The Summer From Hell
I used to enjoy summer, it was actually my favorite season. Nowadays, it’s a crime; too many people, too many crowds, too many tourists. Moving to Washington D.C. was a blunder, a forced error. As Idaho was just as extractive. For there, it was the landlords, while here, it’s everything. Air, tolls, housing, and cars as a property tax. Extortion exists in all domains. Land, air, sea, and space within the DMV area.
The expenses aren’t even logical. For most of these areas are unsafe, polluted, cramped, and congested. It’s simply a structure of corporate pillaging. The tolls are private, the red light cameras are private, the buildings are private, everything is private with the exception of your privacy and individual sovereignty. That is always made public and forcibly placed up for sale.
It is a psycho city, a petty arrangement of optical illusions whereupon optics, presentation, and preformativeness are the default and primarily enforced culture. Failure to perform or conform is usually punished via ostracism, followed by a quiet economic suffocation.
Now that the facts of the DMV landscape have been laid bare. It is time to explain the events of April. A month where I came upon the realization that I’d been assaulted. Not by a person, or really a thing, but a system. The DoD CIO informed the world at a conference that the RMF process was to be “blown up” in the not so distant future. Basically meaning that the Pentagon as an organization was developing a new variant of the GBU-57, to metaphorically punch through the floor of my economic stability, alongside that of thousands of others. Whether these words left Katherine’s lips or that of her future replacement, ultimately did not matter. As at an institutional level, A.I. creeping into the RMF process and other such processes at some point, was inevitable. My career field just happened to be an easy and testable target of an already growing development.
When I reached out to her directly, I presented a timeframe of perhaps two years for the development of my cyber replacement. Which she informed me would take a significantly shorter duration of time. As a result, I realized that my days were perhaps numbered fewer than I’d originally thought, and thus began the process of fortification.
From April to late September, I wrote two cybersecurity books based on the Tier 0 and Tier 1 HackTheBox modules on the hackthebox.com website. Since the write-ups on the site didn’t hold the depth I was looking for when I tried (and often failed) to solve the boxes. I chose to write two books detailing how to solve the modules instead. It is unfortunate that most of my summer was wasted toiling over money avenues, since I openly despise pursuing such ventures unless absolutely necessary, which this no doubt was.
The truth is that I live in a merchant society. A nation of “practicality” so far as most are trained to prize the acquisition of dollars above all else. What an animal mentality, to scrape night and day for digital peanuts printed by a central bank called, “The Federal Reserve.” A private cartel granted the power to conjure money from nothing, on command. A power that the world at large can see is doing nothing good for the majority of peoples forced to toil beneath its government sponsored power complex. Nevertheless, these things are, they have happened before, and they shall happen again. Whether it be next with China, Russia, Japan, or who knows, maybe even Turkey, two hundred years into the future. Men in positions of power will always abide by the rules of “The Prince” if they are wise. Thus, this wisdom will always be used to the disadvantage of all persons who find themselves (often born) at a worldly disadvantage, as is human life in general, on planet earth.
Hello! We’re D.J. Hoskins
We are Davena and Jason Hoskins, co-authors of 30+ books and siblings who write under the pseudonym D.J. Hoskins. Three years apart and in our twenties, we have been fascinated by stories from a young age. Davena is a student attending Princeton University, and Jason attends Georgetown University.
