Massachusetts demonstrates the futility of gun control

Via Insty, here's proof of the utter futility of gun control:

A man named Tyler Brown opened fire on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Mass., this week, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into a rolling ambush near Harvard and MIT.

Middlesex DA Marian Ryan said Brown, a 46-year-old Boston man (notice no doctor was needed to identify Brown as a man), fired roughly 50 to 60 rounds from a rifle at vehicles on the roadway.

A Mass Statie and Our Hero (legally carrying, natch) shot the dirty perp.  So well done!  And I hear you ask, what's the tie in to gun control.  This:

Brown didn't appear from thin air; his criminal record included a 2020 shootout with Boston police, and he had pleaded guilty to charges tied to armed assault with intent to murder. He was reportedly out on probation when the Cambridge shooting unfolded. 

OK, so Massachusetts is run by dumbasses.  Dude was out on parole for armed assault with intent to murder, and he shot up a bunch of stuff, including a Massachusetts State Police cruiser.

But here's the punch line:

[The perpetrator] survived with non-life-threatening injuries and faces serious charges, including armed assault with intent to murder. [Emphasis mine - Borepatch]

This time he'll be sorry! 

Some Masshole judge will release him in 4 or 5 years.  But more gun control is just the thing.  Oooooooh kaaaaaay.

It's quite a mystery why all the retarded Massachusetts liberals think they're so much smarter than we are.  The evidence is against them. 

 

Skynet has arrived

Um, I've seen this movie:

Nation-state goons and cybercrime rings are experimenting with Gemini to develop a "Thinking Robot" malware module that can rewrite its own code to avoid detection, and build an AI agent that tracks enemies' behavior, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group.

In its most recent AI Threat Tracker, published Wednesday, the Chocolate Factory says it observed a shift in adversarial behavior over the past year. 

Attackers are no longer just using Gemini for productivity gains - things like translating and tailoring phishing lures, looking up information about surveillance targets, using AI for tech support, and writing some software scripts. They are also trialing AI-enabled malware in their operations, we're told. 

It seems that the Bad Guys are using all the old malware tricks (obfuscation, hidden files, etc) plus some new ones (sending commands via LLM prompts, i.e. the malware queries (prompts) other LLMs to get commands.

The security model for AI/LLM is hopelessly broken, and the design is defective.  I mean heck - the designers didn't consider two decade old attack techniques.  I don't know if it's correct to label this broken as designed but it's not far off.  This is software engineering malpractice.

I can't wait to see what happens with this and one of Elon's humanoid robots ... 

I would have throught that German IT Security teams would be more competent than this

I was not expecting this:

Germany's infosec office (BSI) is sounding the alarm after finding that 92 percent of the nation's Exchange boxes are still running out-of-support software, a fortnight after Microsoft axed versions 2016 and 2019.

While the end of Windows 10 updates occupied most of the headlines, Microsoft's support for Exchange and a bunch of other 2016 and 2019-branded products ended on October 14, as scheduled a year earlier.

Alternate title: 90% of German firms fail their SOC 2 audit.  Look, this isn't landing a man on the moon, and you had a whole year.  You just couldn't be bothered.

Was ist los? 

 

AI Browsers considered unsafe

OK, that post title is more than a bit inflammatory, but who on earth would want to use something like this?

Several new AI browsers, including OpenAI's Atlas, offer the ability to take actions on the user's behalf, such as opening web pages or even shopping. But these added capabilities create new attack vectors, particularly prompt injection.

Prompt injection occurs when something causes text that the user didn't write to become commands for an AI bot. Direct prompt injection happens when unwanted text gets entered at the point of prompt input, while indirect injection happens when content, such as a web page or PDF that the bot has been asked to summarize, contains hidden commands that AI then follows as if the user had entered them.

This is unbelievably bad.  How bad?  This bad: 

Last week, researchers at Brave browser published a report detailing indirect prompt injection vulns they found in the Comet and Fellou browsers. For Comet, the testers added instructions as unreadable text inside an image on a web page, and for Fellou they simply wrote the instructions into the text of a web page.

When the browsers were asked to summarize these pages – something a user might do – they followed the instructions by opening Gmail, grabbing the subject line of the user's most recent email message, and then appending that data as the query string of another URL to a website that the researchers controlled. If the website were run by crims, they'd be able to collect user data with it.

Surely they must be exaggerating, I hear you say.  Nope - the author of the post at El Reg recreated the exploit his very own self, simply by creating a web page with the commands hidden in it.  FYI, that's 1996 technology right there.

