The Queen Of The World speaks

TQOTW posted this to the Book of Feces.  Just like the Pope sometimes speaks ex cathedra, TQOTW is speaking from her throne.  So pay attention.

The Democrats were so proud of themselves as Biden signed bills to reverse all the good Trump did for this country, most notably the Alaskan pipeline. They didn’t care about the consequences then or now for this country - they just wanted to make sure they put Trump in his place. So how’s that working out for all of us now? They didn’t care about the ramifications, or how it would impact us. Had they not done that, we’d be self sufficient and prices for gas that will soon hit $5 or more per gallon would not be happening. So for those of you who are actually living and did vote for Biden, hope you’re happy! You’re as big a part of his treasonous acts as he is! Everyone knew he has dementia yet no one wants to admit it - except his son who made fun of it even before he ran for POTUS!

Gas jumped 20 cents a gallon overnight.  Even here in Florida it'll be over $4 a gallon Real Soon Now.  But hey - no mean tweets, amirite?

Tagged "Democrats suck" because, well, you know.

New ATF "Ghost Gun" 80% lower rule makes NERF guns into 80% lowers

LOLOLOLOL:

There we go. Every nerf gun is now an 80% or greater receiver. If you have a kid with a nerf gun, please let the ATF know you don't want your kid charged with purchasing a firearm while under 21. pic.twitter.com/giHRwDLDK0

— 00MEAT (@00meat) May 23, 2021

You can follow his series of tweets here.  Whatever you do, don't tell the nominee for ATF director.  He likes to go after kids.

Pro tip for the ATF and liberals (but I repeat myself): governmenting is hard, amirite?

(via)

Save the planet: clearcut the forest

"Green" energy causes forest to be cut down:

The ARD’s “Das Erste” reports how satellite images show deforestation has risen 49% since 2016 in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries. The reason: “Because of the CO2 targets. That sounds totally crazy but precisely because of the trend to renewable energies is in part responsible for deforestation in Estonia,” says the Das Erste moderator.

Having spent some time working for the EU, Liiana Steinberg explains in the report how she recently returned to her native Estonia and was shocked to see how much deforestation had taken place over the recent years (2:25). “I discovered how the forests no longer exists here left and right.”

You grind up the trees to make wood pellets which count as a "green" "carbon-neutral" energy source.  Except the forest is gone (hey, it will grow back in 30 or 40 years, although it will be fast growing pine and fir rather than old growth hardwood - but eggs, omlets, amirite?).

It seems that wildlife has declined by 25%.  Yay, environmentalists!

What's funny is that this keeps happening.  It seems that this has been going on for years.  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence.  Third time is, well, you know.

Why does Government smother everything it touches?

Historic 13th century pub could be shut down due to government regulations.

T.S. Elliott didn't write The Waste Land about government, but it sure applies.

Environmentalists are idiots

Way to go, Team Green - you now have everyone who used to like you wanting to punch you in the face:



These are the Extinction Rebellion morons who are protesting not the eeeevil automobiles but mass transit.  They shut down the London Underground subway system at rush hour.  One of the heroes shown here got dragged from off the roof of a train and beaten up by a working class crowd who just wanted to get to work and earn a living.  Those in the crowd who didn't do the beating cheered it on.

The XR morons complain that they're just trying to get attention to their cause.  Mission accomplished, Scooter.  And if you think that I'm being overly harsh on XR by calling them "morons", take a look at their very own web site that has this to say about the crowd doing the beat down in the London Tube:

It’s no less through love and fear, and due to the same conditions of oppression that we face ourselves, that we saw such a disturbing reaction from some of those on the platform at Canning Town. These were commuters trying to get to work so they can support their loved ones. We recognise that disruption at Canning Town affected those already suffering the hardships of a toxic system – those who are the most at risk from the effects of climate and ecological collapse and for that we are truly sorry — just as we always are whenever we disrupt the public.

[emphasis in the original]  What did they expect?  Morons.  Go protest movie stars and Prince Harry flying everywhere, and you might get some sympathy from Joe Bloggs on his way to work.  Make it impossible for Joe to get to work, and get ready for a beat down.  This isn't Rocket Surgery, amirite?

