RunaCapitalawesome-oss-alternatives Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io.md\"> Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services arvind.io </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS.md\"> How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data.md\"> Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Les 17 erreurs de management à ne pas commettre.md\"> Les 17 erreurs de management à ne pas commettre </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/« Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> « Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers – Sol Love.md\"> My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers – Sol Love </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick.md\"> How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web.md\"> Helium creates an open source, decentralized future for the web </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ultimate Sugar Cookies.md\"> Ultimate Sugar Cookies </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/« Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille.md\"> « Quand tu arrives ici, tu te dis que rien n’est cher » les Parisiens s’entichent de Marseille </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro.md\"> Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1 euro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.01 Life Orga/En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera ».md\"> En Bretagne, les responsables politiques redoutent l’émergence d’une « Breizh Riviera » </a>"
"title":"[[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain)",
"title":"[[Hosting Tasks|Hosting]]: Explore the possibility of webhosting through [[Hosting Tasks#Decentralised hosting|decentralised services]] (Blockchain)",
@ -423,14 +340,14 @@
],
],
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-22.md":[
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-22.md":[
{
{
"title":"22:46 [[2022-01-22|Memo]], [[Finances]]: GBP account re moving to ZH",
"title":"22:46 [[2022-01-22|Memo]], [[@Finances]]: GBP account re moving to ZH",
"time":"2022-03-31",
"time":"2022-03-31",
"rowNumber":84
"rowNumber":84
}
}
],
],
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-24.md":[
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-24.md":[
{
{
"title":"14:28 [[Life Admin]], [[2022-01-24|Memo]]: finishings for the flat: curtains, bins, bedside tables #shopping #home",
"title":"14:28 [[@Life Admin]], [[2022-01-24|Memo]]: finishings for the flat: curtains, bins, bedside tables #shopping #home",
"time":"2022-02-25",
"time":"2022-02-25",
"rowNumber":81
"rowNumber":81
}
}
@ -456,13 +373,6 @@
"rowNumber":73
"rowNumber":73
}
}
],
],
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-30.md":[
{
"title":"15:20 [[IT & Computer]], [[2022-01-30|Memo]]: Figure out how the Obsidian plugin called Remotely Save works or delete it",
"time":"2022-02-20",
"rowNumber":86
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-31.md":[
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-01-31.md":[
{
{
"title":"13:04 Organise [[MRCK]]'s birthday",
"title":"13:04 Organise [[MRCK]]'s birthday",
@ -482,19 +392,95 @@
"rowNumber":247
"rowNumber":247
}
}
],
],
"00.01 Admin/Memos/2022-02-05.md":[
{
"title":"12:38 [[2022-02-05|Memo]]: Faire un peu de ménage",
"time":"2022-02-06",
"rowNumber":84
}
],
"01.03 Family/Thaïs Bédier.md":[
"01.03 Family/Thaïs Bédier.md":[
{
{
"title":":birthday: **[[Thaïs Bédier|Thaïs]]**",
"title":":birthday: **[[Thaïs Bédier|Thaïs]]**",
"time":"2023-02-06",
"time":"2023-02-06",
"rowNumber":100
"rowNumber":100
}
}
],
"01.01 Life Orga/@Finances.md":[
{
"title":"[[@Finances]]: update crypto prices within Obsidian 🔼",
"time":"2022-03-08",
"rowNumber":117
},
{
"title":"[[@Finances]]: Transfer UK pension to CH",
"time":"2022-06-29",
"rowNumber":72
}
],
"01.01 Life Orga/@Life Admin.md":[
{
"title":"[[@Life Admin]]: Change address with HSBC FR/UK",
"time":"2022-02-15",
"rowNumber":72
},
{
"title":"[[@Life Admin]]: Update UK Nationality scheme of new address",
"time":"2022-02-15",
"rowNumber":73
},
{
"title":"[[@Life Admin]]: Check if requirement to close NHS/HMRC accounts",
"time":"2022-02-15",
"rowNumber":74
},
{
"title":"[[@Life Admin]]: Get a [[@Life Admin#Swiss Mobile|CH mobile line]]",
"time":"2022-03-31",
"rowNumber":75
},
{
"title":"[[@Life Admin]]: Cancel UK mobile line",
"time":"2022-03-31",
"rowNumber":76
}
],
"01.01 Life Orga/@Lifestyle.md":[
{
"title":"[[@Lifestyle]]: Continue building [[@Lifestyle#Music Library|Music Library]]",
- [ ] 15:20 [[IT & Computer]], [[2022-01-30|Memo]]: Figure out how the Obsidian plugin called Remotely Save works or delete it 📆2022-02-20
- [x] 15:20 [[@IT & Computer]], [[2022-01-30|Memo]]: Figure out how the Obsidian plugin called Remotely Save works or delete it 📅 2022-02-20 ✅ 2022-02-06
- 16:54 Check August Macke (1887-1914), impressionisme/fauvisme
- 16:54 Check August Macke (1887-1914), impressionisme/fauvisme
- 16:57 Check Max Bill (1908-1994), cubisme, abstract
- 16:57 Check Max Bill (1908-1994), cubisme, abstract
We’ll come to the homegrown terrorists he foiled and the race war they tried to foment. To the journalists he saved from assassination and the synagogue marked for carnage in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. To the gun-rights march on the steps of a state capitol, where they planned to pick off cops and rallygoers. There’s time enough to valorize the work of Scott B., an undercover fed who breached far-right death squads and squashed their national web of terror cells. (Scott requested that his surname not be used for the sake of his family’s safety.) Last summer, when he retired at 50 from the FBI, Scott left the bureau as one of the most storied agents since Joe Pistone, the real-life Donnie Brasco. For two-plus decades, he cracked landmark cases and won every laurel they give to undercovers. Months out of the game, though, he can’t stop brooding over the threat he left behind. He knows better than anyone that it’s later than we think, and that each day brings us closer to the next 9/11 — this one launched by our own children.
But first, we need to talk about the ram. Because that ram — actually, a terrified goat with diarrhea — died for all our sins of the past four centuries.
It is Halloween evening 2019, and Scott — undercover coordinator for the FBI and special agent dispatched to its Joint Terrorism Task Force — is shivering in three layers, including tactical gear, in the pitch-black woods of northern Georgia. He has infiltrated a domestic-terror group called the Base, posing as a former skinhead who calls himself PaleHorse and is expert in hand-to-hand combat. Scott and 11 Base members are walking an unmarked path to a clearing above a creek bed. He doesn’t know most of the men he’s with; they’ve come from far distances to this encampment on a farm for a four-day training block on guerrilla warfare. Five of them traveled from Northeast states with assault rifles and armor in their car trunks. Another, a young psycho who calls himself ZoomGnat, has been up for two days straight on Adderall and Red Bull and has driven from Texas without stopping. None of them call one another by their given names, only their noms de guerre: Pestilence, PunishSnake, BigSiege, etc. Several are ex-military with munitions training and the wherewithal to take out power stations. Others are self-taught tactical freaks who shoot and move as nimbly as paratroopers. The internet will teach you anything these days, including how to start a race war in three steps.
The day had broken mild but turned bone-cold later, and was now, after many hours of slanting rain, a misery of mud and wind. When they came to the clearing, the members lit torches and formed a circle around the fire. Incantations were spoken by one of the men, citing the Wild Hunt and other gross misreadings of pre-Christian and Norse mythology. And then — because this was a sacrament not to the gods but to the massacre of Jews, Blacks, and gays — it was time to sacrifice the trembling animal they’d kidnapped from a neighbor’s farm.
The goat, all 80-something pounds of him soaking wet, was shitting and bleating in prostrate fear of these men in death masks and camo. The man leading the ritual — code name: Eisen — swung the machete overhead. He hesitated a moment, then brought the blade down; it bounced off the animal with a whomp. Goats aren’t built for ritual kills, as it happens: The scruffs of their necks are double-reinforced with back straps of gristle and fur. After further attempts at holy butchery, someone had the bright idea to just shoot the thing already. But this, too, quickly became a clusterfuck. Eisen looked away as he pointed the pistol — and the members, after all, were in a _circle_. One of them could have died if he misfired.
And so Scott, who in real life is a sniper-grade marksman and who teaches his fellow agents how to shoot, stepped in to school the young neo-Nazi on the rudiments of gun safety_._ But the goat didn’t die after a single head shot; its legs kept flailing, as if to taunt Eisen for being such a weasel. Finally, Eisen put a second slug in him. Now, the dark sacrament could begin.
Someone slit the animal’s throat and filled a chalice with the blood that came glomping out. The men passed the chalice around the fire, each taking sips from the cup. By the time it got to Scott, though, the blood had somehow chunked into dim-sum lumps of plasma and — oh, hell no, he’s not drinking that mess. He dipped a pinky into the chalice and touched it to his lips as one of the men began to vomit. Not a genteel purge but the full-boat Linda Blair, the contents of his dinner spraying the trees. _Sweet Jesus,_ Scott thought as he looked around the campfire at these misfits in training for mayhem. He was the only Christian at this devil’s mass, and the only functional adult on hand. While some of the others took hits of acid and spooked themselves by talking to the severed goat’s head, Scott stood as close to the fire as he could. “It was so fucking cold, and I couldn’t warm up in my truck: I was taping the whole thing on audio recorder.”
Scott is telling this story in the study of his farmhouse high up a hill in the Appalachians. It hunches like a fort on its timbered perch, with assault rifles and armor in the linen closet and kill-shot sight lines of the unmarked road running past his drive. As he talks, he screens footage that he took of those men through a hidden cam on his person. It was wildly risky work, taping terrorists with long guns in woods miles from his support team. It is no less risky to be showing this film and revealing these details for mass consumption. Scott has never been named in public, even at criminal trials. So thorough was the evidence he gathered covertly that every defendant he ever arrested pleaded out.
But he’s breaking his covenant now for the reason he took that footage: He is haunted by what the people onscreen will do if their movement — and their moment — aren’t thwarted. Over months of interviews with Scott and his former colleagues, hours-long conversations with domestic-terror experts, and wormhole dives down fascist portals on apps like Gab and Discord, a portrait emerged of a nation under threat from a thousand points of hate. “We’ve seen massive increases in plots and acts” committed by domestic terrorists, says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and counterterror authority whose _Inside Terrorism_ is the master text on the subject. “Me and my team lay awake nights kicking the walls, because there’s a million-and-a-half guys online plotting murder,” says Rita Katz, the founder and director of the SITE Intelligence Group, and the author of the forthcoming _Saints and Soldiers,_ which tracks the rise of far-right terror in the age of Trump. “We’re in a business where we can’t be wrong once,” says Scott. “And there’s way more of them than us undercovers.”
I ask him how he endured those spectral hours in the company of such fools. Scott stiffens and pulls up pictures on his phone.
“This,” he flashes the photo of a teen with a bowl haircut and a sunk-chest, scarecrow build, “is Dylann Roof. He killed nine people in a church.”
“And this,” he flashes the photo of a crew-cut dork in glasses, “is Patrick Crusius. He’s charged with killing 23 at a Walmart in Texas. So don’t think for a second you can read these boys by how they look on Twitter.”
Then Scott fetches up a meme he pulled off one of the apps where rageful kids meet up. It is a viral poster of the so-called saints who inspire white terrorists worldwide. At the top is Saint Breivik — as in Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who slaughtered 69 people at a summer camp for kids, and another eight in Oslo with a van bomb. Just below him is Saint Tarrant — as in Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who murdered 51 people in a pair of New Zealand mosques. Two down from him is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania trucker who allegedly slew 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. This meme is a totem pole for Nazi youth in training, the standings in a pennant race of killers. Bracketing their stat lines is a phrase in block chalk: “Will you make it onto the leaderboard … in the fight for white survival?”
From top, left to right: Scott infiltrated the Klan for Operation Smoking Robes in 2017, which led to the arrest of a man who said he was planning to shoot up a synagogue; for Operation Road Kill, Scott went undercover in 2006 to take down the Outlaw motorcycle gang; graduating from the academy in 1993.
**Scott doesn’t look like any guardian you’ve met,** unless by “guardian” you mean the cooler at a Vegas strip joint who keeps the drunks off the girls with a black-eyed glare. He’s been lifting all his life and has the setup to prove it: mail-box quads and meat-plow arms that dispose him to sleeveless tees. At six feet four and 260 pounds, he fills up a room without meaning to, though he never wastes time trying to merge with his surroundings. He’s funny and profane and could charm a lampshade off its base with his whiskey-sour drawl and Harley swagger. Small wonder that even strangers at the Quik Mart call him Tex, though he’s as much from Amarillo as you or me.
But being a giant with full tat sleeves is its own disguise: No one sees you and thinks “plainclothes cop” hiding cameras in your leathers. That’s the trademark of a crack undercover: a genius for playing yourself. “What I do isn’t acting, ’cause acting’ll get you killed,” says Scott. “I’m just out here being darker shades of me.” He tartly describes his targets — homicidal bikers who beat their victims with hammers; racist gangsters who pimp out their women under the sobriquet “Aryan angels” — as “my ass-out country cousins,” rednecks raised in the same locus he was but who went right when he went left. “If I hadn’t’ve played \[foot\]ball in college and been friends with lots of Black guys, I might’ve shared a few of their views,” he says. Scott drains the last of his third Jack Daniel’s — he drinks the stuff like seltzer — then laughs at the thought of espousing hate. “Yeah, nah, probably not. I ain’t big on stupid.”
Still, playing Klansmen and hired killers, he had the chops to infiltrate homegrown terror. For 28 years in law enforcement — first as an investigator a year out of college at a county sheriff’s office in the Carolinas, then as a shooting star at the FBI — he’s been working his way into, and out of, tight spaces, breaching outfits that chop up cop impostors. Sitting in the crates he brought home when he retired are the field notes and transcripts of every case he’s worked. They corroborate the accounts he’s giving here and chart the plagues of the past three decades — the flood tide of drugs from the five cartels penetrating our southern border; the poisoning of the suburbs by Big Pharma and the opioid mills they helped spawn; and the radioactive gush of white supremacy through the fire hose of social media. Scott seems almost wistful now to recall the Nineties, when the bogeyman in America was crack cocaine.
By his count, there are 600 FBI agents who are certified as UCEs (undercover employees). But some of them do the work of “backstopping” agents: creating false credentials and social media profiles for UCEs working in the field. Of the several hundred people who do face-to-face ops, most have only handled a couple of cases as the primary undercover. “There’s maybe 50 in the country who’ve done five or more ops — and then the rare few who’ve done double digits,” says Shawn McAlpin, a prolific UCE who retired to run a cannabis dispensary. Scott has done dozens, though they tend to run together; he has, after all, a type. “No one’s gonna send me in on corporate crimes; my country ass would be laughed out of the boardroom,” he says.
And so he made his name doing the dirty jobs, often juggling several ops at once. He infiltrated the Outlaws — a national biker gang that rivals the Hells Angels in size — and sent 16 members or their associates to prison for guns, drugs, extortion, and violent crimes. Hours before they swung a huge dope deal one night, they summoned Scott to their clubhouse in Taunton, Massachusetts. Scott was kitted out with his standard trousseau: a tiny camera and a recording chip secreted on his person (it would breach tradecraft to say precisely where). They ordered him — at gunpoint — to get naked.
Scott was stunned; he’d been undercover for 18 months and committed six crimes with them already. (Or so they thought.) “Not gonna lie to you: My asshole was knittin’ a sweater, going chicka-chicka-chicka as I stripped,” he says. They searched Scott and his garments, but missed the microcamera — a providence he chalks up to his god. Later, at one of the strip joints they called home, his adrenaline dump turned to rage. “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” Scott hissed, turning purple. “Tomorrow, before the drop, I’m making all you bitches strip!”
Next up was Operation Poetic Justice: a sheriff’s office in the hillbilly South dealing drugs, untaxed cigarettes, and taking bribes. “There was so much corruption, it seeped into government, because everyone was related up there,” says Mike MacLean, Scott’s FBI supervisor in Knoxville. Before Scott and his team took down 50 people, including cops and their family members, he was sitting with a deputy’s relative one night when the guy pulled a shotgun, hammers cocked. “I find out you the law, you a dead man,” said the relative, baring his toothless gums in a snarl. Months later, after the takedown, Scott sat with the man again, introducing himself as FBI. “Aw, hell, I knew you was law the whole time,” said the relative. “Yeah?” said Scott, who hears that often, post-arrest. “Then why’d you sell me coke for a year?” “Oh, that’s ’cause I like you,” said the man.
Compound that criminal dementia with fanaticism and you get the pretzel logic of white power. In the hate groups that he breached, Scott encountered credos that only cracked-out satirists could conceive. One night, he sat up drinking bourbon with a Klansman who laid out the dual-seed theory. In the Garden of Eden, it was Adam, Eve, and Abel, and Abel, born of Adam, sired the white race. Then came the snake with forbidden fruit — only, the “fruit” was Eve sleeping with the snake. The snake, being Satan, fathered Cain and the mud people, starting off with the Jews. Then, you got your Blacks, gays, commies, and Asians: They’re all the seed of Satan, too. Christians can kill them and it ain’t a sin to do so, since they’re hell spawn who don’t have souls.
The names of the demons changed as Scott roved the racist circuit: lizard people, beasts of the field, short-faced bears. The rules changed, too, even under the same flag. Aryan Nation disciples in the state of Tennessee trafficked dope and guns and pimped their girls on Backpage, often to Black and brown johns. This raised the hackles of the Right Rev. Richard Butler, who’d founded Aryan Nations in the Seventies. From his compound in Idaho, he sent cease-and-desist letters to those crystal-tweaking heathens down South. For months, he harassed them to change their name; they told him to go fuck himself. Finally, Butler capitulated: They could call themselves Aryan Nation if they studied Scripture with him. And so it came to pass: The Tennessee apostates got religion and kept selling speed to all comers. Scott busted that crew in 2018, sending 44 members to the pen. “For all their Christian bullshit, they were moving tons of product,” he says, and using the criminal proceeds to grow their base.