Now look, I may be an old crabby security geezer (no comments, Glen Filthie!) but the problem of sanitizing user input is a really old one.  So old that it was old when XKCD did it's classic "Bobby Tables" cartoon:

There have been over 3000 XKCD cartoons; that one was number 327.  Yeah, that long ago. 

My opinion about anything regarding AI is that the hype is so fierce that the people developing the applications don't really focus much on security, because security is hard and it would slow down the release cadence.  And so exploits that wouldn't have surprised anyone back in 2010 keep popping up.

Le sigh.  Once again, security isn't an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.  My recommendation is not to touch these turkeys with a 100' pole.

Florida Man lives in my neighborhood?

Sumd00d posted to the neighborhood Facebook group, recommending that people prepare their lanai screen for the high winds by cutting them.

[blink] [blink]

That's some righteous hurricane prep, right there [rolls eyes so hard you can hear it over the hurricane]

My thought is why not open all your windows to keep the wind from blowing them out, amirite?  Sheesh.

Nikki Haley was right

The Civil War was not fought over slavery.  This is trivial to demonstrate.

Consider the Corwin Amendment:

The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that has never been adopted, but owing to the absence of a ratification deadline, could still be adopted by the state legislatures. It would shield slavery within the states from the federal constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress. Although the Corwin Amendment does not explicitly use the word slavery, it was designed specifically to protect slavery from federal power. The outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed the Corwin Amendment on March 2, 1861, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, with the intent of preventing that war and preserving the Union. It passed Congress but was not ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures.

Yeah, yeah - Wikipedia.  But the article plays it straight up.

So if the war was about slavery, why did both houses of Congress pass this amendment, and why did the President sign the bill, sending it to the States for ratification?  And oh by the way, Congress passed this without the Representatives from the seceding States.

And Abraham Lincoln - the "Great Emancipator" himself did not oppose the Amendment.

So the War was all about slavery, but Congress was playing 6-dimension chess or something, right?

[rolls eyes]

I'm no fan of Haley, but she is also right that the question was a liberal plant.  Her response might have been bad politics in 2023, but she is 100% correct on the facts.

But while facts are stubborn things, so is the ignorance and arrogance of the media (including the ostensibly conservative media). Remember, the history of that war as taught today is retarded.

The terms "Software Engineering" and "Military Intelligence" are strangely related

It is said that Engineering is "Science that works", so we have to relegate "Software Engineering" to the same bucket as "Military Intelligence" and "Jumbo Shrimp".  Exhibit A for the prosecution is this month's Microsoft Patch Tuesday, which fixes a data leakage vulnerability caused by a divide by zero condition:

CVE-2023-20588 is a “division-by-zero” vulnerability affecting specific AMD processors that can “potentially return speculative data resulting in loss of confidentiality.”

Microsoft addressed the vulnerability in its Patch Tuesday update round, as the latest Windows versions enable mitigation and protection.

[blink] [blink]

Oooooh kaaaaay.  Maybe I'm old fashioned but aren't folks taught that divide by zero is no bueno?  Like taught that in Coding 101?

All I can think is, well, bless their little hearts.  Wow.

Richard Dawkins is a midwit

Aesop brings the Hammer Of Truth down on the good professor:

One cannot have "only a quarter of an eye, only a hundredth of an eye, or half an eye, is better than nothing " (3:50ff).

Basic physiology disagrees:

It doesn't work like that.

 

In the trade, there's a technical term for what you are when you have a half, a quarter, or a hundredth of an eye (and by this we mean not just the eyeball itself, but the entire cascade of processes enabling vision): BLIND.

There's a lot more in the post, and even more in the comments.  But what I find most interesting is the fact that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and so he knows this. Aesop has a simple answer to why Dawkins still tells this sort of lie  (he's a lying liar).  Well, sure.

But that's not particularly interesting.  Why does he lie?  Moldbug explained this 15 years ago:

Nonetheless, it’s my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins has been pwned. Perhaps you’re over 30 and you’re unfamiliar with this curious new word. As La Wik puts it:

The word “pwn” remains in use as Internet social-culture slang meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.

(At least here at Unqualified Reservations, pwned alliterates with posse and rhymes with loaned.) How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit such an exploitable vulnerability? And who—or what—has taken unauthorized control over Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles.

Ah, those crazy kids and their barbaric slang like pwned.  Good Lord, do I really have over 400 posts with that tag?  Ahem.  

Continuing with Dawkins' failure to adequately explain the difference between Science and Religion:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc., etc.

This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.

Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.

Now I must warn you, Moldbug is pretty thick going.  Fosetti has a very accessible overview that will give you 95% of Moldbug's arguments.