And now we shift to the Netherlands - a more polite and civil people you won't find anywhere.  But the EU introduced a bunch of rules limiting how much nitrogen (or whatever - really, who cares?) can be released by each EU nation, and so Dutch farmers are being told to cull their herds to save on nitrogen (or whatever - like I said, who really cares what the stupid bureaucratic rule says?).  And so even the Dutch took to the streets:

Thousands of farmers shut down highways in a go-slow protest converging on the Dutch capital Monday, as they protested being victimised by a government trying to meet European Union emissions laws by cracking down on agriculture.

Protesters driving thousands of tractors and other pieces of farm machinery in enormous convoys heading to the Hague carried banners and signs reminding Dutch lawmakers of the importance of agriculture, including ‘#NoFarmersNoFood’. Hundreds of miles of highways were blocked by an estimated 3,000 tractors Wednesday morning.

There are amazing pictures at the link, like this one:

Pictures are good, but a video shows you just how massive this was:



So the environmentalists got all we're going to save the world and so they told people that basically they can't have any meat to eat.  What's funny is (a) they didn't think that anyone would mind and (b) when the government called out the military to set up road blocks to stop the protesters the tractors drove into the fields and right around the road blocks.  It seems that nobody in the Dutch military understands that tractors are off-road vehicles.

Top. Men.

And so we see that Environmentalists are idiots.  Rather than protesting the grotesque pollution in, say, China; rather than protesting the extravagant travel-related pollution by loud mouthed environmentalists like Leonardo DiCaprio or Prince Harry; rather than focusing on a problem worth solving they tell people that they can't take mass transit to work or have any meat for dinner.

And these people wonder why the response is a good hard kick in the Nads?  Idiots.

When do rooftop solar panels not work?

During a blackout:

Californians have embraced rooftop solar panels more than anyone in the U.S., but many are learning the hard way the systems won’t keep the lights on during blackouts.

That’s because most panels are designed to supply power to the grid -- not directly to houses. During the heat of the day, solar systems can crank out more juice than a home can handle. Conversely, they don’t produce power at all at night.

So systems are tied into the grid, and the vast majority aren’t working this week as PG&E Corp. cuts power to much of Northern California to prevent wildfires.

You need expensive batteries and special equipment to run off-grid, and most people don't have them.  And the sweet subsidies from non-solar rate payers don't cover these, so solar lovers will have to pay out of their own pocket.

It looks like a generator is a lot cheaper, and maybe more reliable.

Hat tip: biker, former co-worker, and all around good guy Burt via email.

Earth Day in California

It's going to look like this:

Extra off-the-hook-crazy irony points id the lights go out in San Diego but stay on in Tijuana.

California Government discovers the Law of Unintended Consequences, good and hard

So riddle me this, Big Government Man: what happens after a series of separate decisions made over the course of years, each restricting a company's ability to manage its assets?  What happens when the result of these decisions causes an entirely preventable (except that prevention is now prohibited) wildfire that causes billions of dollars of damage?  What happens when the California Government uses that company as a piggy bank to deflect blame from all those regulations that prevented the company from preventing the disaster?

Good thing that California has good weather.  You won't freeze, you'll just be in the dark:

The ‘new’ fire prevention effort for northern California is to have the utilities turn off the power!!!

Citing the potential for extremely dry air and steady winds of up to 30 mph, with gusts that experts said could be twice as strong, Pacific Gas & Electric announced it was considering a public safety power shut-off for 29 counties between Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon.

Full article, HERE.

Now ‘my’ question is, what about those folks who NEED power to run medical devices, keep things like…oh… Insulin cold, and other meds??? Or charge their wheelchair, or charge that Tesla or other electric car they depend on?

Well, for a start they should lobby the government to repeal those stupid regulations preventing PG&E from doing fire prevention maintenance along the power lines.  They could also vote out the dirty commies who enacted those regulations.  They can move.  They can sit in the dark wondering what else the California Government will screw up.

From where I sit, those are all the options.  Of course, some will want the government to take over PG&E, and after a couple years of government control the entire state can enjoy Venezuela style blackouts.  So I guess that's an option, too.

Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - it take a lot to run it into the ground.  We're seeing that every day from the Golden State.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. 

This is known as "bad luck.”

- Robert Heinlein

"Public Safety" means anyone can get the key to your business

The problem with many (perhaps most) laws is that the people who write them cannot think through all the consequences of their law/regulation.  As a result, the world is awash with examples where a law had exactly the opposite result of what was intended.  A great example of this is the Superfund law.  It made all parties to a polluted site individually responsible for 100% of the cleanup, even if they were actually only the cause of a trivial amount of the pollution.  This made each Superfund case essentially a death sentence to all companies involved, and so the strategy has been to stonewall each case as much as possible.  This has led to a lot of Superfund sites remaining polluted, which was precisely the opposite of what the original intent was.