> **“These guys are unstable! People will die if we don’t move,” said an FBI Agent. Well, of course, they’re unstable, Scott thought. That’s what I’m counting on.**
Asked if he’d challenged them to square the contradiction, Scott lets out a snort. “I’m talking to this neo-Nazi and said, ‘Why do y’all hate Blacks so much?’ He goes, ‘They’re lazy, and they mooch off their family and the county.’ I said, ‘OK, so where you living these days?’‘Um, well, right now, I’m staying by my girlfriend’s mama’s.’‘Right, and what do you do for work?’‘Well, I’m kinda between jobs at the moment.’ I just started laughing and said, ‘Is it me, or are you the very thing you just described hating?’”
**If Scott had done nothing** **but “enterprise crimes”** — drug gangs, corrupt cops, human-trafficking cases — he’d have blazed a big trail at the bureau. But he was spinning his wheels working narcotics rips and badly wanted out of that box. So in 2015, he arranged his own transfer to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Tennessee. Created by the bureau in 1980, JTTFs are regional strike teams blending feds, cops, troopers, and linguists tracking terror threats at home. Back then, no one in Washington deemed the far-right groups a high-priority target. “For several years, our unit had been a lackluster crew, not known for having ass kickers,” says Scott. That changed in a hurry with him around. He built the case on the Aryan Nations that lasted 18 months. The windfall payoff in arrests and seizures showed DTOS — the Domestic Terror command in Washington — “that you could bring major cases against white supremacists, and that we needed more bodies” to do so, he adds.
The bureau soon doubled the size of his team; Scott spread his reach to other states. Posing as an outlaw biker, he infiltrated a Klan cell suspected of making ghost guns for sale. One night in a remote field in Scottsboro, Alabama, they blindfolded him and ordered him to his knees: He was “naturalized,” or inducted, by a green-gowned wizard. For months, he attended their Klan Kraft Klasses and played Lynyrd Skynyrd at their rallies. Scott, who shreds like a poor man’s Dave Mustaine, would get four songs in and run out of suitable numbers. “You can’t rock Hendrix for the Klan,” he says. So he’d wail Southern standards as they doused their 30-foot torch with diesel fuel.
At those Klan meetups, Scott caught wind of a man who was bent on bad intentions. “He’d post pictures of synagogues on his Facebook page and say, ‘I’m gonna do something big.’” Scott arranged to meet the man while posing as a closer. (The closer is the guy who supplies the “iron,” be it a gun or bomb for an attack.) On Jan. 12, 2017, he picked up Benji McDowell at his home in Conway, South Carolina; they drove to Myrtle Beach to talk targets. “This was right around the time Dylann Roof was on trial,” says Scott. “Benji said he wanted to do something in the style of Roof, only on a grander scale.”
Scott wasn’t sure what to make of McDowell, an overstuffed pillow of a 30-year-old stoner who came off as a soft-brained teen. Countless idiots shitpost heinous threats but lack the will or means to see them through. Scott made McDowell for one of those losers, a sense compounded when he sparked up a joint in the back seat of Scott’s sedan. “Put that out!” Scott barked at him, boiling mad. “You don’t know what I got in the trunk, or what my priors are!” McDowell was so scared that he swallowed the joint. He later threw up in a parking lot.
But that night, Scott got a call from Benji: “I want a 40-cal and hollow points.” Scott returned in February to deliver the gun — minus firing pin, of course. “He was good to go in the next week or two,” says Scott. “He had intel on an event at a temple \[in Myrtle Beach\] where lots of kids and families would be present.” The drop-off happened at Scott’s motel. Cops swarmed McDowell in the car park. Later, at the station, he gave a rueful confession. “I’m glad y’all stopped me when you did,” said McDowell. “I was fixin’ to do something bad.” Scott notes that McDowell got a wrist slap — 33 months in prison for an illegal weapon. “The loophole is, there’s no domestic-terror law: You can’t bust a guy for saying ‘All Jews must die.’ So you wind up working whatever charge you can just to get ’em off the street.”
He had no time to brood about sentence guidelines, though: There was another plot afoot at an industrial plant. A white man enraged at his Black superiors sought a bomb to blow up the place. Scott reached out to him through a source, posing again as a closer. But leery of leaving a voice trail, the man declined to talk. Instead, he texted Scott the thing he was after: an emoji of a bomb going _ka-boom_. After months of pinging from his personal phone, the perp switched his aim to the home of his bosses, who happened to be a married couple. Travis Dale Brady was pinched when he took possession of a dummy bomb delivered by the feds. “He was no wiz at op-security,” says Scott, “but stupid people kill people all the time. Like the other guy \[McDowell\], he had the heart and drive to do it. And last time I checked, dead is dead.”
Scott couldn’t have known it at the time, of course, but he was feeling the first tremors underfoot: a wave of white terror that built in 2017 and has been breaking on our beaches ever since. There were horrific hate-based murders in New York and Portland, Oregon, that spring. Then, come summer, the deluge: Charlottesville, Virginia. For two days, men with long guns paraded Nazi flags through the streets of that quaint town. Cops and troopers stood by, watching, as dozens were injured in a festival of hate and horror. But even the footage of James Fields Jr. plowing his Dodge into a crowd, then backing up and hitting even more pedestrians after killing Heather Heyer, didn’t center domestic terror as a frontline threat. “That whole time, I had to fight like hell to keep my Aryan Nation op alive,” says Scott. “The International Terror Section were the big dogs. We in DTOS weren’t deemed as important.”
He and his fellow agents were flummoxed. There were groups at that rally plotting mass destruction, the worst of them the Atomwaffen Division. A global gang of white boys in their teens and early twenties, they’d been baptized in fire by the teachings of James Mason, whose banned book, _Siege,_ is a syllabus for racists. Mason, a graying neo-Nazi living quietly in northern Colorado, has been grooming sociopaths since the early Eighties. He’s one of the founding fathers of the “accelerationist” movement: a ragtag consortium of far-right ragers who think society’s on the brink of full collapse. The job of accelerationists is to speed the plow, springing attacks on people and institutions that set the stage for race war in the streets. In that banquet of blood — the “boogaloo,” as they call it — the ones with the biggest guns will prevail. Then, the terrorists can claim their caliphate: a bone-white ethnostate, armed to the teeth, that is by, for, and about the master race.
But Mason’s goons in Atomwaffen were fuzzy about their targets. One of them, Nicholas Giampa, killed his girlfriend’s parents because they didn’t want her dating a white supremacist. Another, Devon Arthurs, killed his two roommates, both Atomwaffen boys. A third member, Samuel Woodward, stabbed his date to death after a gay hookup in California.
Those slayings were the stumbles of a lethal bunch. Three members — all Marines in a cell at Jacksonville’s Camp Lejeune — were planning to take out power plants with homemade thermite bombs. They’d already formed a “death squad” and were selling no-trace rifles to conspirators around the state. A member in Las Vegas targeted a local temple; he aimed to detonate an IED, then pick off panicked congregants as they fled. These kids were such bloodcurdling posters on Gab that the feds finally acted in 2018. They sent Scott west, as part of an undercover squad, to the Destroying Texas Fest that summer. Black-metal bands with names like Satanic Goat Ritual were playing at a club in Houston; several Atomwaffen members would be there. One of the plans was for Scott, et al., to stage a “cold bump”: One of them would pick a fight with the leader, John Cameron Denton, then Scott would jump in to “save” him. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fake the brawl. Other agents infiltrated Denton’s cell and arrested him and five others for plots against reporters, Blacks, and Jews. That freed Scott for his biggest case: the seven-month op to smash the Base.
If you’re a top producer for the FBI, your career can take one of two paths. Some time in your thirties, you’re encouraged to climb the ladder by applying for the position of SSA (supervisory special agent). There’s a big bump in salary, you may get home in time for dinner, and it’s a straight shot up to the boss’s job. Alas, the great undercovers shun that route, disdainful as they are of careerist cops. “Guys like us don’t think of climbing the ladder; we crave this shit too much to want to stop,” says McAlpin, the retired UCE. Instead, stars like Scott often stay in their lane and build their brand by becoming master teachers. By the time he switched over to Domestic Terror in 2015, Scott was the tactical instructor of his division, and ran its firearms-qualification courses. He was also a tough-love mentor at the Undercover School, a two-week crucible of stress and sleep loss that breaks some of the candidates who enroll. “It’s a horrific experience because it has to be; we’re preparing you for the worst of the worst,” says Terry Rankhorn, an undercover coordinator and master instructor who retired in 2019. “You’ll have guns at your head, a rope around your neck; we’ve never killed anyone, but we’ve air-lifted students to hospitals.”
Scott was in Phoenix to train online coverts when he ran into a compadre from Ohio. He and “Jim,” a veteran cop assigned to Joint Terror, were the Hans and Franz twins of undercover: two hyper-muscled men with full-dress Harleys and enough tats to start a biker gang. Each of them had heard the buzz about the Base and wanted to get a case going fast. So one night, they bought a fifth of their favorite poison and stayed up building Scott an alias. Using fascist pen names, they made his social media a fount of Holocaust slurs. But try as they might, it proved problematic to get booted off Facebook, or “Jewbook,” as young racists like to call it. A screenshot of your ouster is a very useful chip if you’re seeking instant cred with terror groups.
So Scott took it on himself to just tag the Base directly. He wrote to the web address they posted on Gab, going by WhiteWarrior88. That night, they emailed him a questionnaire. Several days of back-and-forth led to a voice chat with some of the members, including a man calling himself Roman Wolf. Scott was asked about his combat skills and what he was willing to risk for his beliefs. Accelerationists love to boast that they’re leaderless cells, and that their crypto skills shield them from being breached. But it had taken Scott a day to reach the Base online, and a week to speak to their leader directly.
Said leader, Roman Wolf — real name: Rinaldo Nazzaro — was no blood-and-soil warlord whose hateful worldview stemmed from combat horrors. Wolf graduated prep school in New Jersey and dropped out of Villanova, where he presented himself as an anarchist opposed to government meddling. He had nothing in common with the Base kids he exhorted to “finish” what Hitler started. Those boys were dirt-floor loners in the rural South, while Wolf and his wife lived comfortably in Russia after leaving America in 2018. Everything about him sounded gassy and self-inflated, from his credentials as a mercenary in the Middle East theater to his counterterror chops at an intel firm. There is evidence that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security from 2004 to 2006, but he didn’t learn much tradecraft on the job. The firewall he built around his white-terror op has been breached, time and again, by media types. He bought land, for instance, in Washington state to stage hate camps for the Base, but the site was doxxed by a Vice reporter and swarmed by [antifa](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/antifa/) types. The kids in his western cell quickly quit the group, and Wolf had to start all over in the East.
For his last mission, Scott spent seven months as a member of the Base.
The day after his interview, Scott was asked to join the Base. Wolf put him in touch with the nearest cell leader — a guy in Rome, Georgia, named Luke Lane. “I didn’t know it then, but he was the bastard we’d been hunting under his call name, TMB \[The Militant Buddhist\],” says Scott. “Outta all of ’em in the cell, Lane was the most gonzo. He’d be up till dawn posting seriously crazy shit.” A week or two later, Scott drove to meet Lane near a statue of a — yes, lord — Roman wolf. Lane, 20, and Pestilence, 19, approached Scott in the standard issue of young fascists: black BDUs bloused into combat boots. Lane told Scott to put his cell on airplane mode, then wanded him with a contraption he’d never seen. “It was this detector that picks up waves from any recording device — and my team had put a tracker on my truck,” says Scott.
Two thoughts went through him in a blur: _This’ll be the shortest undercover in history_ (it wasn’t — he’d parked under a power line, fuzzing the rod’s reception), and _How are these kids buying equipment the FBI doesn’t have?_ That question, or something like it, came up again all weekend as he scoped out the armory they’d amassed. Each member of the Base who came to Lane’s place had a kit he could hit the ground with in Tikrit. Set aside their long guns with which they aired out Star of David targets. What stunned Scott was all their ancillary gear: bulletproof vests with ceramic plates that could stop an AK round, and loaded battle-rattles holding gas masks and mag clips and everything you’d need in a firefight. “These boys were tight,” says Scott in grudging awe. “Their shoot-and-move skills, their magazine dumps — for home-schooled dudes, they were pretty squared away.”
Scott says Lane lived on a farm that wasn’t fit for habitation. There was a house on the property encircled by trash, but that was somehow rented to a tenant. Lane and his father bunked in the loft of their converted barn, where they shared a kitchen and bathroom with Lane’s sister. The father worked construction and was gone all day, but neither his son nor Lane’s best friend had a job. Pestilence — real name: Jacob Kaderli — was an unemployed teen who somehow scrounged the cash to pay for combat gear. Helter-Skelter — real name: Michael Helterbrand — was the only Georgia member with a steady check. He worked in IT. Lane was the oddest of the three, though, says Scott: an eighth-grade dropout who’d quit school to read _Mein Kampf_ and trade firearms online all night. Scott never saw his bedroom, but heard from the other members that it harbored an arsenal. “That’s how he had money to buy new gear,” says Scott. “Buying and selling on armslist.com.”
At night, after hours of training maneuvers and honing their Sieg Heil poses, the Base boys would sit beneath an awning by the barn, drinking Jägermeister and trading tin-foil theories. “Pestilence would be talking about the Earth being concave, that Hitler proved it by firing rockets that came down,” says Scott. “Then someone would say, ‘No, bullshit. Hitler’s living in Middle Earth, along with a race of giants.’” And Lane would declaim against the “ZOG,” or the Zionist Occupied Government \[of America\]. For all their pagan bluster and dreams of an ethnostate, Scott couldn’t help but ask these sex-starved boys how they planned to sire the master race. “Oh, that’s easy,” said one of them. “We’ll just kidnap bitches and rape ’em till they give us kids.”
There was a lot of this sort of thing over the next three months. Scott (rechristened PaleHorse) drove to Georgia twice a month and met his support team at their off-site. Installed in a defunct schoolhouse, the feds wired him up to record for two days straight. (They also flew a plane overhead that filmed the group’s movements from four miles up.) For 48 hours, his backups eavesdropped as the Base boys burned Bibles and U.S. flags, cut themselves to bleed on blocks of Norse runes, and raged against Jesus and “the rest of his fucking Jews.” What the feds didn’t hear were the names and dates of targets; the Georgia cell took pains to speak vaguely. Scott sensed they were hatching something, but couldn’t get them to say it. Meanwhile, his case kept getting bigger.
Sometime in August, three other men showed up; one became a fixture at the farm. He had a fringy beard and was evasive about his background, but his Manitoba twang gave him away. Patrik Mathews was a corporal in the Canadian Reserves trained in explosives who’d fled Canada after being outed as a neo-Nazi by a reporter. Half the FBI was looking for Mathews, who’d snuck across the border weeks before. Members of the Georgia cell were awed by his prowess and his commitment to the cause. Lane’s father let him stay at the farm, where, per Scott, Mathews slept in a horse stall for two months.
Then there were the other two who’d come down with him. Can’t-Go-Back — real name: Brian Lemley — was an Army vet and truck driver who’d scooped up Mathews near the border and harbored him for a while in Virginia. Eisen — real name: William Bilbrough — was another middle-earther and self-taught ninja whose martial skills weren’t worth a damn. Those three wanted to start a race war ASAP. Mathews, who’d named himself PunishSnake, had the self-assurance of the psychotic. He was, he said, “invisible,” the perfect killing machine because, as far as anyone knew, he was dead. Drunk or sober, he’d foam at the mouth about downed power lines and poisoned water supplies. That fall, when they formed their own cell in Delaware, Mathews and Lemley built a ghost gun from parts, hatched plans to assassinate cops for their weapons, and roughed out a plot on a gun rally on the Capitol steps in Virginia.
Meanwhile, Scott was under blue-flame pressure to bust the Georgia cell. It is murderously expensive to build a multistate op on a terror group that keeps growing. By October, the feds had dozens of members in their sights, and offices from New York to L.A. were opening cases against suspects in their region. Scott would man the phones once a week at 10 a.m., briefing the other teams about his progress. Sometimes, he says, “there were a hundred people on the line — and a whole bunch of backstabbing” going down. Alliances and antipathies formed between regions: “Some of us divisions were on the same sheet of music, saying ‘Where’s the imminent threat? Just play this out.’ Whereas other teams were like, ‘These guys are unstable! People are gonna die if we don’t move.’”
_Well, of course, they’re unstable,_ Scott thought but didn’t say. _That’s what I’m counting on._
**It is, to corrupt Tolstoy, a truth self-evident**: Every unhappy family is alike. The Base, a paranoid clan with no shared past or people skills, was rigged to explode before it fired the first shot or laid its first bomb outside a church. Scott says Lane, who’d idolized Mathews in August, was plotting to blow his brains out that fall. He’d had it with Mathews’ “fed talk” — the loosey-goosey mentions of murder and mayhem that draw the eyes and ears of the FBI. Also — and this was a problem — Mathews “knew too much,” mostly because Lane had spilled his plans to him.
That Halloween weekend, Lane and Pestilence shared those plans with Scott. Sitting around a campfire after everyone else had left, they told him to put his phone on ice. “We’ve developed targets” we’re going after, said Pestilence. Lane didn’t divulge names, but wanted to know if Scott was up for whatever. “Brothers, you know this,” said Scott. “Just tell me when and where — and give me a couple days to clear the decks.”
Just before Thanksgiving, Scott got a blast on Wire, via a channel used only by the cell. Be back here in mid-December, said Lane, and bring your whole kit “for a family-friendly camping trip.” Scott drove down there on the appointed day, making sure to arrive before the others. “Whattaya got?” he asked Lane, just the two of them by the barn. We’re gonna go whack some people, Lane whispered: an antifa couple living an hour away. “Well, dang,” said Scott, trying to stall for time. “That ain’t nothin’ I want to drive my personal truck to.” He peppered Lane with questions: Who lives in the house with them? Are there children and pets present? How close is their bedroom to the neighbors?
Lane admitted he knew none of those things; he agreed to delay the hit to do recon. “Forget it,” said Scott. “I’ll get the intel myself.” His cover job — site surveying — gave him credentials to pull deeds and housing floor plans. He slow-walked that “research” and took a stealth trip up North, training with Mathews and Lemley in Delaware. The two cells had come to truly loathe each other, and Scott worked the rift on both ends. “I don’t like the way Lane treats you guys,” he said. “We’re supposed to be on the same side.” Mathews entreated him to join their cell, then let him in on the plot.