One other interesting comment at Aesop's place concerned science as a process.  As I've pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, science as practiced today is very, very sick, and the reason is The Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action:

I can't seem to find and data about the number of scientists working today, vs. the number a century ago.  I can't even find decent proxy data for this - say the number of scientific articles published in 2010 vs. the number published in 1910.  But we can all agree that there has been a vast increase in the number of working scientists and the number of published articles (which may be up to 50 Million by now).

And yet we are not seeing any obvious acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery.  Nigel Calder again:

While the modern advances are all impressive, are they really more impressive than those from a century ago?  Especially when you adjust for the army of scientists at work today - perhaps a thousand times as many as at the dawn of the 20th Century - the question becomes why has science slowed down?

The post about how sick science as practiced today is gives the reason:

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

...

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

The people who run the institutions of Science don't see that there's a problem.  I mean, hey - there's a ton of grant funding coming in and nobody can be allowed to rock that boat, amirite?  And so it's all gatekeeping and name calling.

The result? Scientific Progress has essentially ground to a halt.

Note that this doesn't apply to Engineering, which we can call "science that works".  SpaceX is Exhibit 1 for the Prosecution here.  But Science as currently practiced is a game for fools and liars. And Richard Dawkins, but I repeat myself.

Retractionwatch is Exhibit 2 for the Prosecution.  A few minutes thought will produce another dozen Exhibits.

And yes, I was an Engineer not a Scientist by training back at State U.  Because of that, I haven't been (intellectually) pwned, like Dawkins has.  But good gravy, it's getting to where the term "scientist" is almost as pejorative as the term "intellectual".  The last word goes to Aesop, who explains why:

I doubt, with Dawkins being so invested, intellectually and morally, in the lifelong lie, he'd ever be intellectually honest enough to admit that he, just like Darwin, had a grudge against the idea of the divine or supernatural, and both had therefore sunk their spurs into the idea that there is no god, because it makes the rest of their pathetic existence tolerable and comfortable, not to mention lucrative.

He's entitled to go to hell in whatever way he sees fit to do so; that's free will in action.

But to make it his life's work to try and bamboozle others by deliberately ignoring the utter lack of any scientific underpinning for his delusions, and furthermore the evidence to the exact contrary, and outright lying about both in support of his line of twaddle, is quite inarguably and inexcusably monstrous and damnable.

Enough with the dishonesty

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

- William Shakespeare, Othello

I'm with Mike from Cold Fury: Trump has to go.  The only thing I would add is that he has to go because he's too stupid to realize that his idiotic attacks on Ron DeSantis are trivially falsified by watching the video he posted.  Dumbass.

All that one gains by falsehood is, not to be believed when he speaks the truth.

- Aristotle

Security news

Not exactly a Security Smorgasbord post, but interesting and important stuff.

Lawrence has an post about a new sort of phishing scam pretending to be a Paypal invoice for a Walmart purchase.

There’s a new phishing scam making the rounds. I’ve received examples of this one twice myself over the last week, and since it’s a lot more sophisticated and polished than the average email phishing scam, I think it’s worth taking a look at.

You should go read - this is important.

Twitter's ex-Chief of security says that the company is entirely uninteresting in knowing just how many bots make up the Twitter user population.  What makes this really big security news is that the ex-Chief is none other than Mudge, one of the original L0pht guys.  He has big, big stature in the security community.  I don't know how this will play out, but this will be enormously damaging to Twitter's share price.  But it's hard to see this Justice Department go after the Twitter execs who helped the Democrats so much over the last few years.  

The Metaverse sucks, and you cannot have any privacy there.  I expect you already know that.

Sumd00d hacks his Hyundai car to change the smart screen software.  What uber 31337 'sploit does he use to find Hyundai's secret encryption key?  Google.  For realz.  Angels and Ministers of Graqce defend us.

Softness to traitors

Softness to traitors will destroy us all.

- Maximilian Robespierre

Texas GOP Senator Cornyn, leader of the Republicans playing Gun Control footsie with the Democrats, gets booed by Republicans at the Texas GOP convention.  And not just a couple of Boo birds, but a solid minute and a half before his speech.  It seems that the good Senator was surprised by the response.

Smartest kid in class, right there [rolls eyes].  Maybe he should have read Shakespeare.

But cruel are the times, when we are traitors,
And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and none

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

What causes de-forestation?

First the god news: de-forestation is down by two-thirds since 1980: 

In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.

This is from the latest UN report on the subject, found via a link from Chris Lynch.