Another example is how towns sometimes mandate that businesses have a box containing a key to their building.  The fire department has a master key that opens all the boxes, and they can use the key in the box to get into the business to put the fire out.  No need to break down the door, just unlock it.  Simple, right?

Well, not so fast.  It seems that all these boxes have the same master key (world-wide, not just in the town) and it's possible to 3D print this key if you have one of the boxes.  Like, if the company sells you one.



[sigh]

Don't try this at home, kids.

(via)

German Greens fighting new "green" power projects

Last week I posted about how wind farms are decimating wildlife, from insects to bats to birds to eagles, because environmentalists are ignoring the problem.  It seems that this is not true in Germany, of all places:

The expansion of wind power in the first half of this year collapsed to its lowest level since the introduction of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) in 2000. All in all, just 35 wind turbines were build with an output of 231 megawatts. “This corresponds to a decline of 82 percent compared to the already weak period of the previous year”, according to the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) in Berlin.

“This makes one nearly speechless,” said Matthias Zelinger at the presentation of the data. The managing director of the Power Systems division of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) spoke of a “blow to the guts of the energy turnaround”. This actual development doesn’t match “at all to the current climate protection debate”.

...

The most important cause lies in the legal resistance of wildlife and forest conservationists fighting new wind farms. The BWE President referred to an industry survey of the onshore wind agency. According to its findings, more than 70 percent of the legal objections are based on species conservation, especially the threat to endangered bird species and bats.

Well done to the German environmentalists for holding to their principles.  I've been very hard on the environmental movement in the past, mostly because the rampant hypocrisy so often on display.  But not here.  Anyone who loves the outdoors can applaud this victory, whether you believe in man made global warming or not.

And today is a twofer in non-hypocritical environmentalist news:

Greta Thunberg to sail Atlantic for climate conferences

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has accepted a ride across the Atlantic by boat to attend two key climate conferences.

The teenager will make the journey aboard the Malizia II, a high-speed 18-metre (60ft) yacht built to race around the globe.

“We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to New York in mid August,” she tweeted.

Thunberg refuses to fly because of the environmental impact of air travel.

Miss Thunberg is a bit of a social media sensation in Scandinavia.  She and I clearly disagree on whether mankind is causing the heat death of the planet, but good for her sticking to her principles.  She has chosen a very inconvenient (and quite frankly pretty uncomfortable) alternative transportation mode to keep from being a hypocrite on the subject.  In this she is seemingly unique among all the world's climate activists - none of them have given up jet travel to climate conferences.  Thunberg is showing everyone that it really isn't easy being Green, but being Green is exactly what she is being.

And a little child shall lead them.

- Isaiah 11:6

Bravo to Miss Thunberg.  The kids are all right.  Maybe wrong, but all right.

Ten Years ago on this blog

It was census time, and since a fellow with a (D) after his name occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue it was the GOP freaking out.  Now that's all swapped but the song remains the same.

On advise of Counsel, I respectfully decline to answer ...

Seems that the Census folks will be asking a lot of questions this time around. Some folks are planning on telling them how many people live in the house, and then telling them to clear off:

Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann says she's so worried that information from next year's national census will be abused that she will refuse to fill out anything more than the number of people in her household. 
In an interview Wednesday morning with The Washington Times "America's Morning News," Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, said the questions have become "very intricate, very personal" and she also fears ACORN, the community organizing group that came under fire for its voter registration efforts last year, will be part of the Census Bureau's door-to-door information collection efforts. 
"I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home," she said. "We won't be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn't require any information beyond that." 

Seems that the good folks at Census don't much like this:

Shelly Lowe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Census Bureau, said Mrs. Bachmann is "misreading" the law.

She sent a portion of the U.S. legal code that says anyone over 18 years of age who refuses to answer "any of the questions" on the census can be fined up to $5,000.

Well now. I wonder if you have to sign the Census form, under penalty of perjury?

One of the unanticipated consequences of the left's statist agenda is that people end up trusting the government less over time. The government needs that trust, or a lot of things simply break down.

Me? I wonder if the expression Come back with a warrant would make them unhappy?