Sitting in their flat in Newark, Delaware, Scott sipped his whiskey and nodded as they sketched it out. There was a Second Amendment rally in Virginia, they said, that figured to be a powder keg. Democrats had just taken power in the state and were planning stiff gun-control measures. While tens of thousands of people milled the Capitol steps, they’d set up in a tree line a hundred yards back and start picking off cops and troopers. A circular firing squad would spark off: Cops would shoot the gun nuts, gun nuts would shoot antifa, and bystanders would be cut down in the middle. As Scott winked at a wall cam that the feds installed while the two men were off at work, Mathews rambled on about his plans. After the rally, they’d slip away and become a roving death squad, posing as homeless men to stalk their targets. At night, gloved and hooded, they’d follow a reporter to his car, put a couple rounds in the back of his head, then move to the next city and lefty target.
Scott had gotten enough to bag the Delaware cell. But he needed a little luck now to take down the Georgia crew. It doesn’t suffice to tape people talking murder — they actually have to do something to further that plot in order for charges to stick. It was January 2020, and the window was closing fast. If Scott didn’t act before the rally in nine days, the Georgia cell would scatter once Mathews fell.
On Jan. 12, Scott drove back to Rome: Lane announced that the hit was going down. Scott’s pulse raced when he heard what they’d acquired. They had bought catch bags for their brass — sacks that clip to the ejection ports of rifles and catch the expended shells as they pour out. They had drilled a silencer for a pistol, and would go out and buy frog tape to cinch their pant legs so they didn’t leave stray skin cells at the scene. (They also said they’d grab a package of adult diapers, having heard that people shit themselves doing their first murder.) Scott, for his part, produced some images of the house, but couldn’t get the list of current tenants. “Well, whatever,” said Helter-Skelter. “If there’s kids there, let’s whack ’em. I got no problem killing commie kids.”
The original plan was for Helter to drive and the other three to go in blazing. But Helter had changed his mind: He wanted “to pop his cherry” instead of waiting in the truck. Otherwise, the blueprint remained the same. They’d rent a single room at a dive motel; there, they’d shower up, slough their dead skin off, and change into disposable murder gear. Scott would steal a truck with out-of-state plates, and someone would bring accelerants to torch the house. They’d be in and out in minutes, murder everything that moved, and leave behind a fireball for the cops.
On Jan. 15, Scott called on Lane to take him out to lunch. Driving out of the farm, he turned off the dirt road when he heard an odd noise from his pickup. “Fuck!” he said to Lane as he pulled over. “If this truck’s messin’ up on me again…”
He got out and walked to the back of the truck when another pickup passed him on the road. The driver stopped and asked Scott if he needed help. While they talked, an armored BearCat came over the hill, a gunner in the turret with an M-4. Scott and the other driver dove into the truck and tore off. A SWAT team surrounded Lane, guns drawn.
These undated photos provided by Floyd County, Ga., Police show from left, Luke Austin Lane of Floyd County, Jacob Kaderli of Dacula, and Michael Helterbrand of Dalton, Ga. FBI spokesman Kevin Rowson said Friday, Jan 20, 2020, that agents assisted in the arrests of the three Georgia men linked to The Base, a violent white supremacist group, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang.
Floyd County Police/AP Images
A couple of hours later, a team arrested Pestilence at his house two hours south, near Atlanta. His parents feigned innocence about their son’s intentions, but Scott claims otherwise. “Pest said he would show his dad videos of our training sessions; hell, he said his dad used to take him to the gun range.”
At five that afternoon, cops arrested Helter-Skelter as he left his IT job in Georgia. The three cell members were held without bail and booked for a raft of crimes: conspiracy to commit murder, arson, home invasion, and — eventually — animal cruelty to that goat. The next day, Jan. 16, SWAT teams in two cities rolled up Mathews, Lemley, and Bilbrough. BigSiege — real name: Yousef Barasneh — was busted with a second member for defacing houses of worship. Lanzer — real name: Richard Tobin — was charged with conspiracy in those crimes: He was the one who’d planned a nationwide assault on churches and temples. Months later, cops got ZoomGnat — real name: Duncan Trimmell — the deranged kid who’d driven all the way from Texas to take part in the Halloween gore. So, too, Dima — real name: Brandon Ashley; both were charged for beheading a goat.
In all, the bureau snared 11 members, effectively ending the group. So strong was the proof Scott gathered against them that they all took pleas and prison bids. Not so Nazzaro, the leader of the Base, who denies any part in their plots. At this writing, he sits, impregnable, at his redoubt in Russia, far beyond the reach of law enforcement. There, he recruits his next band of racists, protected by the U.S. Constitution. Still an American citizen, he has the First Amendment right to polemicize the slaughter of civilians. Does he crave the fall of government and the erasure of Blacks and Jews, or are those just the tantrums of a middle-age troll from the dark side of the moon? For all anyone knows, he’s an FSB proxy who cares only about planting false flags.
While on the subject of false flags: That antifa couple in Georgia? They were neither antifa nor a couple. Far from living together, they were total strangers who were photographed side by side at a rally. But that is what happens when you recruit child soldiers who can’t read a caption below a picture. You seed the soil for war in which everyone’s a foe, and the killers we fear the most are our own kids.
**They threw a day for Scott in his hometown** when he retired; it was quite the swell affair of state. The mayor and lieutenant governor read proclamations of honor, the Domestic Terror brass flew in from D.C., and one of their senior analysts gave a toast to his heroics. “No one in this room,” she said, “has any idea how many lives this man saved these last five years.” She congratulated Scott on his retirement and presented him a quart of aged bourbon. On the back of the bottle was a ghost engraving: the original G-man in a fedora, toting a tommy gun.
There were a hundred people gathered there to cheer on Scott; naturally, he rocked his own party. He played them “Purple Rain” and “Pride and Joy,” bending notes until they begged for help. And then he did his version of “The Devil Named Music,” because that song caught the blues of the undercover: Yes, I get tired of being alone/I miss my daughter/I miss my wife/But the devil named music is taking my life. For most of three decades, he’d hardly ever been home, spending months on the road as a character with a rap sheet and a convincing cover story. “You can’t play with the devil without the devil bleeding into you — and your family feels it way before you do,” says Dave Redemann, an undercover instructor with 30 years’ experience who trained Scott at UC school. “There’s a guilt he has for not seeing his kids grow up, and he’s one of the very few who’s honest with young agents about the cost he’s paid for doing this.” Scott mourns the missed birthdays and the marital dust-ups, the calls from his sobbing wife “while I was halfway across the country, way overcommitted on a case.” He’s had spinal fusions on a back that broke twice; surgical reattachments of his biceps, knee, and shoulders; and a complete collapse in 2007, “burning the candle till it ran out of wax,” he says. He’d been emptying the ocean of hate with a spoon, he says. “The shit I saw, I’m never gonna unsee.”
And so, because he had to, Scott walked away cold. Closed his laptop, tossed his work phones, and logged off all the platforms: a funeral, of sorts, for his false selves. There’s only so much evil you can will yourself to swallow before it turns to poison in your throat. When the back-taste overwhelms him, he gets on his Harley and rides a twisty pass through the Appalachians. There’s a river up there where he sits and eyes the current, listening to the tree frogs and cicadas. They sing to him, a tune he can’t make out but which takes him somewhere better down the bend.
# How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case
Any fan of _The Wire_ would recognize [Michael K. Williams](https://www.thedailybeast.com/emmy-nominated-actor-michael-k-williams-dead-at-54-report-says) in the video as he strode up to a group of men outside a Brooklyn tenement.
Only the 54-year-old actor was not playing the fictional Omar when he handed something to a thin man in light blue pants after a brief verbal exchange.
And the video was recovered by NYPD detectives from a building surveillance camera outside 228 South 3rd Street in Williamsburg after his Sept. 5 death. They believe this is the moment that Williams bought the heroin laced with fentanyl and carfentanil that killed him.
After Williams’ fatal overdose, Deputy Chief John Chell had instructed the 90 Precinct Detective Squad and Brooklyn North Narcotics Group 2 83/84/90 to treat it as a homicide.
“Treat this case as if Michael K. Williams was hit by a bullet,” Chell remembers telling the detectives. “Make believe he got shot.”
They made good on that. And the result was seen on Tuesday, when four men were arrested on federal charges of distributing the narcotics that resulted in Williams’ death.
The essential evidence is the only footage of Williams that no fan of the actor would ever want to see.
Just as they might after a fatal shooting, the detectives of the 90 squad used the city’s network of license plate readers to backtrack Williams’ movements that day, pinpointing when he drove from Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge. The reader hits indicated that he was minutes into Brooklyn when he rolled onto South 2nd Street a quarter block beyond Havemeyer Street. He double parked, as someone might when figuring they can run a quick errand and be back before they get a ticket.
As detailed to The Daily Beast by investigators who pieced together video from the surrounding surveillance cameras, Williams walked back up the block and turned right onto Havemeyer. He had on a black baseball cap and a black jogging suit with white stripes along the legs and sleeves. He was loose-limbed, but he was striding in his black-and-white Adidas shoes with more purpose than if he were just out for a Labor Day weekend stroll.
He proceeded past a gentrified pizzeria with an outdoor eating enclosure and a Jamaican restaurant and an old-school barbershop and a vape store. None of the people he passed appeared to recognize the man who brought Omar Little and Chalky White to life.
Up ahead on the left was a public middle school with a huge mural depicting historical and neighborhood figures along with a famous declaration by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the final word in huge, cursive letters.
“The Arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends toward JUSTICE.”
“The set” where Michael K. Williams bought drugs the day of his death.
#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Screenshot/Google Maps
The assembled footage shows that Williams turned right on the far side of the next corner and started down South 3rd Street. He came to five figures a third of the way up the block. He may have simply surmised that the man in light blue pants was the one to approach. Detectives would later identify that man as a 38-year-old alleged dealer named Irvin Cartagena, known on the street as Green Eyes.
“We don't have the dealer contacting him beforehand,” Det. Mark Gurleski of Group 2, the lead investigator on the case, told The Daily Beast. “It looks like he didn't even know these guys beforehand.”
But one of the other men seemed to recognize Williams and became suddenly animated, placing his right hand on the actor’s shoulder. Green Eyes’ demeanor was unchanged and he appeared to be all business as Williams handed him what proved to be folded bills.
#### Handout/U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York
Green Eyes quickly checked the bills and stuck them in his right front pants pocket as he started toward six garbage cans to the left of the building entrance, just inside a low wrought-iron fence.
Green Eyes bent to retrieve something from a paper bag stashed beside a blue recycling can at the end. He then stepped back over to Williams and handed him what detectives believe was at least one glassine envelope stamped AAA Insurance and containing traces of what the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would rule as the cause of death: heroin laced with fentanyl and carfentanil. The official finding would also list cocaine, but Williams is believed to have taken that independently from the lethal mix.
One difference between a hand-to-hand drug sale depicted on television and this one on the surveillance video is that Green Eyes did not look around or give any other indication of being concerned the police might be watching.
While an episode of _The Wire_ shows a drug crew throwing rocks to break a surveillance camera, Green Eyes and those with him seemed not at all worried that the transaction was being recorded.
“The building has these cameras pointing directly on them the whole day long,” Gurleski later noted.
#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
And even though Green Eyes had been busted at this very spot six months before, he did not hesitate to conduct this exchange with Williams in plain sight. The whole scene appeared as relaxed as if dealing dangerous narcotics were as completely legal as selling milk at the Alegria Grocery next door.
Williams and Green Eyes were so at ease that they paused to take out their phones to exchange numbers, Green Eyes dialing first. Williams showed him his screen and Green Eyes pointed to it, apparently confirming his number.
That done, they pocketed their phones. The detectives later found a sent call on Williams’ phone that matched the corresponding moment in the surveillance footage. The camera’s time stamp proved to be accurate.
“Which is rare,” Gurleski said. “Usually, you pull surveillance video from any of the bodegas, the dates could be… anywhere.”
Video showed Williams returning to his car. The detectives used other surveillance footage and license readers to follow his four-minute drive from there to his residence atop a 25-story luxury building at 440 Kent Ave. He made no stops along the way.
“There's no gaps from the set to the apartment,” Chell later noted, “set” being the cop term for the location of a drug transaction.
Detectives watching the video saw Williams pull in behind several other cars in an area by the building entrance marked by a sign reading “PICK UP AND DROP OFF ONLY.” He left the keys in the ignition when he strode inside, carrying a liter-sized bottle of water in his right hand.
“He parked his car in a place where you're not supposed to park and he just left it there with the keys,” Chell said.
And that was not in keeping with someone whom other residents describe as responsible and considerate.
#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Williams greeted the concierge in the lobby and continued on to an elevator. He pushed a button and stepped back, leaning against a wall and cradling the water bottle in both hands as he waited.
Detectives said an elevator arrived and the lone passenger exited, pausing to hold the door for Williams as he entered. Williams pushed one of the buttons with his knuckle and a digital display showed the floor numbers during his 84-second ascent.
His last recorded image came as he stepped off at Penthouse 3. He missed an appointment the following morning and his nephew, Dominic DuPont, went to check on him just before 2 p.m. DuPont found him on the living room floor, unresponsive. On a table in the kitchen was a glassine envelope stamped with the AAA Insurance logo.
The car was still parked in the loading zone and its license plate number led the 90 Squad to the video of Williams making the exchange with Green Eyes. They noted that Williams was wearing the same black tracksuit as when he was found dead.
The 90 Squad told Group 2 about the AAA Insurance stamp, and Gurleski heard on the street that it was being sold in Williamsburg. He was also informed that dealers were trying to get rid of it because of Williams’ death.
When the Group 2 team saw the footage retracing the actor’s day, Det. Ramon Rodriguez recognized Green Eyes as quickly as a fan of _The Wire_ would have recognized Williams. Rodriguez had arrested him for selling heroin at this same location at 4 p.m. on Feb. 10. Group 2 had targeted the location after receiving a “kite,” a police term for a complaint about drug dealing.
The court papers say on that day Green Eyes was found in possession of a dozen crack vials and heroin in a glassine envelope stamped MOBIL. He was surrounded by empty envelopes apparently left by customers.
“There were just hundreds and hundreds of wet glassines… everywhere on the sidewalk, on the snow, on the garbage cans,” Sgt. Mark Bourbeau of Group 2 recalled.
With the arrest, the residents who made the complaints might have anticipated an actual improvement in the quality of life on their block.
“There was a lady walking by, she was on her phone, she said in Spanish, ‘Oh look, they finally got the guy,’” Rodriguez recalled of the moment he took Green Eyes into custody last February. “The block was probably like, ‘Thank God.’”
The top charge at Green Eyes’ arraignment the day after that bust was criminal sale of a controlled substance. That is a B felony in the same class as rape, attempted murder, and armed robbery. It technically carries a maximum sentence of 25 years.
Nobody expected Green Eyes to get more than a fraction of that. But it seemed reasonable to expect _some_ time behind bars. He had been collared less than 1,000 feet from Middle School 50 and the Success Academy grade school. State statutes consider that to be the same as selling on school grounds.
And at that time, Green Eyes was already charged with another B felony, having been arrested for a drug sale and weapon possession on Aug. 27, 2020.
The bail reform provisions of that year required the courts to release him on his own recognizance after the earlier arrest and after the February bust. He was soon back by the garbage cans and among people on South 3rd Street who had been calling in complaints.
“To see him go through the system and come right out—they're probably saying the cops didn't even do anything,” Rodriguez told The Daily Beast.
On Aug. 26, 2021, the two outstanding drug cases were combined. Green Eyes was allowed to resolve them by pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, not even a crime, but a violation in the same category as loitering or making undue noise or drinking beer in public. He returned to the block having served not a minute of jail time.
And 10 days later, Green Eyes was videotaped standing by the trash cans with four other men—two of them alleged dealers—when Williams approached.
“It’s just crazy that a guy with that much money and that many connections is buying on the street from these old bums,” Gurleski said.
After Williams’ death, the team met his nephew at the actor’s residence, calling it “the crime scene,” as they would if he had been shot there. The nephew, Dominic DuPont, had seemed to be a serious physical presence.
“He's jacked, he’s in shape,” Bourbeau said. “He’s not letting \[Williams\] go anywhere near drugs. So that’s why he had to go outside.”
In an interview with NJ.com back in 2012, Williams described his battle with his demon and his resolve to beat it.
_"No one who was in my circle, who knew me as Mike, was allowing me to get high,” he told the news outlet. “I had to slip away to do drugs. I had to hide it. I'd be gone for days at a time. I was lonely in that part of my life. I was broke, broken, and beat up. Exhausted. Empty. I finally said, 'I can't do this no more.' I didn't want to end up dead."_
Williams had said on several occasions that he was speaking publicly about his fight to stay clean with the hope it would help others in their struggle. He had also been working to improve police and community relations, a Brooklynite in the fullest, best sense. And, on a personal level, the actor had been warm and immensely likable when Chell would see him over the last couple of years at Bamonte’s, an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg.
“He went there for the meatballs,” Chell reported.
An outside observer would have thought that Williams was at a high point in his life.
“He was making money, he was making a movie, he was moving north,” Chell said. “And then something, I guess we’ll never know, set him off. And here we are. He was the best of the best who just had a problem. A great guy battling a demon and lost. That’s really what it is.”
The detectives noted that overdose deaths are at a record high in America, just under 100,000 year to year. And fentanyl is a factor in more than half of them.
“It’s happening all over the place,” Capt. Kevin Cain, commanding officer of Group 2, said. “It's in the drug areas, it’s cities, it’s in the suburbs.”
Cain noted that a drug user may not even know they are taking fentanyl.
“It’s in a powdered form, it can go into any other mixture,” he noted. “The dealers… fentanyl, for them, it’s cheap and strong, so it’s perfect for them.”
Surveillance showed that Green Eyes vanished from “the set” soon after news broke that Williams had died of an apparent overdose. The detectives say that the three others in what they describe as a four-man drug operation—70-year-old Carlos Macchi, 57-year-old Hector Robles and 55-year-old Luis Cruz—continued on as before, right down to stashing the merchandise by the recycling can.
“Obviously they weren't that concerned because the rest of them stayed out there and didn't change anything,” Gurleski said.