Now the bad news: ancient forest is being clear cut for wind farms:

Lately we’ve been reporting on what many people are calling one of the greatest environmental felonies in Europe: the deforestation of the 1000-year old Reinhardswald, known as the “fairy tale forest”, in order to make way for largescale industrial wind parks to produce “green” energy. Proponents claim the wind parks will save our environment and climate. Clearing the forests has already commenced.

I guess that "sustainable electricity" comes from cutting down thousand year old forest.  Good to know.

Unknown whether the report talks about how deforestation is up in Scandinavia because the forests are being cut down to make wood pellet fuel.  What a weird "environmentalism" that burns the forest in order to save it.

Don't ever change, WaPo

Pretty much everyone is mocking Taylor Lorenz' WaPo article about how EVIL conservatives scuppered the new Ministry of Truth. You remember Taylor, don't you?  She's the one who doxxed the woman who ran the Libs of TikTok account and then sobbed about how mean everyone was to her.

Anyhow, this is the bit from her article that is the most jaw droppingly stupid:

Jankowicz’s case is a perfect example of this system at work, said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They try to define people by these single, decontextualized moments,” Brooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few TikTok videos, or one or two comments out of thousands of public appearances. They fixate on these small instances and they define this villain.”...

Okay, Taylor - now do Roseanne.

The Czar of Muscovy wrote a long, long time ago that you will understand the media perfectly if you just think of them as mean middle school girls.  Jealous. not very smart, but mean.

Who benefits from the US in Ukraine?

One thing that I have not been able to figure out is who would benefit from the US sending 8,500 (or 50,000 - the number keeps changing) US troops to Stalingrad in winter.  We've seen this movie before and we all know how it comes out.  There are pretty much no good arguments to do this - nothing but huffing and puffing about "deterring aggression" and "stopping Putin's land grab" and "country borders are sacred".  Let's quickly dispense with these arguments and move on to who really wins.

Deterring Aggression.  It's not 1939, and the US Establishment isn't Neville Chamberland.  A quick review of the first two decades of this century will establish the wars we've fought: Afghanistan (2001-2021), Iraq (2003 - present), Libya (2011), Syria (2013).  The problem isn't an American meekness; on the contrary.  Vladimir Putin knows this, and doesn't have to read between the lines to understand what NATO expansion plans for Ukraine would mean to a Russia that shares a border with it.

Putin's "Land Grab".  So Russia has demanded guarantees from NATO that (a) Ukraine will not be admitted to the coalition (as this would compel NATO to defend Ukraine in the future, by treaty), and also guarantees that NATO offensive weapons will not be stationed in Ukraine.  The NATO General Secretary has explicitly rejected both demands, as has the US State Department (at least according to the Russian foreign ministry; while this is not proof, it does concur with the NATO General Secretary's public statements from two days ago).  So what options does Putin have?  More importantly, what options are we giving him?

"National Borders are sacrosanct".  Well, except for the US-Mexico border, I guess.  This doesn't pass the "red face" test - the fact that people can say this without shame only shows that our elites are, well, shameless.

So who wins in this showdown?  We know who is facing the risks - you know, that whole Stalingrad in winter thing, but Russia is facing substantial risks as well from sanctions, a military with some good units but many not so good ones, potential guerrilla war, etc.  NATO appears to be splintering before our eyes as Germany, France, and others refuse to do any heavy lifting (Germany's offer a a few thousand mil surplus helmets to Ukraine speaks volumes on how tight this "alliance" is).  

Oh yeah - Russia has a bunch of nuclear missiles aimed at us.  That would never go sideways, right?  So there are lots of potential losers here.  

Who wins?

China.  This is long, but clearly and plainly laid out.  I highly recommend you spend the time to watch it:

Other winners: The Military Industrial Complex (Defense suppliers and retired 4 stars who get cushy and well paid gigs on their boards of directors).  The Biden Administration which gets to keep the Hunter Biden Ukrainian payoffs swept under the carpet.  The Democratic Party which is desperately looking for something - anything - to change the electorate's focus from the disastrous Afghanistan bug out, or inflation, or the increasingly unpopular Covid lockdowns, or the Teacher's Unions destroying public education, or the weakening economy.

I guess that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out what adding that whole "Stalingrad in winter" thing to that list will do in the run up to the elections.

Tucker Carlson quite rightly asks: how does any of this make America stronger?  Clearly it doesn't - to the contrary.  But if you don't pound the jingoistic War Drum with the idiots in the media you're Putin's Stooge or Neville Chamberlin or unpatriotic.  Or something.

I'm so old that I remember Democrats shouting that they were tired of their patriotism being questioned.  Times sure have changed.