The world wide collapse of the Left reaches Australia

Adam Piggot muses on how the Labor party lost an "unlosable" election.  The Greens Sink Labor:

Queensland won the election for the conservative Liberal party, not because of what they did but rather because of what Labor didn’t do. Labor didn’t stand up for its heartland in the face of the Adani protests. Not only that but labor has failed to understand that its traditional working class voters in outback mining towns are more and more in a high income bracket, a situation that is only a fairly recent development. When tradies are on a cool 250K pay packet then Labor’s class warfare tax brackets suddenly don’t have quite the appeal that they once had.

This culminated in the election campaign when a worker at the Gladstone Port in Queensland politely quizzed Shorten on what he was going to do for workers who are now finding themselves in a high tax bracket. Shorten fluffed the question but his real troubles began the next day when the worker had his contract terminated by the company for daring to ask the great Labor leader an awkward question.

Labor has been infected by the Green mind virus and assumed that the majority of Australia would vote like inner-city Melbourne. But with the working class now often making more money than inner-city lefties, a threat to their new found livelihoods in the form of stopping a major coal mine was just the tip of the iceberg, as Labor intended to roll out radical Green proposals to go 100% renewable energy in Australia.

Status is a positional good - there really seems to be a zero sum game at work in status hierarchies (if one person gains status, it is as measured against the other members of that hierarchy who lose status).  This is the vise in which the Left now finds itself: as more and more of their support comes from urban, white collar workers - many of whom find themselves in jobs that have modest pay, like school teachers or government clerks - then seeing higher pay for "lower status" jobs like the trades, mining, and manufacturing (and the resulting higher financial status) is a psychological blow for their core base of supporters.

I mean, here you are with all this student debt for your Masters in Education and some low-life deplorable coal miner is making twice as much as you?

The Left has a built-in preference for policies that will damage the trades, mining, and manufacturing, so that the Left's core support base will be relatively better off as the people in these "deplorable" jobs lose income and status.  Of course, this doesn't do a thing to raise the incomes of the Left's core support base, but nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance ever lead to rational outcomes.

What is a disaster for the Left (in Australia and world wide) is that the Deplorables have caught on to the game, and are now voting as a bloc against the Left.  It's self-defense - there's no ideological congruence with "conservative" parties, but that actually makes it worse for the Left: acting in self-interest is a much stronger predictor of outcome than ideology.

And so the Left keeps losing elections that are "unlosable" - BREXIT, Trump, Brazil, Italy ... the list goes on and on.  The Green Agenda is toxic at the polls.

Quite frankly, the only places you see success for the Greens is at isolated local levels where there is essentially a single party state - California, New York, a few other places.  Unsurprisingly, these are the places facing the biggest fiscal crisis as productive (read: tax paying) members of the Deplorables decamp to friendlier locales.  If anything, this accelerates the coming collapse.  New York and California Democrats are getting short term psychological benefits for their core supporters at the cost of long term lower incomes for those same supporters.

Hey, nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance lead to rational outcomes.

Quote of the Day: Blowing things up edition

Miguel is simply unimprovable here:

If I ever have enough money to go back to school and get another degree, I am going go to New Mexico Tech and get a Masters in Explosives Engineering in association with the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center. 

I cannot imagine anything cooler than saying “I have an advanced degree in slowing shit up.”

But then he rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and methodically blows up the new Democratic Party.

So they had this guy "buy back" in Missouri

And sumd00d made three crapy guns from scrap metal and sold them to the State.  Then he took the money and bought a real gun.

But sure, the Organs of the State are totes competent to win the War On Drugs.

The War on Drugs and the persistence of pain

There's quite a discussion going on in the comments of the posts here and here.  A really good insight was left in this comment by Bill AKA waepnedmann:

I noticed that the three commenters, Aesop, Peter, and myself, who were relegated to the pro-war on drugs camp have their opinions formed by having been in the trenches on this so-called war. 

Aesop on the front lines in an ER 

I have a step-son who retired out as a paramedic in Richmond, CA. 

You literally cannot conceive of what medical personnel not only witness, but with which they live and wake up to in their dreams. 

PTSD is not only found in soldiers.  

Peter as a prison Chaplin. 

Myself: Twice my employment involved drug users and they damage they do: once as an MP in the Army (I was actually the NCOIC acting, for two months, at the maximum security cell bloc for an area confinement facility. Some of the troops returning stateside from The Land of Bad Things had drug problems and drug problems morphed into behavioral problems.