The detectives say they observed the rest of the crew continue to make exchanges nonchalantly in front of youngsters who came and went from the building. They said the video shows that legitimate people who proceeded along the block to work or school had to pass through the crew’s booming business.
“When we were pulling the videos, right after it happened on the block, everyone that we went and talked to, they’d pull us to aside and be like, ‘Hey, you know, these guys are doing this all day, you know, all day long, right?’” Gurleski recalled.
The detectives recovered drugs from subsequent sales and noted that the crew continued selling its wares in glassine envelopes stamped “AAA Insurance” until the inventory apparently ran out. The crew began selling envelopes stamped “CONOCO,” then a pack of Marlboro Red, followed by “HESS” and “BALMAIN PARIS.”
But if Williams’ death had prompted a rebranding, there was no change in the mix of heroin, fentanyl, and carfentanil, even though it had proven deadly.
“The chemical makeup, you could stamp it 15 different ways, but it matches up,” Chell said.
#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
To make a state case against the crew for death by dealer, the detectives would have needed to prove that the crew was aware that the particular dose sold to Williams would likely be fatal. Federal law, on the other hand, requires only proof that the user died as a result of what the dealer provided. So the detectives went to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which had successfully prosecuted a number of such cases.
The federal prosecutor asked the detectives what they wanted to call the investigation and they were careful not to make any reference to _The Wire_ that might prompt people to guess it involved Michael K. Williams. They decided on one inspired by the “AAA Insurance” stamp.
“Insurance Fraud.”
With the abundant surveillance video and the accurate time stamp and the exchange of phone numbers and the chemical evidence, the detectives developed a strong case and secured arrest warrants for Green Eyes and the three others in the alleged crew on charges of Conspiracy to Commit Narcotics Trafficking in violation of Section 846, Title 21 of the U.S. Code. Green Eyes was alleged to have violated a subsection that carries a minimum 20-year sentence for selling narcotics that result in a death.
The detectives said Macchi, Robles, and Cruz were still operating by the trash cans and they figured they would be easy to grab any time.
“They're out there from the sun-up until sundown,” Gurleski said.
But Green Eyes was down in Puerto Rico, staying out of sight, so the arrests were on hold until he was located. U.S. Marshals set up surveillance there and arrested him around noon on Tuesday. They immediately notified Group 2 83/84/90 in Brooklyn.
“As soon as they grabbed Green Eyes, they called Detective Gurleski and he basically rallied the troops, got his team together,” Cain, the Group 2 commanding officer, told The Daily Beast.
Gurleski, Lt. Terrence McDowell, Bourbeau, and the others headed out to arrest Green Eyes’ alleged accomplices. They came upon Robles a short distance from the block where Williams had bought the fatal dose.
The detectives then executed a search warrant at an apartment on the block alleged to have been selling envelopes stamped AAA Insurance. Gurleski had already been working on a more general tip about the location when Williams died, and that is why he became the lead investigator. He and the team arrested Luis Cruz there. The fourth and final man, Carlos Machi, was picked up at a residence near the set and the school whose mural quotes King’s declaration that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards JUSTICE.
“It’s a perfect end to a tremendous amount of work,” Cain said.
On Wednesday morning, the team members who were not busy with post-arrest details attended the second of the two funerals for two cops who were murdered in Harlem on Jan. 21. They and the rest of the NYPD then resumed risking the same fate.
The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced the arrests in the afternoon. The NYPD also issued a statement as the process to return Green Eyes from Puerto Rico was underway.
With the collars, the team hopes the threat of serious prison time—there is no parole with the feds—would give them leverage in going up the supply chain. They know it will be difficult.
“That’s like cartel stuff,” Gurleski said.
He recalled one cartel-level case where a supplier faced 12 years.
“He’s like, ‘They’ll just kill my family, I'll take the 12 years,’” Gurleski remembers.
In the meantime, the detectives had received another kite from the block, this one from a man who called in and said somebody had sold drugs in front of his daughter.
“If you guys don't do something about it, I'm gonna take it into my own hands,” the man said in his complaint.
The detectives will respond to that kite as they do all the others, with the same dedication depicted by the best cops when Michael K. Williams was on _The Wire._
**The beachfront in Surfside, Florida,** is one of the more peaceful and unexploited stretches of public sunning space in the entire sprawling South Florida metropolis. Nobody is hawking kitschy T-shirts (advertising and vending are verboten), and you can’t fish on the shore during daylight. Grass-topped sand dunes and sea-grape trees hem the length of the beach and separate it from the town’s semi-famous “hard pack”: a serene one-mile pathway of compressed sand beloved by runners.
One sunny day last June, a Surfside resident spotted a tall blond woman on the hard pack, with a little white dog on a leash. She watched as the woman led the dog off the pathway toward the beach, right past a sign that clearly said dogs weren’t allowed.
The resident, a beach activist who finds high purpose in protecting Surfside’s loggerhead sea turtles during nesting season, mobilized. “I was speed-walking at her and yelling at her,” she recalls. “I just opened my mouth and said, ‘You can’t go out there with the dog!’”
When the startled owner turned around, her face was immediately recognizable. It was Ivanka Trump—accompanied by her ten-year-old daughter, Arabella, and their ultra-white, blue-eyed pooch, Winter.
“Oh-uh, I didn’t realize,” Trump said.
The resident was a bit flummoxed herself; this was her first face-to-face encounter with the former First Daughter. “She’s well put together,” the neighbor remembers. “She’s had a lot of work done, and it’s good plastic. It’s Miami, and there’s a lot of bad plastic here. She has good plastic.”
The women were adjacent to the seaside condo building where Ivanka and Jared, their three children, and Winter (believed to be a Pomeranian mix) had resettled after their inglorious exit from Washington five months earlier—and just steps from the large beach-rules notice that Trump surely must have passed scores of times by then.
“You’re standing right next to the sign,” the neighbor told Ivanka. “Look, it says ‘No dogs.’”
The Kushner family are by far the most well-known residents of Surfside, a town that’s as polarized as America. Photograph by SplashNews.com.
A few months later, the woman bumped into the family once more—a rare kind of happenstance since the Kushners had sought exile in the Sunshine State.
Ivanka and Jared were out at the ocean’s edge with their five-year-old son, Theodore. He walked up to the neighbor (who asked to remain anonymous because she continues to live near the family) and talked about a fish he’d caught. The neighbor reminded Jared, in swim trunks, and Ivanka, in a “cute ruffled outfit,” to watch out for jellyfish. Ivanka indicated she wouldn’t be swimming, but Theodore hurried into the ocean. The neighbor was immediately concerned.
“I’m thinking,_Why is this boy in the water alone on a boogie board with this moderate rip current?_I’m a mother, and I would never let my child alone in the water like that.”
Sure enough, young Theodore began drifting from shore, prompting Jared to run in after him.
“Slenderman moves quick,” the neighbor quips.
Her encounters with Ivanka only reinforced a long-held impression: “She seems to be about . . . ‘I live in this little cocoon where the rules don’t apply to me’ . . . in her own little world.”
Ivanka’s world has certainly gotten smaller. She’s out of politics at the moment, out of her former executive job at the Trump Organization, out of the womenswear brand that bore her name, out of high society in New York, and cast out of Washington, too. Although once viewed as a potentially tempering force on her demagogic dad, Ivanka never did find her footing in the White House or in DC society; January 6 was the final rupture. Ivanka reportedly spent hours that day pleading with her father to call off the mob at the Capitol. When she tweeted for an end to the violence herself, she addressed the rioters as “American Patriots,” before admitting that they weren’t patriots at all and deleting the tweet.
Since that traumatic day, Ivanka has largely been silent. Her farewell tweet from the West Wing didn’t mention her father by name, wished Joe Biden success, and urged the nation to find “common ground.” A previously prolific Instagram and Twitter user, she has posted only twice in the year since—both posts commemorated her jabs of the Covid vaccine—and she hasn’t made any public-speaking appearances. While her brothers didn’t have much of a public brand before their ascendance to right-wing demigods, Ivanka’s reputation plummeted in the absolute opposite direction, from haute to hated, fashionista to plain old fascista.
Now the Kushners have sought refuge in Surfside, a town of only 6,000 people that’s hardly immune from Trumpian divisiveness—the former President lost to Joe Biden in the Surfside precinct by 69 votes—yet one that previously managed to stay off most people’s radar. Which was just fine with plenty of residents.
Eliana Salzhauer, a town commissioner, likens her reaction upon hearing Javanka was arriving to a scene in 1980’s_The Jerk_in which Steve Martin’s absurdist character is ecstatic to find his name listed in the phone book while an unhinged killer picks Martin’s name randomly from the same directory.
“It was, ‘Oh, good, the town is getting recognition,’ ” says Salzhauer, a Democrat. “Then it was, ‘Oh, no, the psychos are coming.’ ”
The last thing Salzhauer wants is to become an enabler of the couple’s reinvention act in South Florida, which makes the whole situation rather frustrating. As she puts it, “What are they doing in our town?”
* * *
**Surfside is a quaint (by Florida standards)** hamlet wedged between Bal Harbour to the north and north Miami Beach to the south—“Miami’s Uptown Beachtown,” as they say, with an uptowny history befitting a couple worth an estimated $800 million. The town was incorporated in 1935, when 35 members of the exclusive Surf Club—a secluded hangout for Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Winston Churchill, and other A-listers—wanted to prevent the land around their club from being annexed by Miami. They pooled $28,500 and established their own little burg, thereafter known as Surfside.
The town is only a mile—eight blocks—long, a sliver of land sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intercoastal Waterway, with high-rise beach condos on one side and single-family homes on the other. According to the Census Bureau, 54 percent of residents are white, 45 percent are Latino (many of them affluent immigrants from South American countries), and a virtually unheard-of zero percent of the population is Black. The old Surf Club is now a Four Seasons, one block over from the Arte, the spectacular new glass pile where Ivanka and Jared have been living for the past year (and where the rent can come in at $40,000 a month). Designed by an Italian architect and reminiscent of a pyramid, their 12-story building has 16 residences with floor-to-ceiling windows, plus a clutch of in-house amenities that sound perfectly suited for sheltering in place and shaking off the chill of Washington (beachfront meditation pond, anyone?).
The Kushners have been renting in the luxe Arte building on the beach in Surfside, but barely showing their faces.
Still, Surfside has little of the glitz of Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, the former President’s home base, or even the cachet of nearby Jupiter, where Don Jr. and Eric Trump both purchased multimillion-dollar mansions in the spring of 2021. What it does have is a significant Jewish population.
In Washington, Jared, an Orthodox Jew, and Ivanka, who converted after their 2009 wedding, prioritized walking proximity to their synagogue when they chose Kalorama for their home. Post-administration, they picked what may be South Florida’s closest facsimile to a Little Israel. The heart of Surfside’s two-block downtown strip is a collection of kosher restaurants and stores. (One Javanka sighting put them at the since-closed Koshertown grocery.) Town life tends to center around its two synagogues: the more conservative Shul, which bills itself as “one of the most unorthodox, Orthodox synagogues,” and the smaller Orthodox Young Israel—“Judaism to fit modern times,” as one resident describes it. It’s from the latter that the Kushners have been seen walking home from Shabbat services, security guard trailing behind them.
“If you’re looking to escape New Jersey and New York, \[Surfside\] is where you’re going to end up,” says Salzhauer, the town commissioner. “Once they built the Shul and then Young Israel, it was open season on real estate.” The synagogues serve thousands of congregants from four neighboring communities, but “everybody wants to live within walking distance, if you’re Orthodox, to the temple.”
The Kushner kids attend a private Hebrew school nearby. (And so far, the family has avoided the public drama that chased them out of DC’s Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School, when Ivanka and Jared’s failure to follow Covid safety protocols at work—remember the Amy Coney Barrett swearing-in superspreader?—caused an uproar among fellow parents.)
“This is like a warm version of New York—the same pace, the same driving, the same kind of brusque attitude about things,” says Salzhauer. “It’s the same people, but it’s warmer, so everyone’s a little happier because everybody’s not freezing their asses off and having to dig their cars out of the snow.”
Salzhauer and Jared actually both attended the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, for high school. (At 40, Jared is 11 years Salzhauer’s junior.) Not that the two have had occasion to trade any glory-days yarns about their alma mater. Javanka aren’t only the town’s most well-known inhabitants—_Wonder Woman_actress Lynda Carter is a fairly distant third—they’re also among its most invisible.
The couple is rarely seen outside the Arte, and only the occasional paparazzo has published pictures of their doings (jogging on the hard pack, relaxing on a yacht in Biscayne Bay). One of the few times they seemed to be telegraphing more than proof of life was shortly after their former colleague Stephanie Grisham published her tell-all about the Trump White House. Jared and Ivanka—who, Grisham revealed, had been known around Melania Trump’s East Wing as “ ‘the interns’ because they represented in our minds obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls”—showed up at a Miami water park with their children and kissed for the cameras in their matching black bathing suits, as if to say, “I really don’t care, do u?” Later, after a November outing to a Louis Vuitton show in Miami, leftie Twitter exploded and_Vanity Fair_followed up with a gleeful hate-read headlined JARED AND IVANKA TRY TO REENTER POLITE SOCIETY, ARE PROMPTLY TOLD TO F–K OFF.
Last June, when the Champlain Towers building in Surfside collapsed in the middle of the night and killed 98 people—and TV screens around the world were zooming in on the town—Ivanka and Jared donated to the search effort for victims of the building located two blocks from theirs, according to the local NBC affiliate. But even then, they made no statement. Perhaps they worried their disgraced brand would distract from the incredible tragedy. On the other hand, it might have been an opportunity to suds up their image.
Still, Surfside hasn’t completely sheltered them from the bitter political storm they helped create. The House’s January 6 Committee is pointing to Ivanka’s futile pleas for her father to halt the insurrection as further evidence to implicate the former President. And on December 1, New York’s attorney general subpoenaed Ivanka for testimony in its continuing Trump Organization fraud investigation (the company has pleaded not guilty), which she and her father are fighting together in court.
The town of Surfside, meanwhile, is itself America writ small, all too familiar with the festering division fostered by Javanka’s White House.
* * *
**One Surfside resident who has been tickled** about Javanka taking up in South Florida is Charles Burkett, the town’s mayor. “They’re not just here passing through,” he tells me, playing the role of town pitchman to the hilt. “I believe they want to make this a big part of their life, this part of the state of Florida generally, and specifically Surfside.”
There are certainly more politically friendly communities the couple might have sought out. Burkett, a 60-year-old Miami Beach native, edged out his 2020 rival, the progressive incumbent, by just 50 votes. Then again, while the unvaxed Trump voter didn’t really curry favor with the base during the race, since he’s been in office his Trumpian tactics and talking points may have felt second nature to Javanka.
Democratic town commissioner Eliana Salzhauer, on the left, went to the same New Jersey high school as Kushner.
In 2020, when there was talk of reducing Surfside’s law-enforcement budget—the town goes years without seeing a murder—Burkett blamed Salzhauer for wanting to “defund the police” and surfaced an incriminating (he said) photo of her at the 2017 DC Women’s March, in which Salzhauer holds an anti-Trump sign, while a friend’s placard reads HEY IVANKA—WE’RE HOLDING YOU ACCOUNTABLE. “This town is full of nutty right-wing supporters with alcohol issues and easy access to firearms,” Salzhauer later complained in an email to county ethics officials. “His published call to action that ‘It must be clearly demonstrated to politicians’ along with my photo is a clear dog-whistle threat to my physical safety.” Burkett responded in turn on his personal website, calling Salzhauer’s statement an “unforgivable attack on the integrity and character of the very people she has been elected to represent.”
Dem commissioner Salzhauer flipped the double bird at GOP mayor Charles Burkett (top row, middle) after he muted her during a Zoom meeting.
During a town meeting over Zoom that same year, Burkett, a Catholic, complained that a Salzhauer-supported resolution to condemn discrimination against Asians and Jews during the pandemic was unfair to evangelical Christians. When Salzhauer interrupted him, he muted her. She responded by flashing him the double bird, blurry screen grabs of which made the rounds on the local news. Not surprisingly, they disagree about Javanka.
The tall, slender Burkett is out on the hard pack most days, jogging in a ball cap and mini-shorts, his shirtless trunk spit-roasting brown in the sun, and it was on one of his runs that he first met Ivanka. “It was almost like a collision,” he recalls. “Ivanka was walking out of the gate of her building, and I was jogging by.”
Burkett stopped and introduced himself. She suggested they continue their chat at a later time, and what do you know, Burkett got a follow-up call with an invite to meet the Kushners at home at the Arte.
Ivanka and Jared greeted him as their kids bustled about the condo. The conversation, as Burkett describes it, was “very generic,” with no discernible agenda on the Kushners’ side. “It was not unlike a conversation I would have with any other resident,” the mayor says. “It didn’t touch on any specific politics. It was a chance for them to educate themselves on their new home.”
Perhaps the couple just wanted a friend in the mayor’s office. Burkett, who resides in a $4-million oceanfront house, does happen to be an heir of a significant South Florida real-estate family. And actually, the Kushners did ask him to do what he could to protect Surfside—which has a 12-story building-height limit—from the kind of overdevelopment that plagues much of the Miami-Dade coastline. “They, like everyone else that I talk to, want to make sure we don’t turn into Miami Beach or Sunny Isles,” he says—never mind that the Trump name is on several gaudily oversize beachfront skyscrapers in the area.
Jared’s family business, the Kushner Companies, is busy in South Florida at the moment, involved in an estimated billion dollars’ worth of local development projects. Chaired by Jared’s father, the Trump-pardoned felon Charles Kushner, the company is building two large apartments in Miami-Dade and another nearby in Fort Lauderdale. (Jared’s Democrat brother, Joshua, a venture capitalist, last year bought a $23.5-million mansion on Miami Beach.) Jared himself started a venture-capital firm in Miami called Affinity Partners, where he’s hiring executives. He’s reportedly courting investments from Saudi Arabia, which is notable given his cozy and controversial White House relationship with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. (MBS communicated solo with Jared on WhatsApp and reportedly boasted he had the First Son-in-Law “in his pocket.”) Jared has his own tell-all in the works for HarperCollins’s new conservative imprint, Broadside Books, scheduled for early this year.