But remember: these people are all so much smarter (and nicer!) than you are.  You stooge, you.

UPDATE 27 January 2022 17:46:  Divemedic has a detailed post about another downside - our diminished military capability and top-heavy brass.  You should read the whole thing but this is the summation:

The US has cut its ability to project power so severely, that it can no longer afford to be, nor can it be, the world’s policeman.

Russia and China know that.

But hey - on to Stalingrad!

UPDATE 27 January 2022 18:40:  LOL:

The other things the BBC were moaning about were the winter famine wiping out the children of the Taliban and the poor pitiful Ukrainians who are ill-equipped to fight the Red Army. I see a confluence of benefits here. The Taliban have $89 billion dollars in high tech weaponry they manifestly don't need and the Ukraine produces most of Europes wheat. They could trade weaponry to the breadbasket of Europe for food. Win win!

Helpful. That's me.

Maybe $89 B of food would give them enough weapons to get to Stalingrad, amirite?  Who says that Atomic War can't be hilarious?

UPDATE 27 January 2022 19:01:  Yeah, yeah, I can stop anytime.  Kurt Schlicter (LTC USA, Ret) has an informative post about the difference between the Cold War NATO of his service days and today's NATO.  He echos and amplifies what Divemedic highlights, from an Army (vs. a Navy) perspective.  He is even more pessimistic (and sarcastically so) than Divemedic is.  But he gets deadly serious in his key point:

It seems like we might have trouble achieving our objectives. And one of the biggest reasons is that it’s not clear what our objectives would even be. Since none of the usual hawks can be bothered to articulate a vital American interest involved in defending Ukraine’s borders, that makes it hard to come up with objectives for the military. “Stop Putin” is not really a military objective; it’s sort of an amorphous goal.

So what does victory look like? Putin held off to the outskirts of Kiev? Putin tossed back over the Belarus and Russian borders? What’s our desired end state? Or are we not going to articulate that either? Maybe we can just sort of exist in a tense status quo over some sort of demilitarized zone for seven decades or so. Gee, sound familiar?

Now all these questions deserve answers, but don’t look for any since none of the answers are good. And bad answers would slow the rush to war, so we can’t have them come out. Instead, the establishment is going back to the classics. If you ask what America’s vital interest is, you love Putin. If you ask what our military objectives would be, much less how we can rev up the combat power way over there to attain them, you love Putin. Yeah, it’s always a delight to be a vet of the Cold War being who is told he digs the Russians by a bunch of DC saps whose experience with the Bear is trying a Moscow Mule once, deciding it was icky, and asking for a white wine spritzer instead.

The Ukrainians are getting a raw deal, and I hope they drown their invaders in a river of blood. But it’s not our fight. And, if we did fight, there’s a significant chance we would lose. Then every two-bit tyrant on Earth will be coming for a piece of the helpless giant. We’re weak right now, folks, and the worst thing we can do is get up in front of everyone and prove it.

This.  This exactly.  The Administration looks like it is trying to draw into an inside straight.  With the potential death, destruction, and risk to America's international position, I'd sure like answers - any answers - to the question what do we get out of any of this?

When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

Stop protecting stupid people

Peter finds the Fed.Gov offering advice to stupid people ("Don't put gasoline in grocery bags.")  He is (naturally) horrified.  But he's a Man Of The Cloth, and you would expect that charitable reaction from him.  

Me, not so much ...

 (Language warning)

Quote of the Day - Warmonger edition

From T-Bolt:

Getting out after 20 years gives Al Qaeda a propaganda victory, Ms. Cheney?

You know what wouldn't have given them a propaganda victory?  Victory victory.  Like 16 years ago.  Too bad you don't know someone that could have helped pull that off, back then.  Prolly shoula been 18+ years ago. 

Prolly your Dad shoulda learned the lessons of Korea and Vietnam.  I don't even mind all the treasure we spent (well, not much) but the lives and blood and PSTD and lost limbs deserve something better than "My political opponents are big fat poopyheads."

Dumbass.

Why are we still in NATO?

NATO Secretary General wants solar powered tanks. [rolls eyes]

The comment there sums it up:

The stupid, it burns … an M1 tank gets 0.6 mpg. A gallon of diesel contains ~ 40 kWh of energy. A solar panel puts out ~ 1 kWh per day. A solar panel is about 17 sq. ft. You MIGHT fit four of them on an M1 tank without impairing the weapons and sensors. Then you’d need four Tesla Powerwall batteries, weight half a ton.With that setup, every ten days you could move your tank 0.6 miles …

Here's your sign.