These guys speak passionately about their experiences dealing with people who are destroying their own lives, or the lives of others.  They speak passionately because of what they've seen.

I'm also going to speak passionately for a moment, about something that effects my life.  The Queen Of The World has had problems with her knees, problems that have been going on for a couple years now and which had her on crutches for months at a time.  Her doctors won't prescribe her pain medications because of the restrictions that they're under from the War On Drugs.

It's something to have to see the pain in her eyes day in and day out.  She's quite a trooper, but I can tell that it wears her down - the months and years of chronic pain take their toll.

To the people that think that the War on Drugs needs to get dialed up to 11, that there needs to be even more of what we've been doing - that we need to do it harder - well, she is the collateral damage from the stupid war.

Your point is a good one that people destroy their lives using drugs, but it's them who do it to themselves.  It's them that cause the aggravation and pain to their family and neighbors.  It's they who are not - and never will be - perfectible, or possibly improvable because they don't want to be.

But it's the government that is forcing the Queen Of The World and millions of others to remain in chronic, unrelieved pain for months or years at a time.  Remember, they say that government is just the things that we choose to do together.

This is personal to me.  Come up with a way to fight the War on Drugs that doesn't burn down the village to save it, or declare victory and go home.  I don't think that there's a way to win without massive collateral damage because the people using drugs want to use them, they don't want to stop, and they won't cooperate with efforts to improve/perfect/save them.

Out of the crooked timber that is Man nothing straight was ever built, and all that.

But it's not cool to keep the Queen Of The World and all the legions like her in constant pain.  It's not cool for local police departments to get all ninja'ed up.  It's not cool for no-knock drug raids to go into the wrong house by mistake.  It's not cool for law enforcement to get corrupted by bribes (or intimidation) from the cartels.

But there's no reforming a system this big.  Bureaucracies gonna bureaucracy and while the people in the system mean well, the system is lousy and getting lousier.  Out of the crooked timber that is Man nothing straight was ever built, and all that.

I do not believe in the perfectibility of mankind, and I sure as hell don't believe in the perfectibility of large organizations.  To win the War on Drugs you need both.  Or you need the organizations so strong and brutal that the population is cowed into acting like they have been perfected.

No thanks.  The Queen Of The World doesn't deserve this: she's the nicest person I know.  The millions of other people that the government keeps in pain don't deserve it either.  The human cost of the War On Drugs is not sustainable, it's not justified, and it needs to end.

UK Police losing war with smuggled guns

Shockingly, it seems that Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle is not so protected by the English Channel as Her Majesty's Government would like:

Police and border officials are struggling to stop a rising supply of illegal firearms being smuggled into Britain, a senior police chief has warned. 

Chief constable Andy Cooke, the national police lead for serious and organised crime, said law enforcement had seen an increased supply of guns over the past year, and feared that it would continue in 2019. 

The Guardian has learned that the situation is so serious that the National Crime Agency has taken the rare step of using its legal powers to direct every single police force to step up the fight against illegal guns.

These are new guns, not existing ones stolen in burglaries.  Some are shipped into the country in packages - the explosion of online shopping has led to new smuggling channels.  Not surprising, as drugs are smuggled by the ton and are available for sale on every street corner.  Of course, this was easily foreseeable - and in fact I blogged about this 8 years ago:

So there was another mass shooting in gun-free Great Britain. To those who think that Yet Another Tweak of the gun control laws will prevent this in the future, to those who believe in their heart of hearts that "Common Sense Gun Control" really is possible, I have one question: 

Which weighs more, a ton of cocaine, or a ton of Glocks?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

But fear not, the UK Police are on it.  Well, they're on something, at least:

British citizens trying to craft a New Year's resolution for 2019 don't have to worry. Your government is taking care of it. You're going to commit to eating less food. 

It doesn't matter whether you want to or even need to eat less food. Public Health England has decided that growing obesity numbers require all British citizens to eat less food. And they're going to force the matter by controlling the size of just about every single piece of food and prepared available for purchase.

If you follow the first link, you'll read a quote from a police commander complaining that they're too understaffed to catch all the illegal guns coming into the kingdom.  But the second link says that they'll be even more understaffed as their police force will be called on to round up Big Mac scofflaws.