Ivanka, meanwhile, has zero publicly known endeavors at the moment. Evan Ross, a Miami Democratic political consultant, says that when some “major Israel backers” in South Florida recently tried to arrange a meeting with her, Ivanka sent back word that she was declining for personal reasons. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet with them specifically—it was that she just wasn’t taking any meetings,” says Ross. “That she’s leading a private life right now.” Officials in area GOP circles likewise report that Ivanka hasn’t “made a peep,” as one puts it—unlike her brothers, who continue to stir up the base on Fox News and social media (and who remain VPs of the Trump Organization).
Although there was talk at one point of Ivanka challenging Marco Rubio for the Senate, her father plainly admitted that his daughter didn’t see any benefit to getting into electoral politics herself. “She doesn’t really like the concept of running for office,” Donald Trump complained to a crowd in Georgia early last year. “She says, ‘What do I need it for, Dad?’ ” That was January 4, the last time Trump and Ivanka shared a stage together. Some weeks later, she reportedly called Rubio to say she had no designs on his seat and would support his campaign.
The Kushners have bought a waterfront mansion on an exclusive neighboring island, Indian Creek. Photograph by SplashNews.com.
Ivanka turned 40 in October and celebrated with girlfriends over “two days of boating, beaches and bubbly . . . champagne toasts, cake, and caviar,” including at the Surf Club, per the_New York Post’s_Page Six. An unnamed source told the paper that Ivanka and Jared “love it down there \[in South Florida\]. It really suits them.” Indeed, the Kushners have reportedly purchased a $24-million home on neighboring Indian Creek Island: an 8,510-square-foot neoclassical mansion with eight and a half bathrooms, a sprawling double staircase rising up from the great room, and a white-columned facade that gives off strong_Scarface_vibes.
> “I’ve lived in town for 16 years now—I’ve never been to Indian Creek, and it’s a couple of feet from my house. You can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s like a fairy tale.”
With fewer than three dozen waterfront homes built around a golf course, Indian Creek is an infinitely more private setting than the Arte. It’s accessible for the yachtless only via a bridge that extends from Surfside—yet close enough for a family like the Kushners to walk to the Surfside synagogues for Shabbat services. The island’s single entrance is heavily guarded, and it has a private police force.
“I’ve lived in town for almost 16 years now—I’ve never been to Indian Creek, and it’s a couple of feet from my house,” says Salzhauer. “You can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s like a fairy tale.”
Investor Carl Icahn, ex–Sears CEO Eddie Lampert, and singer Julio Iglesias all own homes on the island, along with Gisele Bündchen and her husband, Tom Brady. The quarterback has had a famously hot-and-cold relationship with Donald Trump the last several years. But by and large, Indian Creek’s politics run red. According to Miami-Dade voting records, nearly 80 percent of the 53 votes in the 2020 election cast by the islanders went for Trump.
* * *
**On Friday, October 29, Surfside decked** itself out for Halloween. Town officials had hundreds of hay bales delivered to the 96th Street Park, where a maze for children was built. There was a petting zoo, dozens of pumpkins, a DJ, bounce houses. They called the event the “Spooktacular.”
Back in Washington, the House’s January 6 Committee was sparring with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, growing frustrated as he stalled on their subpoena. Up in New York, news had just broken that the Westchester County district attorney’s office was investigating a Trump golf club there, compounding the Trump family’s problems in the state.
But at the Surfside Spooktacular, two former top White House aides were just two parents out for an unusual night of fun with their kids and 750 or so others. Young Theodore was dressed in a ninja outfit, while Ivanka and Jared came as themselves, she in a very plain black knee-length dress, he in designer jeans and a neatly pressed T-shirt. Jared spoke with Mayor Burkett and the police chief about how much he liked the town. (The Secret Service had been impressed with Surfside cops, he told them.) Ivanka was off following the kids.
“The most striking thing about it was that they were like anybody else and blended in with the crowd,” Burkett told me afterward.
Even Commissioner Salzhauer was pleasantly surprised by how the family did, for a short period of time, mix in seamlessly with the townsfolk. “At least the kids had a brief, fun taste of a normal childhood for Halloween,” she says.
As the Kushners were leaving the event, Ivanka bent down to pick a large pumpkin off the ground and started to walk off with it. Families were allowed to take one gourd home with them. Ivanka handed hers to Jared, who carried it the rest of the way. Their bodyguard, who followed Ivanka, also walked out with one.
The double-pumpkin takeaway may not have fallen strictly within the rules, but what’s a pumpkin or two in the scheme of things? This was Ivanka and Jared attending not some White House event or private-school recital or exclusive soiree in the Hamptons. It was just small-town life in South Florida, where they could easily slip out with their pumpkins and disappear into the night.
_This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Washingtonian._
A student sommelier serves a glass of red wine in France.(Photo By: PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP via Getty Images)
What ideas come to mind when you hear the word “Epicurean”? Probably: wine snob, gourmet cooking, foppish, superficial, idle, frivolous, decadent, selfish and, of course, pleasure-seeking. Pleasure – and the Epicurean philosophy in which it plays a central role – is a fixed star of philosophical disapproval. All the greats, from Plato to our modern theorists of well-being, not to mention the Fathers of the Early Church, warned, and still warn, against it.
Back then, the attacks on pleasure focused on the superiority of humans to other animals and on our special competencies, obligations and responsibilities. Pleasure is what the dumb, irrational animals pursue: eating, mating, loafing. We humans are made for higher, more difficult and sometimes more painful things, [as the Stoics, the ancient opponents of the Epicureans](https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/coronavirus/2020/03/grace-under-pressure-how-coronavirus-testing-worlds-self-image), insisted: fortitude in adversity, self-control, intellectual labour, logical inferences, the contemplation of spiritual and immaterial entities. Today, the uneasiness about pleasure also reflects an aversion to consumerism and to the empty promises of advertisers who induce us to believe that this or that product or activity is the key to fun-filled days and restful sleep.
The use of reason, self-control and frugality are worthwhile aims and worth philosophising over. But I side with [Epicurus](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/), the 3rd century BCE founder of the Ancient Greek sect, who stated: “\[I\] do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a sensible form.”
If the exercise of our rationality in learning, thinking and communicating were not pleasurable, there would be no point in trying to master any subject or practice. If self-control did not reduce the pain caused to others and ourselves, there would be no purpose to it. If consumerism were not accompanied by environmental destruction, global inequality and unjust labour practices, it would be hard to find much wrong with it.
Rightly understood, philosophical Epicureanism is a politically and personally powerful world-view that belies its caricatures. Its key elements are an unflinching refusal to believe that spiritual entities designed, created or control the world combined with the conviction that death and irreversible decomposition into material atoms is the end for each living being.
Epicureans contend that mortality has to be faced without futile struggles, protests or wails of tragedy.Meanwhile, the joy, not only of the philosopher, but of all of us, is to be found in experience, including the experience of coming to understand how nature and society actually work. Death puts an end to these pleasures, but, as the Epicureans were fond of pointing out, we will not be around to experience the deprivation.
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Epicurus made it clear from the start that he did not advocate the direct pursuit of personal pleasure in the forms of gluttony, indiscriminate sex or overconsumption of intoxicating substances. This was foolish, as it ultimately produces pain. Real pleasure arises from judicious – though not overly fussy – “choice and avoidance”, and avoidance is as important as choice.
Epicurean ethics reduces to a few simple principles: avoid harming others and live so that others have no motive to harm you. Form agreements with them for mutual aid and protection. The greatest good for a human being, Epicurus thought, is friendship – pleasure in the presence of another individual, and the security of knowing that help will be given if ever it is needed.
According to Epicurus, cold, hunger and illness are the main causes of human misery, but we are liable to other forms of suffering and deprivation. The management of wealth, he observed, is attended with anxiety, and the ambitious in any arena will find themselves surrounded by dangerous enemies. Keep your worldly ambitions modest, he advised. Unrequited love, he recognised, is terrible to endure, as are the torments of jealousy, so keep away from anyone threatening to make you miserable before you are in over your head.
Why would anyone resist such an appealing philosophy? For one thing, we are taught to strive for money, esteem and power over others, even when these pursuits break down our health, create enemies and leave little time for enjoyment. And in keeping our eyes fixed on ambitious goals, we avert them from the deprivations other people suffer through no fault of their own.
A political message of much philosophy through the ages, an argument one encounters in Aristotle’s _Politics_ as well as in Immanuel Kant’s _Critique of Judgement_, is that the deprivation and suffering of the majority of human beings is an arrangement favoured by nature and the cosmos so the superior few can thrive. Many religions teach that suffering today does not matter because it will be compensated for in another life.
The Epicureans thought this was wicked nonsense, and their later followers, especially Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, agreed. These thinkers insisted, in their different ways, that this life is all we have, and that a humane politics ought to aim at security for all and enjoyment in the present.
An important objection to regarding pleasure as the sole human good, and pain as the only true evil, is that few of us would choose to take a “bliss drug” that kept us in a permanent and passive state of delight, unaware of our hurts. Most would rather experience hardships, ups and downs, and the pains of off-and-on deprivation that keep our appetites sharp.
The Epicurean can agree entirely. A bliss drug would not be a source of real pleasure because it would wipe out experience. Blissed out, we would not be encountering the world as it is, but a distorted world in which the causes of physical and psychological pleasure as well as pain were obscured.
What would an Epicurean world look like? It wouldn’t be based, as our world is, on the value of the speed and efficiency of output – the transformation of raw materials into consumer products and consumer products into rubbish, at whatever human cost. It would be focused on enhancing another form of utility, the creation of good experiences and the minimisation of pain.
Adam Smith hoped and believed that a deregulated capitalism would accomplish that goal, which he called “universal opulence”. For reasons well understood by economists, sociologists and philosophers, too, that has not happened. Given the political, economic, environmental and health crises that have defined 2020, Epicureanism provides a unique and timely philosophical framework for reforming our institutions, our interactions with the natural world and our relationships with each other.
_Catherine Wilson is a visiting presidential professor in philosophy at the City University of New YorkGraduate School. She is the author of_ [How to be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well](https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/catherine-wilson/how-to-be-an-epicurean/9781541672628/).
_This article is part of the_ [_Agora_](https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/agora-market-place-ideas) _series, a collaboration between the_ New Statesman _and Aaron James Wendland, senior research fellow in philosophy at Massey College, Toronto. He tweets_ [_@aj\_wendland_](https://twitter.com/aj_wendland)_._
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[[@IT & Computer]], [[@Computer Set Up|Computer Setup]]
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While that may sound like a big number if you’re running a firm that’s only now considering tighter security measures, there’s a bigger question here. With data breaches [exposing 36 billion records](https://pages.riskbasedsecurity.com/hubfs/Reports/2020/2020%20Q3%20Data%20Breach%20QuickView%20Report.pdf) in the first half of 2020, and with most business leaders worried that [cybersecurity risks are increasing](https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-96/Accenture-2019-Cost-of-Cybercrime-Study-Final.pdf#zoom=50), the more important question is why all of a company’s digital systems aren’t encrypted?
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[[Selfhosting|Self hosting]], [[@Computer Set Up|Computer Setup]]
# [GitHub - RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives: Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀](https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives)
Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to established SaaS products. Maintained by folks at [Runa Capital](https://runacap.com/).
Also checkout our [ROSS index](https://runacap.com/ross-index/): fastest-growing open-source startups, every quarter.
Criteria
--------
Open-source company is added to the list if:
1. Its product is strongly based on an open-source repo
2. It has a well-known closed-sourced competitor, solving a similar business problem
3. It is a private for-profit company, founded in the last 10 years
4. Its repo has 100+ stars on GitHub
Things change really fast in the startup world, so this list can neither be fully complete, nor 100% up to date.
Don't hesitate to [contribute](https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives/blob/main/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) and add new startups. Let's build the most comprehensive list together.
* * *
Startup List
------------
All startups in the list are sorted by categories and names in an alphabetical order. If you click on the stars badge, you will get to a product's repo. **Have a good search!**
| Category | Company | Description | GitHub Stars | Alternative to |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| API Platform | [Hoppscotch](https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch) | API development ecosystem | [](https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch) | [Postman](https://www.postman.com/) |
| Auth & SSO | [Supertokens](https://supertokens.io/) | User authentication and session management framework | [](https://github.com/supertokens/supertokens-core) | [Okta](https://okta.com/), [Auth0](https://auth0.com/) |
| Backend as a service | [Appwrite](https://appwrite.io/) | Backend server with REST APIs to manage core backend needs | [](https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite) | [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) |
| Backend as a service | [Kuzzle](https://kuzzle.io/kuzzle-backend/) | Backend server with REST APIs to manage core backend needs | [](https://github.com/kuzzleio/kuzzle) | [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) |
| Backend as a service | [Nhost](https://nhost.io/) | Backend server with GraphQL | [](https://github.com/nhost/nhost) | [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) |
| Backend as a service | [Supabase](https://supabase.io/) | Backend server with REST APIs to manage core backend needs | [](https://github.com/supabase/supabase) | [Firebase](https://firebase.google.com/) |
| Business intelligence | [Metabase](https://www.metabase.com/) | Business intelligence software | [](https://github.com/metabase/metabase) | [Tableau](https://www.tableau.com/), [Power BI](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/), [DataStudio](https://datastudio.google.com/) |
| CMS | [Builder](https://builder.io/) | Drag and drop page builder and CMS | [](https://github.com/builderio/builder) | [Contentfull](https://www.contentful.com/) |
| CMS | [Concrete](https://www.concretecms.com/) | CMS for teams | [](https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5) | [Contentfull](https://www.contentful.com/) |
| CMS | [Directus](https://directus.io/) | Data platform which wraps any database with an intuitive app | [](https://github.com/directus/directus) | [Contentfull](https://www.contentful.com/) |
| CMS | [Netlify CMS](https://www.netlifycms.org/) | Git-based CMS for static site generators | [](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms) | [Contentfull](https://www.contentful.com/) |
| CMS | [Plasmic](https://plasmic.app/) | The headless page builder for singe-page frameworks | [](https://github.com/plasmicapp/plasmic) | [Contentfull](https://www.contentful.com/) |
| Communication | [Fonoster](https://fonoster.com/) | APIs for SMS, voice and video | [](https://github.com/fonoster/fonoster) | [Twilio](https://www.twilio.com/) |
| Customer Data Platform | [Jitsu](https://jitsu.com/) | Fully-scriptable data ingestion engine for modern data teams | [](https://github.com/jitsucom/jitsu) | [Segment](https://segment.com/) |
| Customer Data Platform | [Rudderstack](https://rudderstack.com/) | Customer data platform for developers | [](https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server) | [Segment](https://segment.com/) |
| Cybersecurity | [CloudQuery](https://cloudquery.io/) | Assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your cloud assets. | [](https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery) | [AWS Config](https://aws.amazon.com/config/), [GCP Cloud Asset Inventory](https://cloud.google.com/asset-inventory), [AWS GuardDuty](https://aws.amazon.com/guardduty/) |
| Cybersecurity | [CrowdSec](http://crowdsec.net/) | Collaborative IPS able to analyze visitor behavior and to provide an adapted response to all kinds of attacks. | [](https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec) | [GreyNoise](https://www.greynoise.io/) |
| Cybersecurity | [Firezone](https://www.firez.one/) | VPN Server & Firewall for teams | [](https://github.com/firezone/firezone) | [OpenVPN Access Server](https://openvpn.net/access-server/) |
| ELT / ETL | [Prefect](https://www.prefect.io/) | Data orchestration platform for a modern data stack | [](https://github.com/prefecthq/prefect) | [Fivetran](https://fivetran.com/) |
| ERP | [DoliCloud](https://dolicloud.com/) | Business management suite (ERP and CRM) | [](https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr) | [Oracle Fusion ERP Cloud](https://www.oracle.com/erp),[Odoo](https://odoo.com/),[Microsoft Dynamics](https://dynamics.microsoft.com/) |
| Feature flag and toggle management | [FlagSmith](https://flagsmith.com/) | Feature Flag & Remote Config Service | [](https://github.com/Flagsmith/flagsmith) | [LaunchDarkly](https://launchdarkly.com/) |
| Feature flag and toggle management | [GrowthBook](https://www.growthbook.io/) | Feature flags and A/B testing | [](https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook) | [LaunchDarkly](https://launchdarkly.com/) |
| Feature flag and toggle management | [Unleash](https://www.getunleash.io/) | Feature flags platform | [](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash) | [LaunchDarkly](https://launchdarkly.com/) |
| File Hosting | [Filestash](https://www.filestash.app/) | A file manager that let you manage your data anywhere it is located | [](https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) | [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/), [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/) |
| File Hosting | [Nextcloud](https://nextcloud.com/) | A personal cloud which runs on your own server | [](https://github.com/nextcloud/server) | [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/), [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/) |
| File Hosting | [Owncloud](https://owncloud.com/) | A personal cloud which runs on your own server | [](https://github.com/owncloud/core) | [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/), [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/) |
| Forum Software | [Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/) | A platform for community discussion | [](https://github.com/discourse/discourse) | [Tribe](https://tribe.so/), [Circle](https://circle.so/) |
| Forum Software | [Vanilla](https://vanillaforums.com/) | A platform for community discussion | [](https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla) | [Tribe](https://tribe.so/), [Circle](https://circle.so/) |
| Graph database | [ArangoDB](https://www.arangodb.com/) | Graph database and document store | [](https://github.com/arangodb/arangodb) | [TigerGraph](https://www.tigergraph.com/), [Amazon Neptune](https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/) |
| Metrics store | [Cube.js](https://cube.dev/) | Headless business intelligence suite | [](https://github.com/cube-js/cube.js) | [Looker](https://looker.com/) |
| Metrics store | [LightDash](https://www.lightdash.com/) | Low-code metrics layer, alternative to Looker | [](https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash) | [Looker](https://looker.com/) |
| Metrics store | [MLCraft](http://mlcraft.io/) | Low-code metrics layer, alternative to Looker | [](https://github.com/mlcraft-io/mlcraft) | [Looker](https://looker.com/) |
| Metrics store | [MetriQL](https://metriql.com/) | Headless business intelligence suite | [](https://github.com/metriql/metriql) | [Looker](https://looker.com/) |
| No-code database | [Baserow](https://baserow.io/) | No-code database and Airtable alternative | [](https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow) | [AirTable](https://www.airtable.com/) |
| No-code database | [NocoDB](https://www.nocodb.com/) | No-code database and Airtable alternative | [](https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb) | [AirTable](https://www.airtable.com/) |
| Notetaking | [Outline](https://www.getoutline.com/) | Wiki and knowledge base | [](https://github.com/outline/outline) | [Notion](https://notion.so/) |
| Observability and monitoring | [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) | Observability and data visualization platform | [](https://github.com/grafana/grafana) | [DataDog](https://www.datadoghq.com/), [NewRelic](https://newrelic.com/) |
| Observability and monitoring | [Sentry](https://sentry.io/) | Application monitoring with a focus on error reporting | [](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry) | [DataDog](https://www.datadoghq.com/), [NewRelic](https://newrelic.com/) |
| Observability and monitoring | [Signoz](https://signoz.io/) | Application monitoring and observability platform | [](https://github.com/signoz/signoz) | [DataDog](https://www.datadoghq.com/), [NewRelic](https://newrelic.com/) |
| Observability and monitoring | [VictoriaMetrics](https://victoriametrics.com/) | Application monitoring and observability platform | [](https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics) | [DataDog](https://www.datadoghq.com/), [NewRelic](https://newrelic.com/) |
| Observability and monitoring | [Netdata](https://www.netdata.cloud/) | Application monitoring and observability platform | [](https://github.com/netdata/netdata) | [DataDog](https://www.datadoghq.com/), [NewRelic](https://newrelic.com/) |
| Password manager | [BitWarden](https://bitwarden.com/) | Password manager for teams and individuals | [](https://github.com/bitwarden/server) | [1Password](https://1password.com/) |
| Password manager | [Padloc](https://padloc.app/) | Password manager for teams and individuals | [](https://github.com/padloc/padloc) | [1Password](https://1password.com/) |
| Password manager | [Passbolt](https://www.passbolt.com/) | Password manager for teams and individuals | [](https://github.com/passbolt/passbolt_api) | [1Password](https://1password.com/) |
| Platform as a service | [Coolify](https://coolify.io/) | Self-hostable Heroku alternative | [](https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify) | [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) |
| Platform as a service | [Porter](https://porter.run/) | Kubernetes powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud | [](https://github.com/porter-dev/porter) | [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) |
| Platform as a service | [Qovery](https://www.qovery.com/) | Kubernetes powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud | [](https://github.com/Qovery/engine) | [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) |
| Platform as a service | [Space Cloud](https://space-cloud.io/) | Serverless cloud deployment platform | [](https://github.com/spacecloud-io/space-cloud) | [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/) |
| Robotic Process Automation (RPA) | [RoboCorp](https://robocorp.com/) | Set of tooling that allows to create automation packages | [](https://github.com/robocorp/rcc) | [UiPath](https://www.uipath.com/) |
| Scheduling | [Calendso](https://cal.com/) | Scheduling infrastructure, alternative to Calendly | [](https://github.com/calendso/calendso) | [Calendly](https://calendly.com/) |
| Timeseries database | [InfluxDB](https://www.influxdata.com/) | Database designed to process time series data | [](https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb) | [Kdb+](https://kx.com/developers/) |
| Timeseries database | [QuestDB](https://questdb.io/) | Database designed to process time series data | [](https://github.com/questdb/questdb) | [Kdb+](https://kx.com/developers/) |
| Timeseries database | [TimescaleDB](https://www.timescale.com/) | Database designed to process time series data | [](https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb) | [Kdb+](https://kx.com/developers/) |
| Timeseries database | [TDengine](https://tdengine.com/?en) | Database designed to process time series data | [](https://github.com/taosdata/TDengine) | [Kdb+](https://kx.com/developers/) |
| Video Conferencing | [Jitsi](https://jitsi.org/meet) | Video conferences platform and SDK | [](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet) | [Zoom](https://zoom.us/) |
| Website analytics | [GoatCounter](https://www.goatcounter.com/) | Google Analytics alternative | [](https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter) | [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/) |
| Website analytics | [Matomo](https://matomo.org/) | Google Analytics alternative | [](https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo) | [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/) |
| Website analytics | [Plausible](https://plausible.io/) | Google Analytics alternative | [](https://github.com/plausible/analytics) | [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/) |
| Website analytics | [Umami](https://umami.is/) | Google Analytics alternative | [](https://github.com/mikecao/umami) | [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com/) |
**Postal** is a complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers. Think Sendgrid, Mailgun or Postmark but open source and ready for you to run on your own servers. Postal is developed by [Krystal](https://k.io/) to serve its own mail processing requirements and we have since decided that it should be released as an open source project for the community.
# GitHub - stefanprodan/dockprom: Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager
dockprom
--------
A monitoring solution for Docker hosts and containers with [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/), [Grafana](http://grafana.org/), [cAdvisor](https://github.com/google/cadvisor), [NodeExporter](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter) and alerting with [AlertManager](https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager).
_**If you're looking for the Docker Swarm version please go to [stefanprodan/swarmprom](https://github.com/stefanprodan/swarmprom)**_
Install
-------
Clone this repository on your Docker host, cd into dockprom directory and run compose up:
ADMIN\_USER=admin ADMIN\_PASSWORD=admin ADMIN\_PASSWORD\_HASH=JDJhJDE0JE91S1FrN0Z0VEsyWmhrQVpON1VzdHVLSDkyWHdsN0xNbEZYdnNIZm1pb2d1blg4Y09mL0ZP docker-compose up -d
**Caddy v2 does not accept plaintext passwords. It MUST be provided as a hash value. The above password hash corresponds to ADMIN\_PASSWORD 'admin'. To know how to generate hash password, refer [Updating Caddy to v2](https://github.com/#Updating-Caddy-to-v2)**
Prerequisites:
* Docker Engine >= 1.13
* Docker Compose >= 1.11
Updating Caddy to v2
--------------------
Perform a `docker run --rm caddy caddy hash-password --plaintext 'ADMIN_PASSWORD'` in order to generate a hash for your new password. ENSURE that you replace `ADMIN_PASSWORD` with new plain text password and `ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH` with the hashed password references in [docker-compose.yml](https://github.com/stefanprodan/dockprom/blob/master/docker-compose.yml) for the caddy container.
* Caddy (reverse proxy and basic auth provider for prometheus and alertmanager)
Setup Grafana
-------------
Navigate to `http://<host-ip>:3000` and login with user _**admin**_ password _**admin**_. You can change the credentials in the compose file or by supplying the `ADMIN_USER` and `ADMIN_PASSWORD` environment variables on compose up. The config file can be added directly in grafana part like this
grafana:
image: grafana/grafana:7.2.0
env\_file:
- config
and the config file format should have this content
GF\_SECURITY\_ADMIN\_USER=admin
GF\_SECURITY\_ADMIN\_PASSWORD=changeme
GF\_USERS\_ALLOW\_SIGN\_UP=false
If you want to change the password, you have to remove this entry, otherwise the change will not take effect
\- grafana\_data:/var/lib/grafana
Grafana is preconfigured with dashboards and Prometheus as the default data source:
The Docker Host Dashboard shows key metrics for monitoring the resource usage of your server:
* Server uptime, CPU idle percent, number of CPU cores, available memory, swap and storage
* System load average graph, running and blocked by IO processes graph, interrupts graph
* CPU usage graph by mode (guest, idle, iowait, irq, nice, softirq, steal, system, user)
* Memory usage graph by distribution (used, free, buffers, cached)
* IO usage graph (read Bps, read Bps and IO time)
* Network usage graph by device (inbound Bps, Outbound Bps)
* Swap usage and activity graphs
For storage and particularly Free Storage graph, you have to specify the fstype in grafana graph request. You can find it in `grafana/provisioning/dashboards/docker_host.json`, at line 480 :
Three alert groups have been setup within the [alert.rules](https://github.com/stefanprodan/dockprom/blob/master/prometheus/alert.rules) configuration file:
You can modify the alert rules and reload them by making a HTTP POST call to Prometheus:
curl -X POST http://admin:admin@<host-ip\>:9090/-/reload
_**Monitoring services alerts**_
Trigger an alert if any of the monitoring targets (node-exporter and cAdvisor) are down for more than 30 seconds:
\- alert: monitor\_service\_down
expr: up == 0
for: 30s
labels:
severity: critical
annotations:
summary: "Monitor service non-operational"
description: "Service {{ $labels.instance }} is down."
_**Docker Host alerts**_
Trigger an alert if the Docker host CPU is under high load for more than 30 seconds:
\- alert: high\_cpu\_load
expr: node\_load1 > 1.5
for: 30s
labels:
severity: warning
annotations:
summary: "Server under high load"
description: "Docker host is under high load, the avg load 1m is at {{ $value}}. Reported by instance {{ $labels.instance }} of job {{ $labels.job }}."
Modify the load threshold based on your CPU cores.
Trigger an alert if the Docker host memory is almost full:
description: "Jenkins memory consumption is at {{ humanize $value}}."
Setup alerting
--------------
The AlertManager service is responsible for handling alerts sent by Prometheus server. AlertManager can send notifications via email, Pushover, Slack, HipChat or any other system that exposes a webhook interface. A complete list of integrations can be found [here](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/configuration).
You can view and silence notifications by accessing `http://<host-ip>:9093`.
The notification receivers can be configured in [alertmanager/config.yml](https://github.com/stefanprodan/dockprom/blob/master/alertmanager/config.yml) file.
To receive alerts via Slack you need to make a custom integration by choose _**incoming web hooks**_ in your Slack team app page. You can find more details on setting up Slack integration [here](http://www.robustperception.io/using-slack-with-the-alertmanager/).
Copy the Slack Webhook URL into the _**api\_url**_ field and specify a Slack _**channel**_.
Please replace the `user:password` part with your user and password set in the initial configuration (default: `admin:admin`).
Updating Grafana to v5.2.2
--------------------------
[In Grafana versions >= 5.1 the id of the grafana user has been changed](http://docs.grafana.org/installation/docker/#migration-from-a-previous-version-of-the-docker-container-to-5-1-or-later). Unfortunately this means that files created prior to 5.1 won’t have the correct permissions for later versions.
| Version | User | User ID |
| --- | --- | --- |
| <5.1|grafana|104|
| \>= 5.1 | grafana | 472 |
There are two possible solutions to this problem.
1. Change ownership from 104 to 472
2. Start the upgraded container as user 104
Specifying a user in docker-compose.yml
---------------------------------------
To change ownership of the files run your grafana container as root and modify the permissions.
First perform a `docker-compose down` then modify your docker-compose.yml to include the `user: root` option:
# [How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick](https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-run-tails-secure-portable-pc-usb-stick)
For those looking for the ultimate in portability and security in their computing, there's the option of running a system straight from [a USB drive](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-usb-flash-drives/) you can carry around in your pocket.
Plug this into a spare USB port on a Windows or macOS computer, and the flash drive acts as the storage and the software of the system while borrowing everything else—display, keyboard, processor, graphics—from the machine it's connected to.
Shut down the computer, pull out the USB drive, and it's as if you were never there. It's an appealing option for those who value their privacy, as well as those who spend a lot of time moving between offices.
For the purposes of this guide, we're going to take a look at [Tails](https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html). It was developed as a way to avoid surveillance, censorship, advertising, and viruses, and it comes with a stack of useful, privacy-focused software applications. It's also free to use, and all you need to provide is the USB stick.
We'll show you how to set up Tails in its default configuration, which gives you maximum anonymity and protection; every time you start it up, it's like you're starting up a new computer for the first time. If you'd prefer to have Tails remember your activity and hold onto files saved to the USB stick, that's possible too—the instructions are [here](https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/persistence/configure/index.en.html).
Setting Up Tails
Etcher will help you get Tails installed.
Photograph: Etcher via David Nield
Tails stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, which is a reference to how your activities are gone for good as soon as you unplug the USB drive from the computer it's attached to and move on. It's based on the Debian Linux distribution, and it should work just fine with most computers from the last decade or so.
To get this up and running, you need a USB stick with a minimum 8 GB of capacity. With that in hand, head to [the Tails download page](https://tails.boum.org/install/index.en.html) and select the operating system that you're using to set it up. Follow the instructions on the screen and you'll get a USB image file around 1 GB in size, which you'll then need to transfer to the flash drive itself.
Next, you need a little utility called [Etcher](https://www.balena.io/etcher/) (you'll be directed toward it by the step-by-step installation guide on the Tails website). This takes care of putting the USB image file on the USB drive, a process that should only take a few minutes—you'll get a notification when the transfer is complete. You're then ready to start using your portable PC.
When the setup has been completed, you can plug your Tails USB stick into just about any 64-bit PC with a spare port. It'll also work on Mac computers, but not those with the newest M1 series of chips (at least not yet, anyway). The computer you're connecting to should have at least 2 GB of RAM, and you should of course make sure it's not infected with any viruses or malware beforehand.
Running and Using Tails
The settings dialog for Tails.
Photograph: Tails via David Nield
Perhaps the trickiest part of the process we're outlining here is getting the computer you're plugging the USB stick into to boot from that USB stick (rather than the operating system on the hard drive, which will be the default behavior). But it's not all that difficult once you know how, and Tails has full instructions [here](https://tails.boum.org/install/win/usb/index.en.html) and [here](https://tails.boum.org/install/mac/usb/index.en.html).
On Windows, open the Start menu, hold down **Shift**, click **Power**, and then click **Restart**. Windows closes down, and you'll see a new screen. Pick **Use a device**, then select the USB drive running Tails that's plugged into the computer. On a Mac, press and hold the **Option** key while the computer is booting up, then select the USB drive with Tails on it once a list of choices shows up on the screen.
If all goes well, you should then make it into Tails. It might look a bit sparse compared to what you're used to with Windows or macOS, but that's part of its appeal. Click the drop-down menu in the top right corner to connect to a Wi-Fi network, if you need to, and you'll be able to get online through the Tor Browser. The same menu has the system settings shortcut (the icon to the lower left on the panel).
Up in the top left of the interface, you'll see a drop-down menu labeled **Applications**, where you can get at your email client, web browser, office apps, image editor, media player, and so on. In the same corner is **Places**, which gives you speedy access to all of the key areas on the system, including the document and picture folders.
It shouldn't take you too long to get up to speed on Tails and everything it can offer, especially if you've used one of the flavors of Linux before. When you're done with your super-private, super-safe computing, reboot the computer and you should find yourself back in the default operating system. Take out your USB stick, and there will be no trace that you were ever there.
* * *
More Great WIRED Stories
* 📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: [Get our newsletters](https://www.wired.com/newsletter?sourceCode=BottomStories)!
* Weighing Big Tech's [promise to Black America](https://www.wired.com/story/big-techs-promise-to-black-america/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc)
* I used [Facebook without the algorithm](https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-facebook-no-algorithm/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc), and you can too
* [How to install Android 12](https://www.wired.com/story/android-12-features-and-how-to-download/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc)—and get these great features
* Games can show us [how to govern the metaverse](https://www.wired.com/story/metaverse-video-games-virtual-reality-ethics-digital-governance/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc)
* [If clouds are](https://www.wired.com/story/if-clouds-are-made-of-water-how-do-they-stay-in-the-air/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc) made of water, how do they stay in the air?
* 👁️ Explore AI like never before with [our new database](https://www.wired.com/category/artificial-intelligence/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc)
* 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s [favorite laptops](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-laptops/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc), [keyboards](https://www.wired.com/story/top-3-mechanical-keyboards/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc), [typing alternatives](https://www.wired.com/story/best-keyboard-alternatives/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc), and [noise-canceling headphones](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-noise-canceling-headphones/?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&itm_content=footer-recirc)
# [How to sync Obsidian Notes on iOS](https://gist.github.com/agmm/ea97a3c2b5bf713567aad89672116e12)
> ⚠️ To prevent data loss make sure you understand how `rclone sync` and `rclone copy` work.
1. Download iSH from the AppStore
2. Open iSH and install Rclone with the following command:
apk add rclone
3. Create a new remote using
rclone config
4. Open your `.profile` file to add the `push` and `pull` commands
nano ~/.profile
5. Add the following lines to your profile
pull() {
rclone sync -P "REMOTE\_NAME:NOTES\_PATH" ~/Notes
}
push() {
rclone copy -P ~/Notes "REMOTE\_NAME:NOTES\_PATH"
}
6. Create a directory to mount your notes on iSH
mkdir ~/Notes
7. Mount the Obsidian folder on iOS to the iSH app. After running the following command a file selection dialog will appear, select your local Obsidian vault.
mount -t ios . ~/Notes
8. Restart the shell by quitting the iSH app or executing `exit`.
9. Run `pull` to sync the notes from your remote machine to the iOS device. Run `push` to upload the files on the iOS device to the remote machine.
Notes
-----
Note that the `pull` command will perform an `rclone sync` action instead of an `rclone copy`. An `rclone sync` will make the iOS vault identical to the remote, this means that it will delete any file on the local vault that is not present on the remote.
# [My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers – Sol Love](https://sollove.com/2013/03/03/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essential-security-for-linux-servers/)
Server security doesn’t need to be complicated. My security philosophy is simple: adopt principles that will protect you from the most frequent attack vectors, while keeping administration efficient enough that you won’t develop “security cruft”. If you use your first 5 minutes on a server wisely, I believe you can do that.
Any seasoned sysadmin can tell you that as you grow and add more servers & developers, user administration inevitably becomes a burden. Maintaining conventional access grants in the environment of a fast growing startup is an uphill battle – you’re bound to end up with stale passwords, abandoned intern accounts, and a myriad of “I have sudo access to Server A, but not Server B” issues. There are account sync tools to help mitigate this pain, but IMHO the incremental benefit isn’t worth the time nor the security downsides. Simplicity is the heart of good security.
Our servers are configured with two accounts: root and deploy. The deploy user has sudo access via an arbitrarily long password and is the account that developers log into. Developers log in with their public keys, not passwords, so administration is as simple as keeping the_authorized\_keys_file up-to-date across servers. Root login over ssh is disabled, and the deploy user can only log in from our office IP block.