Err, when they're not blockading hospitals to make sure that desperately ill children don't escape the National Health Service:

[The Archbishop of Liverpool] tells us that everything “humanly possible” has been done to help the child, ignoring that the Police hold him hostage in a hospital that intends to starve him to death.  Police that turned away a German Air Ambulance come to take him for treatment far from the shores of Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle.

But no doubt that one more tweak of the gun laws in Blighty - or on these shores (*cough* ATF Bumpstock Ban *cough*) will solve the problem nicely.

And so the Government can't do basic things that the public expects (provide security) while it busies itself sticking its nose into your business (or killing your kids).  Ah, well.  It's clear that the UK.gov has no legitimacy:

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon. 

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be? 

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

I'm old enough to remember when it was widely thought that the Government was competent, and if it put its mind to it could do amazing things.  That was in the 1960s.  What we've seen since then is a more frequent demonstration that the Government couldn't bring tomorrow in on time.

But hey, some more stupid or useless gun control laws would be awesome, amirite?

Around the blogs

Rather than having to actually, you know, think and work, I'll highlight some posts that struck me as important and well worth your time.

OldNFO posts about how College is a waste for many kids and they would be much better off financially learning a high paying trade.  The comments are all pack full of smart, too.

The Czar of Muscovy writes about how when an organization loudly trumpets what appears to be nothing short of lunacy, you should follow the money.

Speaking of lunacy, Lawrence Person writes on how the establishment simply can't get their heads around how Trump accomplishes what he does - even though it is as simple as simple.  Smartest kids in class, right there.

Peter writes disturbingly about how the lunacy is being dialed up past 11 to 12 or beyond, and that a coup or assassination may be the logical outcome.  Quite frankly, I don't expect the 50% of Americans who voted for Trump to go along quietly with this if it happens.

Quote of the day: idiot leftists edition

Smartest guys in the room:

The idea that taxes cut into existing productive activity, and that as a cost, will be passed on to consumers (such as the financial transaction tax passing on costs to bank clients, shareholders, etc) doesn’t occur [to leftists]. No, taxes are part of that wonderful magic money tree. Why stop at a pathetic 50 per cent? Why not tax the lot? Give it all to the State, so those clever people can spray it around and make us richer, except of course the money has that odd way of disappearing from our paychecks……..Sorry, excuse me, time for my pills.

You do have to wonder what a century or more of compulsory education has wrought.

Actually, no you don't.

Obamacare's legacy: medical information hacking

Obamacare requires the use of electronic medical records (and even budgets to help that transition).  This looks to be a massively attractive target for the Black Hats:

Carl Leonard, principal security analyst for Websense, says hackers are breaking into the computer networks of health-care facilities with increasing frequency and taking valuable personal information that is often secured improperly. In August, Websense researchers reported that over the previous 10 months they had observed a 600 percent increase in attacks on hospitals (See “Hackers Are Homing In on Hospitals”). Leonard’s group now predicts that in 2015 the health-care industry will see a “substantial increase” in thefts of data.

Why are they doing it?  Like Willie Horton said about why he robbed banks, that's where the money is:

Credit card information is less valuable on the black market than it was several years ago, says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at the security firm PhishLabs. That market is flooded, and credit card information is becoming less useful without supporting identification information, he says.

Medical records, however, often contain both identification information, such as Social Security numbers, and financial information. This can be enough to build a near-complete picture of an individual. And such information can command hundreds of dollars from black-market customers wanting to impersonate someone for the purpose of accessing bank accounts or drug prescriptions.

Security:  not an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.

Malware is like biological pathanogenic weapons

Once you release them into the wild, there's no telling where they will infect something.  The Covertress (on a hopefully remunerative hiatus) emails to point this out:

Security researchers have uncovered a new Stuxnet like malware, named as “Havex”, which was used in a number of previous cyber attacks against organizations in the energy sector.

Just like Famous Stuxnet Worm, which was specially designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear project, the new trojan Havex is also programmed to infect industrial control system softwares of SCADA and ICS systems, with the capability to possibly disable hydroelectric dams, overload nuclear power plants, and even can shut down a country’s power grid with a single keystroke.

Well done, Cyber Warriors of Freedom!  You slowed down the Iranians by months!  Err, but now there's a cleanup on Aile European Power Grid.  I'm sure that you're all over this, right?  Kthanxbai.

P.S. Stalin would have had you all sent to Siberia.  Or liquidated.

P.P.S. Morons.

P.P.P.S. Note to Progressives everywhere: Observe your Philosopher Kings in action.  Top.  Men.