The downside to our approach is that if an authorized\_keys file gets clobbered or mis-permissioned, I need to log into the remote terminal to fix it (Linode offers something called Lish, which runs in the browser). If you take appropriate caution, you shouldn’t need to do this.
_Note: I’m not advocating this as the most secure approach – just that it balances security and management simplicity for our small team. From my experience, most security breaches are caused either by insufficient security procedures or sufficient procedures poorly maintained._
**Let’s Get Started**
Our box is freshly hatched, virgin pixels at the prompt. I favor Ubuntu; if you use another version of linux, your commands may vary. Five minutes to go:
passwd
Change the root password to something long and complex. You won’t need to remember it, just store it somewhere secure – this password will only be needed if you lose the ability to log in over ssh or lose your sudo password.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
The above gets us started on the right foot.
**Install Fail2ban**
apt-get install fail2ban
[Fail2ban](http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)is a daemon that monitors login attempts to a server and blocks suspicious activity as it occurs. It’s well configured out of the box.
Now, let’s set up your login user. Feel free to name the user something besides ‘deploy’, it’s just a convention we use:
useradd deploy
mkdir /home/deploy
mkdir /home/deploy/.ssh
chmod 700 /home/deploy/.ssh
**Require public key authentication**
The days of passwords are over. You’ll enhance security and ease of use in one fell swoop by ditching those passwords and employing[public key authentication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography)for your user accounts.
vim /home/deploy/.ssh/authorized_keys
Add the contents of the id\_rsa.pub on your local machine and any other public keys that you want to have access to this server to this file.
chmod 400 /home/deploy/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown deploy:deploy /home/deploy -R
**Test The New User & Enable Sudo**
Now test your new account logging into your new server with the deploy user (keep the terminal window with the root login open). If you’re successful, switch back to the terminal with the root user active and set a sudo password for your login user:
passwd deploy
Set a complex password – you can either store it somewhere secure or make it something memorable to the team. This is the password you’ll use to sudo.
visudo
Comment all existing user/group grant lines and add:
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
deploy ALL=(ALL) ALL
The above grants sudo access to the deploy user when they enter the proper password.
**Lock Down SSH**
Configure ssh to prevent password & root logins and lock ssh to particular IPs:
vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Add these lines to the file, inserting the ip address from where you will be connecting:
No secure server is complete without a firewall. Ubuntu provides ufw, which makes firewall management easy. Run:
ufw allow from {your-ip} to any port 22
ufw allow 80
ufw allow 443
ufw enable
This sets up a basic firewall and configures the server to accept traffic over port 80 and 443. You may wish to add more ports depending on what your server is going to do.
**Enable Automatic Security Updates**
I’ve gotten into the_apt-get update/upgrade_habit over the years, but with a dozen servers, I found that servers I logged into less frequently weren’t staying as fresh. Especially with load-balanced machines, it’s important that they all stay up to date. Automated security updates scare me somewhat, but not as badly as unpatched security holes.
apt-get install unattended-upgrades
vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic
Update the file to look like this:
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";
One more config file to edit:
vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
Update the file to look like below. You should probably keep updates disabled and stick with security updates only:
Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
"Ubuntu lucid-security";
// "Ubuntu lucid-updates";
};
**Install Logwatch To Keep An Eye On Things**
[Logwatch](http://linux.die.net/man/8/logwatch)is a daemon that monitors your logs and emails them to you. This is useful for tracking and detecting intrusion. If someone were to access your server, the logs that are emailed to you will be helpful in determining what happened and when – as the logs on your server might have been compromised.
apt-get install logwatch
vim /etc/cron.daily/00logwatch
add this line:
/usr/sbin/logwatch --output mail --mailto test@gmail.com --detail high
**All Done!**
I think we’re at a solid place now. In just a few minutes, we’ve locked down a server and set up a level of security that should repel most attacks while being easy to maintain. At the end of the day, it’s almost always user error that causes break-ins, so make sure you keep those passwords long and safe!
I’d love to hear your feedback on this approach! Feel free to discuss on[Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316093)or[follow me on Twitter](http://twitter.com/plusbryan).
**Update**
There’s a great discussion happening over at[Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316093). Thanks for all the good ideas and helpful advice! As our infrastructure grows, I definitely plan on checking out Puppet or Chef – they sound like great tools for simplifying multi-server infrastructure management. If you’re on Linode like us, the above can be accomplished via StackScripts as well.
* [How does Fail2ban solve this?](https://arvind.io/#solution)
* [Creating a Fail2ban jail for an exposed service](https://arvind.io/#example)
What this guide is and isn't
----------------------------
Fail2ban is a software application that protects you from brute-force attacks.[1](https://arvind.io/#user-content-fn-1)
The most common use-case is to protect your server’s publicly exposed SSH service from being an easy target.[2](https://arvind.io/#user-content-fn-2) If that is your only goal, you might find it quicker to follow the steps from [this article by Linode](https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/how-to-use-fail2ban-for-ssh-brute-force-protection/) for example.
In this guide however, we are going to dive a bit deeper. We are going to learn how Fail2ban works and then use that knowledge to protect any arbitrary service of our choosing.
This means we won’t be limited by only what Fail2ban supports out-of-the-box, and by the time you’re done with this guide, you should be able to configure Fail2ban yourself to protect any service that you desire, including SSH.
The challenges involved
-----------------------
The need to expose your server to the outside world can be unavoidable at times.
Maybe you’re running a game server for some non-tech savvy friends; maybe you self-host a website on your old desktop and can’t afford a CDN; maybe you want to share your media server with your grandparents without spending an entire evening trying to explain what a VPN is.
Whatever the case may be, any exposed service has the following main issues:
1. There could be a vulnerability in the service which can then be exploited by an attacker. This vulnerability might not even be documented yet.[3](https://arvind.io/#user-content-fn-3)
2. There is a security risk. For a service protected by a password or key, attackers might repeatedly attempt to gain access and could eventually succeed if the security is poor or if they get enough attempts.[4](https://arvind.io/#user-content-fn-4)
3. Processing the traffic from an attacker wastes network and CPU resources. With enough traffic, there is a risk of a [DoS attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack).
Points numbered 2 and 3 are our focus here. We want a solution that prevents a DoS attack, thereby also slowing down a brute force attack. There are some general pitfalls associated with what we are trying to do:
* Attempting to block malicious traffic from attackers in an over-aggressive manner might end up blocking legitimate traffic from genuine users (including yourself).
* If we only block traffic that show patterns of failed attempts to gain access, a smart attacker could still spam normal traffic unrelated to authorization attempts (such as connect/disconnect events) and trigger a DoS attack.
##### Your service itself needs to have reasonable security either built-in, or configured. Fail2ban is not a substitute for good security practices and at best will only compliment it. If your service is secured with a weak passphrase for example, Fail2ban will not help.
How does Fail2ban solve this?
-----------------------------
Fail2ban monitors application logs and checks each incoming log entry against a list of patterns. You can then tell Fail2ban after how many pattern matches in a specific interval of time should it ban the remote source by adding a temporary firewall rule.
When we break it down, the components are as such:
1. The application log. This can be a log file or systemd journal that is written to in real-time. The logs must include a timestamp, the remote IP and some indicator that the traffic might be undesirable.
2. A list of patterns that identify undesirable traffic. This is known as a filter. These are regular expression rules that each log entry will be checked against.
3. The maximum number of attempts allowed; the time interval within which if those many attempts are found, the remote source is identified as an attacker and blocked; and the ban duration, i.e. for how long an attacker is blocked.
These components together represent a jail. For each service that we want to protect, we have to write a jail configuration.
##### Fail2ban has some pre-written jail configurations for popular services, and there is a chance that the service you are trying to protect might be among them. Read the default [jail.conf](https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban/blob/master/config/jail.conf) file to find your service and to also learn more about many other components you can configure (choosing how the application log is parsed, defining custom actions such as sending a mail when an attacker is identified, etc.) that we won’t be visiting in this guide.
Creating a Fail2ban jail for an exposed service
-----------------------------------------------
Let’s try to apply what we learnt with a real example. Assume we have a self-hosted website being served by [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/).
##### Remember, this is an example and you are not limited to Caddy. This should work even if you are using Apache, lighttpd, nginx etc. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a web server. You should be able to follow this guide to protect any public facing service as long as you have the three components listed in the previous section of this guide.
Make sure Fail2ban is installed. Check your preferred package manager for an install candidate.
On Debian based distros (including Ubuntu), run `sudo apt install fail2ban`.
On Arch based distros, run `sudo pacman -S fail2ban`.
Start and enable the systemd service that should now be available with `sudo systemctl start fail2ban` and `sudo systemctl enable fail2ban`.
On other operating systems, you can follow the [installation steps on their repository](https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban#installation).
The **first component** we need is our application log. For my setup, I can find that at `/var/log/caddy/access.log`. Let’s take a look at it to discover items of interest. I’ll highlight any lines that stand out to me.
A common attack pattern seems to be to spam requests for invalid web pages. Notice the 404 status code in the highlighted lines and also that we can see the IP address for each request.
The **second component** is our filter. We need a list of regex patterns that will be used to check for matches in our application log. Let’s create a new file at `/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/caddy404.conf` with the following contents:
[Definition]
failregex = ^ <HOST> \- \- \".+\" 404 \d+$
In our case, just this one regex pattern should do. The flavor of regex here is Python. [Regex101](https://regex101.com/) is a great tool to quickly write and test regular expressions in any flavor. Refer to [Fail2ban’s dev docs on writing filters](https://fail2ban.readthedocs.io/en/latest/filters.html#regular-expressions) to understand more about special words like `<HOST>` and the rules behind writing filters.
Fail2ban comes with `fail2ban-regex` which is a handy tool to quickly check if our filter will work correctly. We can test the filter we made against our application log like so:
Missed line(s): too many to print. Use --print-all-missed to print all 1656 lines
Looks like our filter is accurately matching entries. You can use the `-l heavydebug` flag to debug in more detail and see what is being matched per record.
The **third component** involves deciding the thresholds around blocking an IP address. The Fail2ban documentation says that a host is banned for `bantime` seconds if it has generated `maxretry` during the last `findtime` seconds. These are numerical values that we have to set.
Sending a request that results in a 404 status code isn’t necessarily malicious. Dead links in your application, outdated search engine records and a user making a typo are examples of legitimate traffic that we don’t want to punish. We need to find a balance past which we can confidently say without a doubt that a source is sending bad requests excessively often. These values are going to be subjective and different people might find different thresholds that work for them, but here are the values that I have decided on:
bantime = 1440m
maxretry = 50
findtime = 30
This means that if a source tries to access an invalid page more than fifty times in half a minute, they will be blocked for one day.
**Putting all our components together**, we should now be able to write our jail configuration. Edit `/etc/fail2ban/jail.local` (if that file doesn’t exist, you might have to create one by copying `/etc/fail2ban/jail.conf`) and add the following section at the end:
[caddy404]
enabled = true
port = https
filter = caddy404
logpath = /var/log/caddy/access.log
backend = auto
bantime = 360m
maxretry = 50
findtime = 30
Reload Fail2ban to apply the new configuration:
$ fail2ban-client reload
OK
Now you should be able to see the newly added jail alongside any existing ones:
$ fail2ban-client status
Status
|- Number of jail: 2
`- Jail list: caddy404, sshd
Once your jail starts to block IP addresses, you can see them as such:
$ fail2ban-client status caddy404
Status for the jail: caddy404
|- Filter
| |- Currently failed: 0
| |- Total failed: 219
| `- File list: /var/log/caddy/access.log
`- Actions
|- Currently banned: 3
|- Total banned: 3
`- Banned IP list: 10.47.0.2 157.45.202.105 157.45.191.241
That’s it! Fail2ban will keep listening to incoming logs in the background and keep your system protected from being flooded by bad requests.
While your use-case will likely be different, if you’ve followed this guide to the end, I hope that you were able to fit the same methodology to work for you. Let me know about your experience by leaving a comment below.
# [Les 17 erreurs de management à ne pas commettre](https://www.cadremploi.fr/editorial/conseils/conseils-carriere/detail/article/promu-manager-les-5-erreurs-a-ne-pas-faire.html?utm_source=cadremploi&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=push_edito&een=636947099d7816eaa7d5c85cdd54fe6d&seen=2)
Jouer au petit chef
-------------------
Ce n’est pas parce que vous êtes en charge du management de l’équipe que vous avez toute autorité sur les collaborateurs. Pratiquer l**’autorité, le flicage et la sanction** constitue une **erreur de management** car ce type de management engendre la peur -de mal faire-, la frustration -de n’avoir aucune marge de manœuvre- et l’absence de prise d’initiative.
Faire sentir le rapport hiérarchique entre vous et les collaborateurs est le meilleur moyen de **créer de la défiance et du désengagement**.
Imposer sa vision et ses idées
------------------------------
En tant que manager, vous devez donner des orientations au travail de l’équipe : les objectifs à atteindre, les moyens à disposition, les organisations possibles au sein de l’équipe.
Toutefois, **donner une direction ne signifie pas imposer ses idées**. Tomber dans ce travers exclut toute forme d’intelligence collective et rend difficile l’adhésion des collaborateurs.
Ne pas écouter ses équipes
--------------------------
L'une des **erreurs de management à ne pas commettre** est de ne pas écouter ses équipes.
Un manager doit êtreà l’écoute des attentes et des motivations des collaborateurs. Vous devez ainsi prendre en compte les remarques qu’ils peuvent émettre durant un projet ou au terme de celui-ci. Ainsi, vous les valoriserez et pourrez trouver des axes d’amélioration pour les projets futurs. Vous êtes gagnant sur tous les plans : humain et économique.
Considérer les collaborateurs comme des exécutants
Il n’y a pas d’un côté celui qui décide -vous-, et de l’autre ceux qui font. Traiter les collaborateurs comme des machines les incite à se désinvestir. Au contraire, faites preuve d’intelligence relationnelle, misez sur les atouts de chacun pour faire évoluer l’équipe. En gommant le rapport hiérarchique, vous créez de la confiance, de l’implication et de la prise d’autonomie.
Diviser pour mieux régner
-------------------------
Certains mauvais managers considèrent que les relations conflictuelles au sein de leur équipe favorisent leur position hégémonique. Si cette tactique peut fonctionner sur le court terme, elle est inefficace à long terme ; la **mauvaise ambiance** ayant généralement des **répercussions négatives sur la qualité du travail**.
Fermer les yeux sur les conflits
--------------------------------
A l’inverse, une autre erreur de management serait de faire l’autruche face à des situations conflictuelles au sein de son équipe. Un manager doit en effet veiller à ce que les collaborateurs travaillent correctement ensemble dans une ambiance de travail saine et sereine.
En cas de [conflits au travail](https://www.cadremploi.fr/editorial/conseils/conseils-carriere/detail/article/gerer-un-conflit-au-bureau-les-plus-mauvaises-idees-des-managers.html), il est de la responsabilité du manager de **réguler, d’arbitrer** et de prendre des décisions.
Faire du favoritisme
--------------------
**Faire du favoritisme peut nuire à votre management**. Certes vous êtes humain et il est possible que vous ayez plus d’affinités avec certains collaborateurs plutôt que d’autres.
Toutefois, **vos décisions de manager doivent être justes et objectives**. Dans le cas contraire, vous risquez de **perdre en légitimité**, d’affecter la confiance des collaborateurs et de générer des tensions au sein de l’équipe.
Manager de façon uniforme
-------------------------
Pour être juste, vous décidez de traiter tous les collaborateurs à la même enseigne.
Erreur : en fonction des profils, des personnalités, des parcours et des expériences, chacun a des attentes différentes. Certains auront par exemple besoin d’un fort accompagnement quand d’autres réclameront plus d’autonomie. Il est conseillé d'adapter son management à chaque profil pour ne pas faire d'erreur.
S’affranchir des règles de vie au travail
-----------------------------------------
Horaires, tenue vestimentaire, langage : ce n’est pas parce que vous êtes manager que vous êtes dispensé de respecter les règles qui s’imposent à l’équipe.
Au contraire : c’est vous qui donnez le ton. Sur ces sujets, soyez irréprochable !
Faire cavalier seul
-------------------
Vous ne voulez pas déléguer car vous êtes certain de mieux faire le travail seul ? Face à la direction, vous défendez davantage vos intérêts personnels ? Vous vous attribuez les réussites de votre équipe ? Vous vous faites briller en écrasant vos collaborateurs ou en minimisant leur travail ? Dans ce cas, vous n’êtes pas fait pour être manager. Car bien manager, c’est [savoir déléguer](https://www.cadremploi.fr/editorial/conseils/conseils-carriere/detail/article/la-methode-pour-deleguer-au-travail.html) efficacement, valoriser l’équipe et penser collectif.
Déléguer sans accompagner ni contrôler
--------------------------------------
Dans l’excès inverse, une autre erreur de management consiste à tout déléguer sans accompagner, en laissant l’équipe en roue libre. Par exemple refiler les «patates chaudes» -ces dossiers ultra-sensibles que personne ne veut- ou affecter des missions sans objectif précis ni accompagnement lors de la réalisation.
Fixer de faux objectifs
-----------------------
Mal définis, ambigus, irréalistes : si vous fixez des objectifs à votre équipe, veillez à ce qu’ils soient des [objectifs SMART](https://www.cadremploi.fr/editorial/conseils/conseils-carriere/comment-se-fixer-des-objectifs-smart). Cela nécessite une réflexion en amont de votre part : vision, planification, instauration de KPIs, reporting. En l’absence de directives claires, impossible pour les collaborateurs d’avancer correctement.
Faire preuve d’abus de pouvoir
------------------------------
Si vous pensez que votre posture de manager vous autorise toutes sortes de pratiques pour parvenir à vos fins, vous avez tort. Chantage, rétention d’informations, pratiques discriminantes : attention, car ces erreurs de management peuvent vous coûter cher.
Rejeter la faute sur les collaborateurs
---------------------------------------
Face à un échec ou un problème, le manager doit **assumer la responsabilité pour son équipe**. Ne pas reconnaître ses propres erreurs ou faire porter le chapeau à son équipe sont des fautes de management qui ôtent toute légitimité au manager.
Ne pas féliciter ses collaborateurs
-----------------------------------
Autre erreur de management classique : ne pas valoriser ses équipes. Vos collaborateurs ont fait du bon travail ? Dites-leur ! Cette communication s’avère essentielle pour motiver vos collaborateurs et leur donner envie d’atteindre des sommets. Un bon manager doit savoir dire quand il est insatisfait, mais il doit égalementsavoir féliciter ses équipeslorsque les objectifs ont été atteints avec brio.
Etre une passoire émotionnelle
------------------------------
Vous êtes de mauvaise humeur, triste, en colère, stressé ? Même si vous subissez une très forte pression de la part de la direction, ne transmettez pas vos émotions négatives à l’équipe. **Apprenez à maîtriser votre ressenti émotionnel** pour continuer à porter et motiver les collaborateurs.
Pour autant, cela ne signifie pas d’être dans la représentation permanente. Vous avez le droit de dire à vos collaborateurs «Excusez-moi mais je suis en petite forme aujourd’hui». Reconnaître ses faiblesses en tant que manager permet d’instaurer un rapport de confiance et d’égalité avec son équipe. A vous de trouver le juste milieu.
Refuser le changement
---------------------
**La souplesse et l’adaptabilité sont des qualités majeures pour réussir en management**. Et même si la recette que vous appliquez aujourd’hui fonctionne bien, ce serait une erreur de management que de vouloir rester dans l’immobilisme.
Car de fait, c’est impossible : un collaborateur qui change de poste, un concurrent qui nécessite de moderniser ses pratiques, de nouvelles compétences à intégrer, des urgences à gérer.
L’évolution est inévitable : à vous d’impulser la bonne dose d’innovation et d’agilité pour permettre à l’équipe de s’adapter.
Your employees’ relationships with their work environment are just as meaningful as their home environment when it comes to mental health. Improving the work environment means improving productivity, retention, and growth — it’s as simple as that.
So, let’s optimize the corporate mission statement and revitalize the communal ethos. Let’s open communication channels of transparent optimism and patience.
Just kidding.
If you try searching for “improving company culture,” you are going to get plenty of buzz words and empty sentences. Most advice columnists in the corporate sphere offer the appropriate advice, but because it lacks context, it also lacks focus and application.
Let’s look at the two buzzword sentences above — which, unfortunately, are quite common.
> Let’s optimize the corporate mission statement and revitalize the communal ethos.
This would seem like a great action to take as a company. You can use branding for marketing your understanding of social issues. However, your employees won’t buy into the branding change.
An ‘ethos’ isn’t actionable. A mission statement isn’t relevant. Instead, you need to purposefully choose actions that, on a first-order, affect your employees.
> Let’s open communication channels of transparent optimism and patience.
What does something like this even mean?
Just because management says, “my door is always open,” it doesn’t create goodwill if the employees don’t feel the change and don’t feel the safety of the open-door policy. Instead, you need to purposefully choose _actions_ that, on a first-order, affect your employees.
A little repetitive? Maybe, but most changes are easy when they are in words only. However, suppose you are genuinely looking to make a difference to the employees of your firm. In that case, you need to invest in systematic alterations that affect the employees and management.
To better understand what these systematic alterations could and need to be, let’s look at what they _aren’t_ first.
What is and what isn’t a company culture
----------------------------------------
You don’t need to live in Silicon Valley to know about the fantastic benefits that await employees at tech firms in the Bay Area. They are offered free lunches, gaming machines, sleeping areas, pet health care, and who knows what. But are these real?
In other words, are these [perks](https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5935-improve-company-culture.html) a reflection of the morals and values of management, or are they a way to appease the masses with the intent of distracting them from the other unhealthy practices?
If you are going to make changes to create a healthy and sustainable work environment, you need to understand the difference between perks and company culture.
A [perk](https://www.welcoa.org/blog/10-ways-improve-culture-workplace/) is an object of instant gratification. It is something that is welcome but doesn’t necessarily reflect the realities of the workplace experience. Regardless of whether the employees use the perk, they are still subject to the oversight of company culture through management.
Just as the examples show, company culture should not and cannot be attached to physical comforts. Instead, company culture is a value placed on the employee by bosses.
So, let’s look at it another way. When you disappoint a spouse, relative, child, or friend, what do you do? Does buying them an expensive dinner or gift make the hurt disappear? Be honest.
Gifts to appease lack authenticity because they have no connection to the actual issue. Regardless of who was right or wrong, apologizing for the error is a selfless act that costs nothing. Yet, most people in positions of power fail to achieve humility and would rather spend corporate dollars.
Company culture isn’t a thing, but rather it is an _attitude_. If this is still a little esoteric, that’s okay. But to dig deeper, let’s look at what your company should not look like.
How do you identify an unhealthy workplace?
-------------------------------------------
You might be asking yourself whether you oversee or work in an unhealthy environment. If you don’t know, it could be one of two options.
First, it could mean that your level or position in the firm is healthy. However, this isn’t and shouldn’t be representative of those above or below you. Second, it could mean that you are the unhealthy one. No one ever wants to hear that, but sometimes it is the reality.
If you don’t have an answer and want to better understand your employees’ environmental health, all you need to do is ask. Will it be uncomfortable? Maybe. Will it be useful? Absolutely.
Here are a few questions to ask to determine whether other parts of your business are emotionally and [mentally healthy](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/workplace-dynamics):
* Do your employees or colleagues experience any verbal abuse, regardless of how slight?
* Does your firm have problems communicating clearly and effectively?
* Are there imbalanced workloads between employees or departments?
* Do your employees or colleagues experience overly poor moods often?
If you or your coworkers can answer yes to more than one of these questions, you may have a toxic working environment. Toxic working environments lead to significant turnover, empty positions, poor performance, acting out, lack of cooperation and communication, and a general decline in business growth.
So, what do you do about it, and how do you improve your company culture?
The standard practices to improve the corporate environment
The standard practices taken to improve a work environment are actions necessary to solve personal life crises, just recast for the work environment.
Why does this work? Your daily routine relies on [interpersonal relationships](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-schmuck-in-your-office/201705/understanding-difficult-workplace-relationships-1). Work is no exception. Productivity depends on interpersonal communication and trust in the communal wellbeing of the office.
If you’ve ever been to the doctor and they tell you to lose weight, do they accept your answer when you say that you aren’t working out, but you are “optimizing your inner values on physical movement?” Your doctor will probably tell you that words don’t matter when the numbers affect your life expectancy.
So, when you read the four steps below, take to heart the following advice. Don’t expect your employees to do all the actual work to change company culture. Change happens when management makes it happen amongst themselves.
1\. Listen
----------
Don’t decide what needs to change for your employees. If you start making alterations about actions without listening to the people involved, you’ve already lost. Instead, listen to what your employees need via any means necessary, usually [collaboratively](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/relationships-intimate-and-more/202111/fill-your-work-life-jar-what-matters-most-relationships).
You could set up a confidential mailbox, have group sessions, hire an HR consultant to create surveys, or start a suggestion box. The method doesn’t matter. The point is to gather research on what needs to change. Then, let your employees make all the hard choices for you.
2\. Decide
----------
The worst thing you could do is not to decide. A lack of a decision is a decision to _not_ care about the process. Your employees and colleagues will notice this and make a judgment based on this lack of action.
Instead, make informed decisions driven by the voices of the staff. However, your decision isn’t just to make a choice. Your decision is to live the choice and follow through via daily actions.
3\. Act
-------
If you don’t live the company culture that your employees want, you are offering empty promises that won’t change the nature of your corporate stagnation.
You’ve listened and decided. Now you need to change the way management interacts and oversees the staff based on the feedback given. Here are a few actions that might arise.
> You need to identify individuals that are creating a toxic work environment.
**Solution:** Fire them or get them business counseling. Either way, your lack of action will show that you care about their harmful attitudes more than the rest of the company.
> You need to increase transparency about certain corporate stances or practices.
**Solution:** Use this moment as a chance to reflect on those actions. Make the information available but provide avenues for alternatives in future instances. Make this a moment where past actions don’t prescribe future choices.
> You need to increase open communication from the bottom up.
**Solution:** No corporate solution ever happens from the bottom up. If you need staffers to communicate more, you need management to start the conversation. Have management recognize what staff is doing on a day-to-day basis, not once a year.
Recognize work and devotion and appreciate the individual. If you appear interested in their work, they will open and communicate.
> You need to increase diversity, acceptance, and happiness.
**Solution:** Hire people with different skillsets and place them in groups where everyone learns and grows as a unit. Pay your employees more than your competitors. Don’t give them perks but use the money for their salaries, paid time off, or better health insurance. Commit to building a community that is representative of the world culture and not a monoculture.
Finally, pay less attention to the bottom line and more to the bottom rung. Who is the lowest paid person in your company? Why are they the lowest paid person? What can you do to change that?
4\. Repeat
----------
Keep this cycle going. Show that you aren’t committing to change once, but rather you are committing to being better than you were yesterday. Change takes time, commitment, and determination. You may make the wrong choices. Own them and rework them until they are corrected.
Once you learn to live the change you seek, you will find your footing to grow your company beyond what it is today. All you need to do is to keep listening and learning from the perspective of your employees and colleagues.
# Désert rural. La grande ruée vers les maisons italiennes à 1euro
Désert rural.
Publié le 26/09/2021 - 11:58
[](https://www.courrierinternational.com/sites/ci_master/files/styles/image_original_1280/public/assets/images/capture_village.jpg?itok=QgvR5rTc)
Une vue du centre historique de Sambuca di Sicilia, en Italie, commune qui propose des maisons à 1 euro.Photo prise en juillet 2019. **PHOTO / ANDREA SAVORANI NERI / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP**
De la Sicile aux Marches, en passant par les Pouilles et la Toscane, le modèle des maisons vendues aux enchères à partir de 1euro pour revitaliser les villages dépeuplés a fait des émules en Italie. _IlVenerdì_est allé enquêter sur cephénomène.
Le changement promet d’être radical. De la jeune et hyperdynamique San Francisco, berceau de la Silicon Valley, à Cantiano, dans la province de Pesaro et Urbino. Une commune dans le centre de l’Italie, qui compte six restaurants, un kiosque à journaux et, au dernier recensement officiel, 2112 âmes pour un âge moyen de 52,2ans. Côté hyperdynamisme, au moins, il faudra faire quelquesconcessions.
Il en aurait toutefois fallu davantage pour décourager Miranda Rose Wood, architecte paysagiste californienne de 36ans. Elle s’est donnée six mois pour déménager toutes ses affaires dans ce petit village des Marches où – si la situation sanitaire le permet – elle élira également bientôt domicile. Pour une somme symbolique, la citoyenne américaine s’est adjugé l’une des trois maisons mises en vente par les autorités municipales de Cantiano. Il s’agit de propriétés privées laissées à l’abandon, que la mairie a proposé à des gens disposés à y vivre et à les remettre en état. Mise à prix:1euro.
_“L’idée a mûri à la fin de 2019. Nous devions faire quelque chose pour remédier au dépeuplement du centre bourg. Nous avons donc cherché une solution qui arrange aussi bien les propriétaires d’un bien immobilier délaissé dont l’entretien ne représente plus qu’un poids financier, que des gens à la recherche d’un nouveau modèle résidentiel”,_ explique le maire, AlessandroPiccini.
> _Nous avons commencé par trois maisons, mais l’opération a eu un tel retentissement dans le monde entier que nous avons reçu près de 5000 demandes d’informations et dossiers de candidature. Et les trois bâtisses ont été cédées à desétrangers.”_
Cantiano n’est que l’une des dizaines de communes qui, depuis quelques années, ont choisi d’offrir des maisons (presque) gratuitement afin d’enrayer la désertification du centre des petits villages. Sur le site Case a 1euro – une plateforme informelle regroupant ces initiatives –, on dénombre
La hausse du nombre de résidences secondaires sur une partie du littoral breton inquiète. Les élus plaident pour davantage d’interventionnisme. Certains proposent d’instaurer un statut de résident.
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Son projet divise autant qu’il agace en Bretagne. Peu importe. Nil Caouissin, conseiller régional d’opposition élu sur la liste rassemblant écologistes et militants autonomistes de l’Union démocratique bretonne (UDB), dont il a été porte-parole, réitère son plaidoyer en faveur d’un statut de résident. Selon ce trentenaire, c’est le seul moyen d’enrayer un marché immobilier devenu _«incontrôlable»,_ notamment sur le littoral breton.
L’élu propose d’autoriser l’acquisition de biens seulement à des personnes habitant depuis plus d’un an sur le territoire concerné par le dispositif. _«Nous avons besoin d’une politique ambitieuse pour permettre de vivre à l’année là où on le souhaite en Bretagne,_ insiste ce professeur d’histoire-géographie_. Aujourd’hui, plus de 250000résidences secondaires sont vides les trois quarts de l’année quand nombre de jeunes ménages peinent à acheter et même à louer un bien.»_
Lire aussi [Les prix de l’immobilier flambent dans les stations balnéaires](https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2021/07/09/les-prix-de-l-immobilier-flambent-dans-les-stations-balneaires_6087741_3234.html)
Emise lors de la placide campagne pour les élections régionales de juin, cette proposition a été contestée par la quasi-totalité des candidats, qui l’ont estimée inconstitutionnelle et inefficace. Elle a néanmoins permis d’alerter sur les difficultés à se loger sur les bords de la péninsule, où les maisons de vacances se multiplient. D’après l’Insee, le nombre des résidences secondaires en Bretagne aurait crû d’un tiers entre 1990 et 2015 et représenterait 13,8% du parc immobilier régional.
«Rareté des biens »
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_«La part du logement secondaire monte à 20% sur le littoral. On constate de grands écarts selon les zones»_, précise Sébastien Pons, directeur régional adjoint de l’Insee Bretagne. Ainsi, à Arzon, commune cossue située dans le golfe du Morbihan, les volets de huit maisons sur dix restent fermés l’hiver. Dans des dizaines d’autres stations balnéaires comme celles-là, la population ne cesse de vieillir, tandis que les classes des écoles ferment.
> Chez les Bretons incapables d’acheter sur les côtes et las de voir leurs communes hiberner, le mécontentement s’amplifie
Depuis qu’a éclaté la pandémie de Covid-19, les rares biens en vente sur ces territoires se négocient de plus en plus chèrement et de plus en plus vite. _«Nous ne constatons cependant pas d’invasion de Parisiens comme certains voudraient le faire croire. L’année passée, un logement de bord de mer sur quatre était acheté par un acquéreur vivant hors de Bretagne»_, relativise Vincent Lemée, notaire à Rennes et délégué à la communication de la chambre régionale des notaires. _«La rareté des biens a effectivement tiré leurs valeurs vers le haut. Si on compare aux autres zones littorales du pays comme les bassins méditerranéen ou bordelais, le marché breton observe un rééquilibrage de prix.»_
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Acheteurs venus d’Ile-de-France après le confinement et locaux en quête d’un logement plus grand ou avec un jardin provoquent hausse des prix et pénurie de biens.
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_«Aujourd’hui, à Marseille, le marché immobilier se porte plus que bien.»_ En cette rentrée, la présidente de la chambre des notaires des Bouches-du-Rhône, Gisèle Laveissière, affiche un soulagement teinté d’étonnement. Selon les chiffres arrêtés au 30juin, le volume des actes de ventes de logements, neuf et ancien confondus, sur douze mois glissants, a augmenté de 13% dans le département, comparé à 2019. Et les projections sur la fin d’année sont prometteuses. Les prix, eux, grimpent à l’unisson.
A Marseille, l’augmentation globale du mètre carré représente 6% dans l’ancien et 7,2% pour le neuf. Mais des quartiers traditionnellement prisés ou en pleine gentrification connaissent des hausses à deux chiffres. Bompard et Endoume (+13%), perles littorales du 7earrondissement, mais aussi le secteur plus excentré de La Fourragère (+ 19,5%) figurent dans la première catégorie. Les Chutes-Lavies (+ 18%) en bordure du parc Longchamp (4e) proche de l’hypercentre, ou L’Estaque et son ambiance de petit port (+ 18,7%), dans la seconde.
Lire aussi Article réservé à nos abonnés [Autour de Vendôme, l’immobilier flambe et frustre les «enfants du pays»](https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2021/09/26/autour-de-vendome-l-immobilier-flambe-et-frustre-les-enfants-du-pays_6096051_3234.html)
_«Marseille, c’est la traduction flagrante des nouveaux comportements après la crise sanitaire»_, estime Pierre-Armand Samama. Pour ce notaire marseillais, l’achat immobilier reste une valeur refuge financière, mais se double d’une _«valeur refuge sanitaire»_. _«Le fait d’être confiné s’est traduit par un besoin d’avoir plus d’espace, un extérieur, ou simplement de changer de lieu»_, explique-t-il.
_«__A l’été 2020, beaucoup de gens sont venus passer leurs vacances dans le Sud-Est. Et ils ont voulu rester. Marseille a la cote et rattrape son retard sur des villes comme Lyon, Bordeaux ou Nantes…»_, se projette Gisèle Laveissière.
«La Sainte-Trinité, c’est étage élevé, terrasse, vue sur mer»
Dans sa base de données, la chambre a repéré 7,3% d’acheteurs franciliens en un an. _«__Avant 2019, ils n’étaient même pas visibles__»_, souligne la présidente des notaires. Des étrangers apparaissent aussi: sur la même période, ils signent 1,4% des actes d’achats à Marseille. Résultat_, «un marché tendu, une pénurie de biens et des ventes sans négociations, voire avec des surenchères»,_ conclut Pierre-Armand Samama.
Derrière son élégant bureau vintage, Anne-Patricia Lesage confirme l’emballement. Terrasses en ville, l’agence qu’elle a cofondée en2008 et qui traite exclusivement les biens avec extérieur, est assaillie. _«On se retrouve pile-poil dans ce que les gens cherchent__»_, constate-t-elle. _«La Sainte-Trinité, c’est étage élevé, terrasse, vue sur mer»_, poursuit l’agente immobilière. Quelques heures plus tôt, un appartement de 65m2 dans les résidences Pouillon, qui surplombent le Vieux-Port est parti à 10000euros du m2. Télétravail oblige, la présence d’un _«bureau séparé»_ devient essentielle. Plus rarement, les acheteurs s’enquièrent du raccordement à la fibre.
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